“I am sure she is a good girl,” said Mrs. Bingham, and to that the lady of Misperton said “We all hope so.”
A merry, a warm-hearted girl. Mr. Germain was confident of that. When a child of her party tripped in running, and fell, how she picked her up, and sitting, cradled her upon her lap and soothed her with voice and soft cheek and quick, kissing lips. A pretty sight, a gracious act sweetly done. Absorbed, he lost the thread of the talk about him, but awoke to hear his sister-in-law’s tones of authority telling Mrs. Bingham things which he wished to know.
“Yes, Middleham—Mary Middleham.—No, she’s three or four and twenty, I believe. She has been here a year or two—teaching the little Nunns. No, no French; and the merest rudiments of piano. But for children of that position piano I consider absurd. Nunn is a most sensible man—no airs at all. . . . Yes, she has nice ways with children; they mind her and like her, too. Really, she and Soames manage everything—but—that is most tiresome!” Mrs. James sat upright. “I must speak to her. I see that they are doing precisely what I did not intend with the tea. It’s very stupid of Mrs. Blain. I’ll send somebody for her if I—.” She looked about her, vaguely offended that a footman did not emerge from the clump of pampas; and—“Cecily, darling,” said Mrs. Bingham.
Cecily jumped up. “I’ll go, Mrs. Germain.”
“That is very nice of you, my dear. Do. Tell Mary that I want to speak to her here.”
Miss Cecily vaulted her black legs over the railing and ran up the field whistling. Conversation, unaided now by Mrs. Germain, ran a languid course.
But Oranges and Lemons stopped short, and crimped tresses could be swept from shoulders and eyes, the better to regard Miss Cecily from the Rectory party. Presently, after an eager colloquy, expressive on one side of dismay and disarray, Miss Cecily was seen returning with her convoy, talking gaily. The captive nymph, though still busy with hat and hairpins, or fanning herself with her pocket handkerchief, walked confidently, carried her head well, and joined happily in the laugh. This until within hail. But then she changed. Her tongue was still, her head was bent the least in the world, and her eyes became guarded and watchful. At the railing, which Miss Cecily again neatly vaulted, Miss Middleham paused, and blushed before she climbed. But she had nothing to be afraid of, for Mr. Germain was looking at his white spats. When she stood before her betters, however, he, following her example, stood before her. And now he observed her sedately.
He was struck first by a caution in her fine eyes which caused them to loom as with reproach, to peer as if she doubted. Her colour, heightened by exertion and, perhaps, by shyness, was very becoming to her. She glowed like a peach burnt by the sun. She looked wholesome and healthy, and her voice did not belie her appearance—a fresh, confident, young voice. She kept her hands behind her—as if she were a catechumen—and with her shoulders back, looked watchfully at you as she listened and replied. The attitude showed her figure to be charming—softly, tenderly curved; a budding figure. Undoubtedly she was pleasant to behold, but she would have been no more to any one but a confirmed amorist had it not been for her eyes.
Mr. Germain was little of an amorist by temperament, though time and the hour had led him to muse over maids at play. And that being so, he was shocked rather than struck by the discrepancy between the playing nymph of his fancies and this healthy sunburnt girl with peering eyes. It almost shocked him to see her so wary. It gave her a guilty look as if she feared detection momently. He thought of a squirrel in leafage, of a dormouse by a tree-bole; he thought, above all, of flinching, of harsh treatment, of the whip. “Great God,” he cried to himself, “what a state of things is this when, upon a summons suddenly, flashing limbs grow stiff and sparkling eyes burn large with apprehension!” And then he said in his heart, “To woo the confidence back to such eyes, to still the doubts in such a breast, were work for a true man.”
From the height of his argument to the flat of the facts is a longish drop. The Catechism had taken this simple form. “Mary,” Mrs. Germain had said with something, but very little after all, of the air of a proprietor, “I see that they are bringing out the tea.”