Perhaps, however, it was not the father who made the child disagreeable so much as nature. Very little of Heather’s generous unselfishness seemed to have descended to her second-born. It appeared as though to Lally had fallen most of her mother’s good qualities, while Leonard inherited Mr. Dudley’s good looks; for Leonard was what is called a “beautiful boy,” and all her best friends could say in favour of Lally was that, very probably, she would grow up into a handsome woman yet.
There was no pride about Miss Lally; she was as ready to accept affection from the odd man that cleaned the knives and boots, as from stately Mrs. Piggott, who, having made overtures to Heather, soon after that young lady’s marriage, had returned to her old dominions and reigned supreme at Berrie Down, over kitchen, and dairy, and larder. To Lally, nothing in the way of attention or amusement came amiss; from the feeding of the chickens to the milking of the cows, from bull’s-eyes to bonbons, from a tour round the premises, seated in a barrow wheeled by Ned, the odd man previously mentioned, to a gallop undertaken on the shoulders of that willing steed Alick, Lally was equally agreeable to, and gratified with all. She was so utterly cosmopolitan in her ideas, that Squire Dudley’s pride was daily offended by her utter want of conservatism. She was so easily pleased, and she found so many people willing to please her, that he came seriously to the conclusion there must be something wrong in the child’s mental constitution—some want in her brains, as he expressed it. “I saw her absolutely one day last winter,” he told Mrs. Ormson, “with about two pounds of salt in her lap, being wheeled round the walks by Ned, in search of birds; ‘because you know, papa,’ she said, ‘if I can once put salt on their tails, we shall be able to catch them.’”
Whereupon Mrs. Ormson lifted her hands and eyes to heaven, and declared, “Heather will never stop till she has made that child a perfect idiot.”
“I sent Ned to his work and Lally into the house,” proceeded Arthur, “but it is of no use my speaking. Five minutes afterwards she was on Alick’s shoulder, and he was carrying the salt for her in a bag tied round his neck.”
“Poor Heather, she will find out her mistake some day,” sighed Mrs. Ormson.
“But it is not Heather alone,” went on Mr. Dudley. “Everybody is the same; everybody makes a perfect idol of Lally, while Leonard mopes about alone. Where could you find a better child than he is? He will walk with me from here to the mill and never say a word, while Lally’s tongue never ceases from morning till night. Sometimes I think she is in fifty places at once, for wherever I go I hear her.”
“It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Ormson, “the child will be perfectly ruined.”
And there can be no doubt but that the lady believed she was speaking the literal truth. She did, indeed, consider Lally an utter mistake—her very existence an oversight on the part of Providence.
“A nice, quiet, pretty little girl, who would sit still in the nursery, with her doll and her picturebook,” was Mrs. Ormson’s idea of the correct style of thing in the scheme of creation; but a child with red hair, with a face covered with freckles, exactly like a turkey’s egg, with reddish-brown eyes, with legs that, in the course of the longest summer-day, never grew weary of carrying her from parlour to kitchen, from garden to Hollow, from Hollow to meadow; a child who had no “pretty ways,” according to Mrs. Ormson’s reading of juvenile attractiveness; who would not learn anything, nor keep her frocks clean; clearly the Almighty had not consulted Mrs. Ormson before He sent Lally Dudley into the world, or such a mistake never would have been committed, not even to please Heather, to whom the little girl was sun, moon, stars, and planets.
And because her heart was bound up in the child, Heather could not bear that another should come in her place, and attract Lally towards her as Bessie had done. With the “other children,” as Mrs. Dudley still continued to call her husband’s brothers and sisters, it did not matter; with the servants also it was of no consequence, for they were all of the one household, all after a fashion members of one family; but here was a stranger—daughter to a woman whom Heather did not much like—a girl whom in her inmost heart Heather distrusted—making friendly overtures to Lally, which Lally accepted with even more than her ordinary readiness, with an increase of her wonted gracious affability.