She was not daunted, however: not she! She was too old and experienced a campaigner for that, and had regularly changed her front mapped out her carte du pays, and planned out an entirely new disposition of her forces before coming down to Bigton. She contemplated a bold stroke, somewhat like Napoleon’s procedure at Austerlitz, or, better still, his invasion of Egypt; and had determined to follow the tactics of other experienced commanders, and “carry the war into Africa.”
It was not a very colossal adversary against whom she schemed and plotted, and collected such munitions of war—it was only Tom Hartshorne—poor Tom, whom she had met in London, and who seemed inclined for a mild flirtation with her pensive Laura, and lively, not to say “larky,” Carry—especially at the last Woolwich Artillery ball, when his attentions had been “really quite marked!” That unfortunate young officer having sauntered through a quadrille with Laura, and told the exuberant Carry, after a waltz, that she was “a stunner to go.” He certainly, however, criminated himself to some extent, by calling the next day at their house in town, and playing pretty to, and chaffing both girls.
Mr Thomas Hartshorne she had found out—strange what wonderful perspicacity and knowledge of the means, standing, and expectations of wooers and would-be sons-in-law, mothers with marriageable daughters have!—was in a very good position, and was the presumptive heir to the present proprietress of The Poplars.
She had made up her mind, therefore, to secure him at all hazards for one of her “dear, darling, girls.” He was, consequently, the object of her present visit to Bigton. Tom was the game marked down in esse, although goodness knows, with the hopeful ground of a watering place to work upon, and its heterogeneous crowds of visitors, and its romantic opportunities, who and how many, without agitating Mormonism, might not be the victims in posse!
Lady Inskip was the widow of a Scotch baronet, who had married her for her good looks rather than her fortune—unlike the generality of his countrymen—for a very limited trousseau was all she brought him; and even now, some twenty years after her marriage, she was still what Doctor Jolly would, and did, call “a fine figure of a woman, sir, by Gad!”
Her two daughters were very nice, presentable girls; Laura a sort of languid beauty, and Carry “gushing,” and a trifle inclined to be fast. The boy, Mortimer, was an obstinate, headstrong, young cub, just of that age when boys are peculiarly obnoxious and always in the way and disagreeable. He was, naturally enough, the spoilt pet of his mother, and for a young baronet had all the graces and follies of the position which he would be required to fill. But we need not go on to particularise all the points of Lady Inskip’s ménage.
Suffice it to say, that she came down to Bigton very shortly after Tom had left town. You may wager a trifle, if you are inclined to woo Fortune in that way, that she was previously acquainted with his destination before she moved her Lares and Penates; and now that she was here, you may depend that she would leave no stone unturned to secure her object.
She took a pleasant little cottage on the Esplanade, about half a mile or so from the town, for a year, and had it fitted up elegantly and decorated so as to make it a perfect bijou of a place. If you watch a spider, you will always observe what a magnificent web he spins before he hunts about or lays in wait for his prey; see what a gorgeous centre-piece he has to his prismatic castle! Depend upon it that the spider is certain that his parlour is well-furnished before he invites the fly to “walk in,” as is detailed in the lines of the harrowing ballad sacred to childhood.
Well, Lady Inskip had a nice little house, nicely furnished, with a nice little garden all mignionette and passion flowers, and a nice little croquet lawn, where nice little games of flirtation could be played by suitable nice young gentlemen with her nice dear darling girls. In fact it was all “nice”—that adjective so dear to the heart of the gentler sex, and so lavishly used by them—and so the old campaigner having entrenched herself within these fortifications, continuing our military descriptive, prepared to battle for and on behalf her of two daughters Laura and Caroline, as aforesaid.
She had not been in the place two days, before she knew “all about everybody.” How Captain Curry Cucumber, who lived at the big red brick house, “just as you passed the common, you know,” was an old returned East India officer (and who was seventy years old if he was a day), was immensely rich, and had come home with a lakh of rupees to marry and settle down. He had an “awful temper in course,” as his landlady said, and swore dreadful at his “pore black man,” but then he had a sweet yellow face, and his widow would be left very comfortably off. Then she learnt too of our old friend the doctor, how he was a gay young bachelor; and of course she found out all about Mrs Hartshorne, and her place and her ways and her oddities. She learnt also of the Revd. Herbert Pringle, and his little church at Hartwood: and as he was a relative of the great Sir Boanerges Todhunter, and was a young man with a good living, and probably had property of his own, she made up her mind to patronise him, especially as he was the protégé of the dowager.