A poor alderman seemed in the eyes of those great people nothing more nor less than an arrant impostor. Of course, any gentleman marrying the daughter of such a person would conclude she had money, and for her not to have money was a downright deception.
Then for her to have five children. “Those kind of vulgar women always have tribes of children, my dear,” said Mrs. Poole Seymour, who was childless, to the Honourable Augusta Baldwin (Lord Kemms’ aunt), who was popularly supposed never to have had an offer. “If poor Major Dudley had lived much longer, there is no telling how many sons and daughters might have been left for his heir to support. Shocking I call it. You remember, the first wife had only one child, and this present Mrs. Dudley but two. Quite enough, to my mind—just a nice number; but as for those five other creatures, it is perfectly heartbreaking to think of any man being burdened with them.”
This was the bird’s-eye view of the question which society from an exalted position was good enough to take.
When, however, society condescended to a nearer inspection, affairs assumed a somewhat different aspect. The Dudley girls were not uncouth young women, with large bones, rough hair, loud voices, and red hands; rather they were, to borrow from Mrs. Poole Seymour once more, decidedly pleasing girls—very nice and unaffected in their manners, and irreproachable as to their accent. Altogether, a call at Berrie Down grew to be considered an agreeable object for a morning drive. The ladies of the three parishes were, perhaps, a trifle weary of each other, and liked, moreover, having something to do.
Fruit and flowers, game, picture-books, dolls, toys, came daily to the Hollow, together with compliments and kind inquiries. Callers arrived also, assured that some day Heather herself would become visible, and also very certain that half an hour at Berrie Down passed more rapidly than ten minutes anywhere else.
Bessie did her best to amuse the great people, and the great people were pleased to approve her efforts. “You and your sisters, really must come over and stay with me,” Mrs. Poole Seymour was good enough at last to declare; and then Bessie had to explain she was not a Miss Dudley at all,—only a cousin wishful to help Mrs. Dudley at that trying period. A “sort of nurse,” added Bessie, mischievously, whereupon Agnes Dudley observed, “A very pearl of nurses; I do not know what we should have done without her;” at which little speech Mrs. Poole Seymour smiled graciously, and said they were good, sweet girls, of whom she trusted she should yet have the pleasure of seeing a great deal.
“She has all the trust, and all the pleasure on her side, then,” remarked Bessie, after their visitor departed; but, in spite of this depreciating observation, there can be no question but that Miss Ormson liked playing hostess—that she delighted in trying her strength and testing her power on grand ladies who were to the manner born, and never seemed disturbed or put out by any circumstance, or any person.
Another thing pleased her also—the vain coquettish puss—namely, to run up to her room after the various callers had departed, and looking in the glass consider how much prettier—how much more graceful she was than any of them.
Mrs. Crompton Raidsford was amongst the earliest of Mrs. Dudley’s visitors. No one, not even the Earl’s daughter, who married Mr. Plimpton, of Thornfield—a man commonly believed to be rolling in wealth—came in such style to Berrie Down as the contractor’s wife.
She had the shortest distance to drive of any lady in the neighbourhood, yet she arrived in a great chariot, drawn by a pair of horses, seventeen hands high if they were an inch, with coachman and footman on the box, and another footman behind.