“The truth is, Madame,” began Lawrence Newt, addressing Mrs. Bennet, “that I am ashamed of myself—I ought to have called a hundred times. I ask your pardon, Sir,” he continued, turning to Mr. Bennet, who was standing irresolutely by the sofa, half-leaning upon the arm.
“Oh!—ah! I am sure,” replied Mr. Bennet, with the nervous smile flitting across his face and apparently breaking out all over him; and there he remained speechless and bowing, while Mr. Newt hastened to seat himself, that every body else might sit down also.
Mrs. Bennet said that she was really, glad to see the face of an old friend again whom she had not seen for so long.
“But I see you every day in Gabriel, my dear Madame,” replied Lawrence Newt, with quaint dignity. Mother and son both smiled, and the father bowed as if the remark had been addressed to him.
Amy seated herself by Gabriel and Ellen, and talked very animatedly with them, while the parents and Mr. Newt sat together. She praised the roses, and smelled them very often; and whenever she did so, her eyes, having nothing in particular to do at the moment, escaped, as it were, under her brows through the petals of the roses as she bent over them, and wandered away to Lawrence Newt, whose kind, inscrutable eyes, by the most extraordinary chance in the world, seemed to be expecting hers, and were ready to receive them with the warmest welcome, and a half-twinkle—or was it no twinkle at all? which seemed to say, “Oh! you came—did you?” And every time his eyes seemed to say this Amy burst out into fresh praises of those beautiful roses to her younger cousins, and pressed them close to her cheek, as if she found their moist, creamy coolness peculiarly delicious and refreshing—pressed them so close, indeed, that she seemed to squeeze some of their color into her cheeks, which Gabriel and Ellen both thought, and afterward declared to their mother, to be quite as beautiful as roses.
Amy’s conversation with her young cousins was very lively indeed, but it had not a continuous interest. There were incessant little pauses, during which the eyes slipped away again across the room, and fell as softly as before, plump into the same welcome and the same little interrogation in those other eyes, twinkling with that annoying “did you?”
Amy Waring was certainly twenty-five, although Gabriel laughed and jeered at any such statement. But mamma and the Family Bible were too much for him. Lawrence Newt was certainly more than forty. But the Newt Family Bible was under a lock of which the key lay in Mrs. Boniface Newt’s bureau, who, in a question of age, preferred tradition, which she could judiciously guide, to Scripture. When Boniface Newt led Nancy Magot to the altar, he recorded, in a large business hand, both the date of his marriage and his wife’s birth. She protested, it was vulgar. And when the bridegroom inquired whether the vulgarity were in the fact of being born or in recording it, she said: “Mr. Newt, I am ashamed of you,” and locked up the evidence.
There was a vague impression in the Newt family—Boniface had already mentioned it to his son Abel—that there was something that Uncle Lawrence never talked about—many things indeed, of course, but still something in particular. Outside the family nothing was suspected. Lawrence Newt was simply one of those incomprehensibly pleasant, eccentric, benevolent men, whose mercantile credit was as good as Jacob Van Boozenberg’s, but who perversely went his own way. One of these ways led to all kinds of poor people’s houses; and it was upon a visit to the widow of the clergyman to whom Boniface Newt had given eight dollars for writing a tract entitled “Indiscriminate Almsgiving a Crime,” that Lawrence Newt had first met Amy Waring. As he was leaving money with the poor woman to pay her rent, Amy came in with a basket of comfortable sugars and teas. She carried the flowers in her face. Lawrence Newt was almost blushing at being caught in the act of charity; and as he was sliding past her to get out, he happened to look at her face, and stopped.
“Bless my soul! my dear young lady, surely your name is Darro!”
The dear young lady smiled and colored, and replied,