From the hour she became acquainted with Mr. Chumney Bella had hated him. She did not know why. It might have been his eyebrows, it might have been his vulgarity. For some undiscovered reason he was more obnoxious to her than any creature she had ever met. She thought him clever, and she had a lurking idea that he was able to read her as easily as he could read a book. She fancied that he knew everything that was passing in her mind—that he was perfectly familiar with her motive for marrying his old employer—that he had weighed and measured her till he was master of her most secret thoughts. She lectured her husband for his cultivation of Chumney; but she was wonderfully polite to Mr. Chumney himself. She feared him too much to be discourteous to him.
CHAPTER XI.
CAPTAIN STANDISH.
Whether it was that Mr. Piper’s plain speaking had its effect, or that Bella grew wise by experience, is an open question; but soon after the particular Thursday upon which Mr. Chumney appeared as an unwelcome guest, the second Mrs. Piper changed her tactics altogether. She left off besieging the county people in their impregnable fortresses, surrounded with the moat of exclusiveness, and shut in with the portcullis of pride. She dropped a good many of those ultra-genteel professional people against whose impertinence Mr. Piper had protested, and she opened her house freely to her husband’s commercial allies of the past—the Wigzells, the Porkmans, the Timperleys, and a good many more of the same class.
When she had made these people understand that her Thursday afternoon reception meant something lively and sociable she was no longer without visitors. The midsummer weather suggested a tent on the lawn, where tea and claret cup, and strawberries and cream, might be taken amidst the perfume of roses and warbling of blackbirds. Archery was introduced on the long stretch of grass on the other side of the ha-ha. Mr. Piper insisted on having American bowls for himself and his particular friends, in an old-fashioned garden on one side of the big square mansion, comfortably shut in by a dense holly hedge, a retreat where a man might smoke a clay pipe and be vulgar at his ease.
The Wigzells and their compeers all came in handsome carriages, and, if the men were somewhat given to eccentricity in their hats and collars, the women all dressed in the latest fashion. But their highest claim to Bella’s favour was the fact that they brought very pleasant people in their train; officers in the regiment stationed at Great Yafford, clever young barristers, lawyers of higher standing than the starched solicitors who had retired to cultivate their roses and air their self-importance in the pastoral seclusion of Little Yafford. Bella perceived with delight that even these manufacturing people could be useful to her.
By midsummer, Mrs. Piper’s Thursday afternoons, which had at first been such dire failures as to provoke the sarcasms of Miss Coyle and her set, had become so successful that Miss Coyle now found herself a neglected atom in the crowd, and sat apart with one of her chosen friends, breathing condemnations of this new phase of worldliness and frivolity. Miss Coyle liked the strong tea, and unlimited pound cake, the claret cup, and strawberries and cream, and better still did she like the large opportunity for scandal which these gatherings afforded her.
‘Poor dear Mrs. Piper,’ she sighed, meaning the lady reposing under the sumptuous monument of many-coloured marbles. ‘If she could only come back to earth for an afternoon, and look upon this scene! If!’
‘Ah!’ echoed Miss Coyle’s friend, Mrs. Namby, the doctor’s wife, ‘if indeed! She would be surprised, poor dear, wouldn’t she?’
‘To think of the waste going on in the servants’ hall, now, my dear!’ continued Miss Coyle, with the tone of a Hebrew prophet bewailing the follies of his misguided nation. ‘It was bad enough in the first Mrs. Piper’s time, though there never was a more careful housekeeper. I’ve heard her lament it many a day. What must it be NOW?’