“I’m sorry that I can’t join you,” said Anthony, putting on his impracticable look.
“Come, come. You’ve treated us very scurvily of late. Miss Lovell must spare you for once, Anthony.”
“Thank you. It is not possible.”
He said it so curtly, that Mr Robert’s face grew a shade redder; but as he watched the young man walking away down the street with short, quick steps, the anger changed in a moment into a sort of kind trouble.
“He’ll have none of it, and if it’s shame I don’t know but what I like him the better, poor boy! I know I’d give pretty nearly anything to be able to put out my hand and tell him I believe that confounded story to be a lie. But I can’t, and he knows it. The mischief I’ve seen in my day that had money at the bottom of it! Well, I hope that pretty little girl will make him a good wife, and I shall make it up to Margaret’s child by and by. There goes Sir Peter, on his way to patronise the Association, I’ll be bound. He’ll walk up to the front and believe they know all about him, how many pheasants he has in his covers, and what a big man he is in his own little particular valley. Why shouldn’t he?—we’re all alike. I caught myself thinking that Parker would be astonished if he could only see my Farleyense; and there’s Charles as proud as a peacock over his Homer that he’s going to display, and Mrs Jones thinking all the world will be struck with the frilling in which she’ll dress up her ham, and so we go on,—one fool very much like another fool. And as the least we can do is to humour one another, and as, to judge from the shops, the Association has in it a largely devouring element, I’ll go and look after Mrs Jones’s lobster.”
He turned down a narrow street. The Cathedral chimes were ringing, dropping down one after the other with a slow stately gravity. People were making their way across the Close to the different doors. The streets had their gay flags, and carriages, and groups in the shops, and mothers bringing little convoys from the dancing academy, and stopping to look at materials for winter frocks,—but hardly a touch of these excitements had reached the Close. It seemed as if nothing could ruffle its quiet air; as if, under the shadow of the old Cathedral, life and death itself would make no stir. The chimes ceased, the figures had gone softly in; presently there floated out dim harmonies from the organ. As Mr Mannering passed along under one of the old houses he met the Squire.
“Winifred and Bess are there,” he said, nodding towards the Cathedral. “The children like to go in for the service. They’re good children—mine—God bless them!” he went on, with a sudden abruptness which made Mr Robert glance in his face.
“Good? They’re as good as gold.”
“So I think, so I think. Bess, now. She’s a spirit of her own, up in a moment, like a horse that has got a mouth worth humouring, but all over with the flash, and not a bit of sulkiness to turn sour afterwards. And Winifred, she’s been a mother to her sister. She has, hasn’t she, Mannering?”
“Don’t harrow a poor old bachelor’s feelings. You know I have lost my heart to Miss Winifred ever since she was ten years old, and she refused to marry me, even then,—point-blank.”