’Tis good to be honest and true,
’Tis good to be off with the old love
Before you are on with the new.”
The party which sat down to dinner at Hazlehurst Grange on that day was a very select one. Mr. Hazlehurst had driven over to the neighbouring town on justice business, and having sentenced certain deer-stealers to undergo divers unpleasantnesses in the way of oakum-picking, solitary confinement, and other such amenities of prison discipline, had stayed to reward virtue by dining with his brother-magistrates upon orthodoxly-slaughtered venison. Accordingly, Mrs. Hazlehurst and the three young ladies, Harry Coverdale and Master Tom, sat down to what Mrs. Malaprop would have termed “quite a tête-à-tête dinner” together;—a tame and docile curate, invited on the spur of the moment to counterbalance Harry, having missed fire, owing to the untimely repentance of a perverse old female parishioner, who being taken poorly and penitent simultaneously, had sent her imperative compliments to the Rev. B. A. A. Lambkin, and she would feel obliged by his coming to convert her at his very earliest possible convenience; to which serious call he felt obliged to respond.
Coverdale had found himself in an unusual and peculiar frame of mind all day; for perhaps the first time in his life he had felt disinclined to active exertion; and had positively gone the length of abstracting from the library a volume of Byron, and spent the afternoon lying under a tree, reading the Bride of Abydos. Now his peculiarity took a new turn; and, freed from his incubus, D’Almayne, a sense of the domestic and sociable suddenly sprang up within him, and throwing off all reserve, he appeared for the first time during his visit in his true colours—that is, unaffected, courteous, kind-hearted, amusing, and well-informed. In consequence possibly of this change, the dinner went off most agreeably; and the absence of the Reverend Lambkin was mentally decreed to be a subject of thanksgiving, by more than one member of the party.
In the evening there were certain wasps’-nests to be destroyed, about which Harry had expressed much interest; but now he discovered that he had blistered his heel on the previous day, by running in a tight boot; and Tom, mightily discontented at his defection, was forced to invade the enemy’s country without the assistance of his ally. When Coverdale rejoined the ladies, Emily was reading Tennyson’s Princess aloud, and the moment he appeared, she declared she was tired, and handed the book to him, begging him to proceed; her mischievous intention being thereby to overwhelm him with confusion, and derive amusement from his consequent mistakes. But she met her match for once, as Harry, coolly replying that he should have much pleasure, took the book and began reading in a deep rich voice, with so much taste and feeling, that her surprise soon changed to admiration. After tea, music was proposed, and the moment Alice began to sing Coverdale, for the first time since he had been in the house, approached the piano, and actually turned over the leaves for her!
“That lovely Là ci darem! Ah, Alice! if we had but a gentleman’s voice to take the second! Why don’t you sing, Mr. Coverdale?” exclaimed Emily, turning over the pages of the duet.
“I’ll try what I can do if you wish it,” was Coverdale’s quiet answer.
Alice, to whom he spoke, glanced at him in speechless surprise; but Emily, at once making up her mind that he was attempting a hoax, and eager to turn the tables upon him, resumed—
“Bravo! give me your seat, Alice, I’ll play the accompaniment for you both.”