‘I shall stay at Sam’s Coffee-house in the Strand,’ said Mr. Scratchell, with a conscientious air. ‘I am not going to waste Miss Harefield’s money on fine hotels.’
A quarter of an hour later and Mr. Scratchell had torn himself from the bosom of his family, and was being driven at a brisk trot towards Great Yafford.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SECOND MRS. PIPER.
Bella was reigning at the Park in all the glory of new-fledged royalty, her husband fascinated and subservient, her step-children all packed off to school, the sober old Georgian barrack transformed by new furniture and improvements of all kinds. At his wife’s urgent desire Mr. Piper had bought the estate from Sir Philip Dulcimer, who, never having liked it, was very glad to turn it into money, which, carefully invested in railway shares, might bring him in five or six per cent., instead of the scanty two and a half which his paternal acres had yielded. Mr. Piper was therefore now Mr. Dulcimer’s patron, as Bella reflected with a thrill of pride. She had ascended a good many steps above poor Mrs. Dulcimer, who had been so patronizingly good-natured to her in the days of her poverty.
For the brief three months of his wedded life Ebenezer Piper had been living in a state of chronic astonishment. ‘This little woman,’ as he called his wife, absolutely took his breath away. Her coolness, her self-assurance, her air of having been used to the possession of unlimited wealth from her babyhood, her insolence to people of higher rank—Lady Jane Gowry, for instance, and the Pynsents, and all the notabilities of Little Yafford—these things filled him with admiring surprise. She was not at all the kind of wife he had expected to find her. He had chosen her for her softness and pliability, and he found her hard and bright as some sparkling gem. He had expected to rule and govern her as easily as a little child, and behold! she was ruling and governing him. He was too much under the spell of her fascination to complain yet awhile; but this kind of thing was not at all what he had intended. He held himself in reserve.
Never was there such a change in any household. A butler in solemn black, with a powdered footman for his assistant, took the place of the decent parlourmaid, in her starched cap and apron.
The first Mrs. Piper had never consented to have indoor men-servants.
‘My dear, why don’t you keep a man?’ Mr. Piper had sometimes inquired. ‘He’d do much better than these girls of yours, who never quite know their business.’
‘Piper,’ his wife had answered solemnly, ‘I am not going to bring you to ruin. The girls are bad enough, what with their extravagance and their followers, but a man would eat us out of house and home before we knew where we were.’