“So kind of you to come to us in this unceremonious way. So pleased to see Miss Eyrecourt again. We quite feared Mrs Eyrecourt would have left Brighton this year before you joined her,” said Miss Cecilia Montmorris. And then old Mrs Montmorris broke in with self-congratulations that “Christy” had just arrived unexpectedly, and, what was more, had brought a friend with him, a gentleman just arrived from India. “We were quite pleased to see him, I assure you,” she continued, addressing Roma in particular, “for a new-comer always brings a little variety; and now that my boys are all away from us we seem to be falling out of fresh acquaintances sadly. Mr Montmorris and I are getting too old for any sort of gaiety,” she went on. “It is dull for Cecilia and Bessie sometimes, but they are good girls, very, and they know it won’t be always that they will have their father and me to care for. Besides, they have a little change now and then when Mrs Christian takes one of them up to town for a week or two. Bessie is going back with them next week. And you have been away up in the north, I hear, my dear? How did you like that? I used to know Cumberland in my young days.”
So she chattered on with the not unpleasing garrulity of gentle, kindly old age. She was a very sweet old lady, and Roma considered herself much more fortunate than her sister-in-law, who had been seized upon by Mrs Christian Montmorris to have poured into her sympathising ear an account of how dreadfully ill her youngest but one had been the last two days, cutting its eye-teeth. Gertrude smiled and said, “indeed,” and tried to look interested; but Roma laughed inwardly at her evident eagerness to change the conversation. Mrs Eyrecourt was not a person in whom the maternal instinct was in all directions fully developed: she loved her handsome little son as much as she could love anything; she honestly meant to do her best by Floss, but on certain points she was by no means an authority. It is, indeed, a question if both Quintin and Floss might not have passed through babyhood guiltless of cutting any teeth at all without her awaking from her happy unconsciousness of their failure in the performance of this important infantine obligation.
So poor Gertrude sat there, looking and feeling very much bored and rather indignant with Roma for the mischievous glances of pity she now and then bestowed upon her. At last, however, the door opened to admit the two gentlemen, whose late arrival had prolonged “the stupid quarter-of-an-hour,” and with, a sensation of relief Mrs Eyrecourt turned to reply to Mr Christian Montmorris’s greeting, feeling that she had had quite enough of his better-half for some time to come.
Volume One—Chapter Five.
Mutual Friends.
“Que serait la vie sans espérance? Qu’ils le disent ceux qui n’ont plus rien à espérer ici bas.”
L’Homme de Quarante Ans.
“Alas! alas! Hope is not prophecy.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting—quite against my habit, I assure you. But trains, you see, are worse than time and tide—they not only wait for no one, they very often make people wait for them,” said the lawyer, as he shook bands cordially with his mother’s guests. “And how is Master Quintin?” he inquired, turning again to Mrs Eyrecourt. “He got no cold bath this morning, I hope? I heard he was going skating with my youngsters.”
Gertrude was much more at home in skating and cricket than in babies and eye-teeth, and Quin was always a congenial subject; so seeing her released from her purgatory, Roma looked about in search of entertainment for herself. Old Mrs Montmorris was now busy talking to some one on her other side; it was the new arrival. Roma glanced up at him, he was standing besides his hostess listening attentively to her little soft, uninteresting remarks. He was quite a young man, at which Roma felt surprised; for with the curious impatience of suspense, with which a lively imagination, even on commonplace and not specially interesting details, takes precedence of knowledge, she had unconsciously pictured this friend of the lawyer’s as middle-aged, if not elderly. Her surprise made her examine him more particularly. He was not exactly what she was accustomed to consider good-looking, though tall and powerfully made without being awkward or clumsy. His hair, though dark, was distinctly brown, not black, and he somehow gave the impression of being naturally a fair-complexioned man, though at present so tanned by exposure to sun and air, that one could but guess at his normal colouring. From where she sat, Roma could not see much of his eyes: she was wondering if they were brown or blue—when a general movement, told her that dinner was announced.