The other ladies present were Mrs. Vansittart and a Miss Green, a young lady who gave herself airs on the strength of her people being the Greens—the Greens of Peddlington—in whose particular case the name of Green was supposed to rank with Guelph or Ghibelline. Miss Green was plain, but clever, and was as boastful of her plainness as of her good old name. Her people were rich, and she had inherited an independent fortune from a bachelor uncle, who had bequeathed his wealth to her with an embargo against marriage with any man—less than a Peer—who should refuse to assume the name of Green. And even in the case of her marriage with a Peer, it was ordained that her second son should be called Green—by letters patent—and should inherit the Green wealth, strictly tied up in the case of the heiress.
Miss Green was economical to meanness—perhaps with some dim idea of enriching that hypothetical scion of nobility—and was proud of her economy. Her chief delight in the metropolis was to go long distances—generally in an omnibus—in quest of cheapness; and she was a scourge to all the young matrons of her acquaintance by her keen interest in their housekeeping, her knowledge of prices, and her outspoken condemnation of their extravagance. She had one original idea which had achieved a kind of distinction for her from the housekeeping point of view, and that was her non-belief in the Co-operative Stores.
Such was the feminine portion of the house-party at Redwold Towers, and it was to this party that John Vansittart had succeeded in making himself eminently agreeable. He had admired the artistic shading and Tudoresque scroll-work of Mrs. Baddington’s counterpane, and had surprised that lady by what seemed a profound knowledge of early Florentine needlework. He had tramped Blackdown in the wind and the weather with the Miss Champernownes, turn and turn about, and was no nearer falling in love with any of the three than when he began these rambles; he had discussed the art of dressing well upon fifty pounds a year with Miss Green, and had allowed her to convince him that the Greens of Peddlington were a purer race than the Plantagenets; and to-day he had given himself up to idleness in the gynæceum, otherwise morning-room, and had offered himself for two round dances apiece to the four young ladies, at the hunt ball in the little rustic town, to which they were all going that evening.
“It will be an awful drive,” said Maud Hartley; “think what the hills will be like in this weather.”
There had been an “old-fashioned Christmas,” and the world outside the windows was for the most part a white world.
“The horses have been roughed, and your coachman tells me he has no fear of the hills,” said Vansittart. “He is going to take four horses.”
“I’m sure they’ll be wanted, poor things, with that big omnibus and a herd of us to drag up those terrible hills,” said his sister.
“If you have any feeling for the brute creation you can get out and walk up the hills,” said Jack.
“What, in our satin slippers? How very delightful!”
There was no one heroic enough to propose walking up the hills at ten o’clock that evening, when the omnibus from Redwold went bowling merrily over the frost-bound roads, uphill and downhill, at a splendid even pace, and with a rhythmical jingle of bars and chains, as the four upstanding browns laid themselves out for their work, going as if it was a pleasure to go through the steel-blue night, with the quiet fields and pastures stretching round them, silvery in the moonshine, while in every dip and hollow the oak and chestnut copses lay wrapped in shadow, darkly mysterious.