The sound of wheels rolling towards the door prevented this question being answered. In another moment the dog-cart drew up before the porch, father and son alighted, and came into the room, bringing a gust of fresh moorland air along with them. The opportunity of obtaining further detail from Mrs. Trevanard was gone for the time being; and it might be long before Maurice again found himself alone with her, or found her inclined to speak. He heartily wished that the attractions of Seacomb market, or of the homely hostelry where the farmers eat their substantial two o’clock dinner, had detained Michael Trevanard and his son just a little longer.
The invalid was more cheerful that evening than she had been for a long time, and something of the old air of domestic comfort seemed to return to the homestead parlour, as Maurice and the family sat at tea. Both her husband and son noticed the improvement.
‘You must be rare good company,’ said the farmer, ‘for Bridget looks ever so much brighter for spending the afternoon with you.—Cheer up! old lady, we may cheat the doctors after all,’ he added, bending over his wife affectionately as he handed her a cup of tea, the only kind of refreshment she now enjoyed.
‘The doctors may have their own way about me, Michael,’ answered Mrs. Trevanard, ‘if I can only go down to my grave with my mind pretty easy.’
Her son drew his chair beside hers after tea, and sat with his hand in hers, clinging to her with melancholy fondness, sadly expectant of the coming day when there would be nothing on this earth more distant from him than that motherly hand.
Maurice Clissold had pledged himself to spend the next day at Penwyn, where there was to be a cottager’s flower show, in which Mrs. Penwyn and Miss Bellingham were deeply interested. It was the Squire’s wife who had organized the annual exhibition, and stimulated the love of floriculture in the peasant mind by the offer of various useful and attractive prizes—a silver watch, a handsome rosewood tea-caddy, a delf dinner service, a copper tea-kettle—prizes which were dear to the tastes of the competing floriculturists, and which were eagerly competed for. The most gigantic yellow roses, the longest and greenest cucumbers, the finest bunches of grapes, the most mathematically correct dahlias were produced within a ten-mile radius of Penwyn; and by this simple means the cottage gardens and flower-pots in latticed casements which Mrs. Penwyn beheld in her walks and drives were things, of beauty, and a perennial source of joy.
The show was held in a vast circular marquee erected in the grounds of the Manor House. Lady Cheshunt was one of the lady adjudicators, and sat in state, gorgeously attired in a tea-leaf coloured silk, fearfully and wonderfully made, by a Regent Street dressmaker, who tyrannized over her customers, and seemed to gratify a malicious disposition by inflicting hideous combinations of form and colour upon her too submissive patronesses.
‘I really can’t say I think it pretty, dear Lady Cheshunt,’ said Madge, when her friend asked her opinion of this tea-leaf coloured abomination.
‘No more do I, my love,’ replied the dowager, calmly, ‘but it’s strikingly ugly. All your county people will be blazing in what they call pretty colours. This dirty greenish brown is chic!’
After the cottage flower-show came a German Tea for the gentlefolks, and croquet, and archery, and the usual amount of indiscriminate flirtation which accompanies those sports. Maurice found himself amongst pleasant sunshiny people, and almost enjoyed himself, which seemed, in some-wise, treason against Justina.