“At his doing one of the most unprincipled acts of which a man can be capable,” sneered Lady Millicent. “He was perfectly well aware—he says so in his letter—that I should be intensely angry at his presumption; and yet—really, Rhoda, I have no patience with your folly and wrongheadedness—you stand up for this priggish, formal, underhand—”
“But he has not been underhand, mamma. As Mr. Wallingford is not here to tell you so himself, I must say the truth; and that is, that never till the day before we left Gillingham did he say one word that you might not have heard, and then he only”—and the colour deepened on her cheek—“said that he should miss me—should think of me till I came back, and that he hoped I would not quite forget Gillingham and—and ‘good things’ while I was away.”
Lady Millicent laughed scornfully.
“For Gillingham read Mr. Wallingford, and for good things the delights, I suppose, of Switcham Parsonage,—boiled leg of mutton and what is called, I believe, a parlour-maid to wait upon you. My dear Rhoda, be thankful that such a fate as becoming the wife of a poor country parson is not in store for you. And now, my dear, you may go, as I said before, to your own room. There is no occasion to make this sort of thing public. I shall of course answer Mr. Wallingford’s letter, and I think I may venture to say that we are not likely to be troubled further on the subject. There, there, that will do; I am very much engaged this morning,”—arresting the words which she could see were hovering on her daughter’s lips,—“and I can afford to waste no more time on such nonsense as this.”
The head and eyes resolutely bent upon the folio before her, the decided tone of a voice whose stern, determined accents Rhoda knew and understood full well, convinced the timid girl that appeal there was none, and that nothing remained for her but to obey. With a heavy heart she ascended the stairs to the chamber that she called her own, and which, opening into a smaller one appropriated to Kate, enabled that lighter-spirited young lady to overhear through the keyhole of the door the hardly suppressed sobs which broke from the breast of the unhappy Rhoda.
“My darling, what is the matter?” cried the younger girl, rushing in impetuously,—for Kate’s strong points were certainly neither prudence nor self-control,—“what is the matter, you poor dear?” And tumbling on her knees by the side of her weeping sister, Kate began sobbing too by sheer force of sympathy.
A very few words sufficed to put the latter au fait of the secret—secret, alas, no longer—which Rhoda had so long and so sedulously kept. Kate listened with eager ears and widely-distended eyes to the details, stammered forth incoherently, of this first love episode in the family. As a love affair, it was certainly not without its interest; but with that interest, and in spite of her sisterly compassion, Katie certainly did feel a little surprise at the singularity of Rhoda’s choice. She made no allowance for the utter absence of competitors for her sister’s favour; all that was patent to this damsel of fast proclivities—who thought Sunday-schools a bore, and who hoped some day to be wooed by a lover of a widely different type—was the fact that Mr. Wallingford had straight hair, was anything but “jolly,” had the misfortune to possess scanty whiskers, did not smoke, and, to sum up all his defects in one comprehensive word, was a “parson.”
“I can’t the least understand how Rhoda can care for him,” she said an hour afterwards to her eldest brother, to whom she had just narrated the provoking circumstance that her sister, who was in love with that stupid Mr. Wallingford, had cried so long and so bitterly that she wasn’t fit to be seen,—“a man who is always talking ‘good,’ and who, of course, thinks it’s wicked to be jolly. Can you make it out, Arthur? I suppose it was all done by staring at each other, for I never saw them speaking, or seeming as if anything was going on.”
“Of course you didn’t,” her brother said, as he settled his cravat in the pier-glass over the mantelshelf (he was going to ride—his usual morning avocation—with Honor Beacham, and naturally wished to look his best on the occasion),—“of course you didn’t. Girls when they are in love (and the best girls too) will deceive even other women,—a very different affair, I can tell you, from taking in a man; and if you think, my dear Katie—”
“O don’t bother about that now,” Kate said impatiently. “I asked you whether you can believe that Rhoda really likes Mr. Wallingford. I can’t fancy his being a lover: horrid creature, I call him! Now, Arthur, do attend one moment. I want to know whether I ought to be glad or sorry that mamma has put an end to the business, and—”