And that very day she did so.
But the result was not what she had hoped. A few thoroughly kind words from her old friend came in response in the course of a week or two, hoping to see her and her children on his return to England the following spring, but evidently not “taking in” the Derwents’ present loneliness. “I hear from Amy Lilford that she has asked her tenants to look after you a little,” he said. “I don’t know them personally, but you will like to have the run of the old place again.”
And Mrs Derwent could not make up her mind to trouble him further. “Men hate writing any letters that are not business ones,” she said to Blanche. “We must just wait till he comes back in the spring, and make ourselves as happy as we can till then; though, of course, I hope some people will call on us as soon as we are settled. The Marths at East Moddersham could scarcely do less.”
To some little extent her expectations were fulfilled. The wife of the vicar of Blissmore called. The vicar was a younger son of the important Enneslie family, enjoying the living in his father’s gift after old-fashioned orthodox fashion, and Mrs Enneslie was a conscientious “caller” on all her husbands parishioners. She had perception enough to discern the Derwents’ refinement and superiority at a glance, but she was a very busy woman, with experience enough to know that to be accepted by the “County,” much more than these qualities was demanded. And she contented herself with such kindly attentions to the strangers as lay in her own power. She did a little more. She spoke of them to her brother, the Pinnerton Green parson, who promised that his wife should look them up as soon as they came under his clerical wing.
“They seem nice girls,” she said, with perhaps some kindly meant diplomacy. “It would be good for them to do a little Sunday-schooling or something of that kind.”
So the weeks passed, bringing with them the exasperating delays which every one in the agonies of house changing thinks peculiar to one’s own case; and Christmas came and went before the Derwents could even name a time with any certainty for taking possession of their new home. It was a dull Christmas. Not that, with their French experience, the young people were accustomed to Yule-tide joviality; but they had heard so much about it—had pictured to themselves the delights of an overflowing country-house, the glories of a real English Christmas, as their mother had so often from their earliest years described it to them.
And the reality—Miss Halliday’s best sitting-room, with some sprigs of holly, a miniature (though far from badly made) plum-pudding, no presents or felicitations except those they gave each other!
“Another of my illusions gone,” said Stasy, with half-comical pathos, which drew forth a warning whisper from Blanche of “Don’t, Stasy. It worries mamma,” and aloud the reminder:
“Everything will be quite different when we are in our own house, you silly girl.”
And when at last the own house did come, and the pleasant stage began of making the rooms home-like and pretty with the old friends so long immured in packing cases, and the new dainty trifles picked up in London, in spite of the fogs, for a short time they were all very busy, and perfectly happy—satisfied that the lonely half-homesick feeling had only been a passing experience.