The third member of the party, reclining limply on the satin sofa, was a lady with quite as much determination as her daughter, and a far more subtle way of getting her wishes attended to. A widow of ten years’ standing, Lady Wyndham enjoyed the frailest health. The merest hint of opposition was too much for the delicate state of her nerves; and anyone, observing her handkerchief, her vinaigrette, and the hartshorn which she usually kept by her, would have had to be stupid indeed to have failed to appreciate their sinister message. In youth, she had been a beauty; in middle age, everything about her seemed to have faded: hair, cheeks, eyes, and even her voice, which was plaintive, and so gentle that it was a wonder it ever made itself heard. Like her daughter, Lady Wyndham had excellent taste in dress, and since she was fortunate enough to possess a very ample jointure she was able to indulge her liking for the most expensive fal-lals of fashion without in any way curtailing her other expenses. This did not prevent her from thinking herself very badly off, but she was able to enjoy many laments over her straitened circumstances without feeling the least real pinch of poverty, and to win the sympathy of her acquaintances by dwelling sadly on the injustice of her late husband’s will, which had placed his only son in the sole possession of his immense fortune. The jointure, her friends deduced hazily, was the veriest pittance.
Lady Wyndham, who lived in a charming house in Clarges Street, could never enter the mansion in St James’s Square without suffering a pang. It was not, as might have been supposed from the look of pain she always cast upon it, a family domicile, but had been acquired by her son only a couple of years before. During Sir Edward’s lifetime, the family had lived in a much larger, and most inconvenient house in Grosvenor Square. Upon Sir Richard’s announcement that he proposed to set up an establishment of his own, this had been given up, so that Lady Wyndham had been able ever since to mourn its loss without being obliged to suffer any longer its inconveniences. But however much she might like her own house in Clarges Street it was not to be supposed that she could bear with equanimity her son’s inhabiting a far larger house in St James’s Square; and when every other source of grievance failed her, she always came back to that, and said, as she said now, in an ill-used voice: “I cannot conceive what he should want with a house like this!”
Louisa, who had a very good house of her own, besides an estate in Berkshire, did not in the least grudge her brother his mansion. She replied: “It doesn’t signify, Mama. Except that he must have been thinking of marriage when he bought it. Would you not say so, George?”
George was flattered at being thus appealed to, but he was an honest, painstaking person, and he could not bring himself to say that he thought Richard had had any thought of marriage in his head, either when he had bought the house, or at any other time.
Louisa was displeased. “Well!” she said, looking resolute, “he must be brought to think of marriage!”
Lady Wyndham lowered her smelling-salts to interpolate: “Heaven knows I would never urge my boy to do anything distasteful, but it has been an understood thing for years that he and Melissa Brandon would seal the long friendship between our families with the Nuptial Tie!”
George goggled at her, and wished himself otherwhere.
“If he doesn’t wish to marry Melissa, I’m sure I should be the last person to press her claim,” said Louisa. “But it is high time that he married someone, and if he has no other suitable young female in his eye, Melissa it must be.”
“I do not know how to face Lord Saar,” bemoaned Lady Wyndham, raising the vinaigrette to her nose again. “Or poor dear Emily, with three girls besides Melissa to dispose of, and none of them more than passable. Sophia has spots, too.”
“I do not consider Augusta hopeless,” said Louisa fairly. “Amelia, too, may improve.”