“Amusing things!” repeated the Squire; “I never hear anything worth listening to of any sort. Bless you, they talk nineteen to the dozen in these days, but there’s no making head nor tail of it when all’s said. It’s speechifying and argufying, and nothing done. That’s what made half the mischief in the Crimea. We sha’n’t get anything again like the old times, when there were no railways, nor confounded telegraphs pulling up the generals for every step they took, or making them believe there’d be a pack of men at their heels to pull them out of any holes they were fools enough to blunder into.”
In his youth the Squire had been in the Dragoons, and no one at Underham was bold enough to question his authority as a military man. Mrs Bennett only said placidly,—
“Dear me, was it not a little inconvenient?”
“It’s a good deal more inconvenient, ma’am, to have a heap of lies talked by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Letters were letters in those days, and you didn’t get pestered by every tradesman who wants to puff off his twopenny halfpenny foolery. When they came they had something in them. My mother, now. I’ve heard my father say that when news from Spain came in, and the old Highflyer was so hung about and set at, all the way down from London, that it was twelve o’clock at night before she got into Thorpe, as soon as my mother heard the wheels far off on the road, no matter what the weather was, rain or shine, moon or no moon, she would go out into the hall and put on her hood and cloak, and away she would trudge across the fields to the Red Lion to see if there might be a letter from poor Jack. My father was crippled at the time, and there wasn’t one she’d let go in her stead. Poor old mother!” said the Squire, with an involuntary softening.
“I remember your mother, Squire,” said old Mr Featherly.
“Then you remember as good a woman as ever breathed,” said Mr Chester, strongly again.
“Well, she was, she was. People called her a little high, but no one found her so when they were in trouble. And a fine woman, too, as upright as a dart, going straight to her point, whatever it was, with as pretty an ankle and as clean a heel as any one in the country. Miss Winifred reminds me of her in many ways.”
The Squire had pushed his chair a little back, and was looking at the glass of port he was fingering on the table with a pleased smile. But he shook his head at the old clergyman’s last remark.
“Winifred’s not so tall by half an inch or more as my mother was when she died.”
“She carries her head in the same fashion, though,” persisted Mr Featherly. “And there’s something that reminds me.”