“Blighted! aye, look! Not a leaf that does not crumble like ashes in my hand,” said Waldie, twitching off a spray and crumbling the leaves. “I had set my heart upon these laurels, and now to see them ruined in this way.... Damn the blight!” muttered he between his teeth.
“I hear there is much mischief done in Kent,” observed lord F——.
“In Kent! You would think there had been a shower of Gomorrah rain by the look of the place. Young ash plantations, miles long, with their shoots crisped and black, worse than my laurels. Curse the blight!”
“And the hops....” lord F—— was going on to inquire; but Mrs. Waldie held up her finger to stop him. He broke off suddenly, and Waldie turned round upon his wife with a look which made her change colour. In order to relieve everybody, lord F—— summoned up all his experiences of the mischiefs done by blight at Weston, diverging gradually upon topics nearly related,—modes of improving, embellishing, &c., and ending with an invitation to the Waldies to go down and occupy the place for the few weeks of its greatest beauty. Waldie glanced quickly from one to another, as if suspicious of some plot to humour and amuse him, and then bluntly intimated that his going from home at present was out of the question. Scarcely another word could be got out of him, even when the ladies had walked away into the greenhouse, and the children had tried who could run fastest from papa, leaving him alone with lord F——.
“Do not you think him looking very ill,—very much altered?” inquired Maria of her sister, with a quivering lip.
“Very unlike himself to-day, certainly. Something has discomposed him. But you must not fancy him more ill than he is. No man varies more from hour to hour, you know. He may be quite a different man to-morrow.”
Maria shook her head, and then asked Letitia to observe what they came to see, without delay. She should not like her husband to think they were consulting about his looks. Letitia snatched up the plant in question, and carried it to lord F—— to ask whether there were any of the kind in the Weston greenhouses.
“You had better take it with you,” said Waldie. “It requires a greenhouse, and we shall have no greenhouses when we remove.”
“Remove!” said his wife faintly.
“Remove! yes, my dear. You would not stay here, would you? The blights ruin everything I set my heart upon; and you know I cannot bear to see a house so exposed as ours, with not a tree to cast a particle of shade on any part of it. There is Erpingham’s house, down below, with those fine spreading sycamores beside it ... that is something like a house. We could live there for a lifetime, and never grow tired of it. But you see it will take a lifetime for our clumps to grow roof-high. I shall move into the city.”