It was he who chose his daughter’s masters, and it was often he who attended during the lesson, listening intently to the progress of the work, and as keenly interested in the pupil’s progress as the pupil herself. Latin he himself taught her, and she already knew by heart those noblest of Horace’s odes which are fittest for young lips. Their philosophy saddened her a little.
“Is life always changing?” she asked her father; “must one never venture to be quite happy?”
The Latin poet’s pervading idea of mutability, inevitable death, and inevitable change impressed her with a flavour of sadness, child as she was.
“My dearest, had Horace been a Christian, as you are, and had he lived for others, as you do, he would not have been afraid to call himself happy,” answered George Greswold. “He was a Pagan, and he put on the armour of philosophy for want of the armour of faith.”
These lessons in the classics, taking a dead language not as a dry study of grammar and dictionary, but as the gate to new worlds of poetry and philosophy, had been Lola’s delight. She was in no wise unpleasantly precocious; but she was far in advance of the conventional schoolroom child, trained into characterless uniformity by a superior governess. Lola had never been under governess rule. Her life at the Manor had been as free as that of the butterflies. There was only Bell to lecture her—white-haired Mrs. Bell, thin and spare, straight as an arrow, at seventy-four years of age, the embodiment of servants’-hall gentility, in her black silk afternoon gown and neat cambric cap—Bell, who looked after Lola’s health, and Lola’s rooms, and was for ever tidying the drawers and tables, and lecturing upon the degeneracy of girlhood. It was her boast to have nursed Lola’s grandmother, as well as Lola’s mother, which seemed going back to the remoteness of the dark ages.
Enderby Manor was three miles from Romsey, and within riding or driving distance of the New Forest and of Salisbury Cathedral. It lay in the heart of a pastoral district watered by the Test, and was altogether one of the most enjoyable estates in that part of the country.
Before luncheon was finished a messenger was on his way to the village to summon Mr. Porter, more commonly Dr. Porter, the parish and everybody’s doctor, an elderly man of burly figure, close-cropped gray hair, and yeoman-like bearing—a man born on the soil, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather had cured or killed the inhabitants of Enderby parish from time immemorial. Judging from the tombstones in the pretty old churchyard, they must have cured more than they killed; for those crumbling moss-grown stones bore the record of patriarchal lives, and the union near Enderby was a museum of incipient centenarians.
Mr. Porter came into the grave old library at the Manor looking more serious than his wont, perhaps in sympathy with George Greswold’s anxious face, turned towards the door as the footman opened it.
“Well, Porter, what does it all mean, this fever?” asked Greswold abruptly.
Mr. Porter had a manner of discussing a case which was all his own. He always appealed to his patient with a professional air, as if consulting another medical authority, and a higher one than himself. It was flattering, perhaps, but not always satisfactory.