“You’re a good soul; try and drop all that nonsense about position, and we shall be a regular Darby and Joan in our old age.”
Luke kissed her on the forehead and went out; and the wife continued her knitting.
There were some things that she would undo if she could! The years of secret hopes and fears, and doubts and misery, revealed in this expression, were not even dreamed of by Luke Somerton. She had schemed, and plotted, and built castles in the future, and carried about with her a big, burning secret, and it had lately begun to dawn upon her that her designs would be frustrated.
There may be far-seeing readers of this book who have already plucked out the heart of Mrs. Somerton’s mystery. We have made no great effort to conceal it from this piercing foresight. It is no new thing that we have invented. Our story will not be injured by your knowing Mrs. Somerton’s secret from the beginning, neither will it be particularly enhanced by delaying the disclosure of the great plot of her married life.
But there are other things crowding upon my attention, and we must leave Mrs. Somerton at present without further explanation, to chafe against the bars of her own self-made prison-house.
CHAPTER XVI.
MAY BE SAID TO INAUGURATE A SERIES OF IMPORTANT CHANGES IN THE LIVES OF SEVERAL NOTABLE PERSONS IN THIS HISTORY.
The financial storm had been but little felt, you see, at Barton Hall, or Mr. and Mrs. Somerton would no doubt have said something about it in the conversation which is set down in the previous chapter.
Phœbe Tallant and her friend, Miss Somerton, had read of it in the daily papers, which arrived in a special parcel from Smith & Sons every day at the nearest railway station, where a groom was in waiting for them. But Phœbe and Amy knew little or nothing about panics. It was to them very much like what it was to the boy,—“something in the City.” Miss Tallant’s clever governess, however, knew a great deal about a Panic, which she seemed to stroke and pat on the back in her intellectual superiority.
They little knew how seriously such a storm might affect the master of Barton Hall. It had already demolished more than one or two establishments of nearly equal importance; but Mr. Tallant was particularly strong in the back, as they say in the City, and it was well for him that such was the case, as was speedily exemplified soon after the first shock of the panic had vibrated throughout the country.
On the very day after the clever governess’s description of a panic, the half-yearly meeting of the Eastern Banking Company (of which Mr. Tallant was chairman, and his son a director) was held at the London Tavern.