“I will ask Mrs Carteret about it,” she said.
“And then the two years’ schooling for her. Where is that to come from?” he asked.
“Ah! that is the question. Well, Basil, I love our independence as much as you do, but with this prospect of steady and remunerative employment for her, I think we should swallow our false pride,—it surely would be false pride in such a case,—and ask Lady Mildred to help us. It would not be asking much, or burdening her for long.”
“I will think it over,” Mr Meredon replied, “and you perhaps had better sound Mrs Carteret, and, if you like, Mr Fade also.”
Perhaps Mrs Meredon had already done so. Be that as it may, the results were satisfactory. And a few days later the letter on which hung so many hopes was written by his wife to Mr Meredon’s dictation.
“And now,” she said wisely, “we have done what we could. Let us try in the mean time to put the matter off our minds.”
Their patience, however, was not so taxed as often happens in such cases. Nor was the answer what they had expected. How seldom, how strangely seldom are expectations realised! If ever in the long run things turn out as we have anticipated, the details of their fulfilment are so curiously unlike what we had pictured that we scarcely recognise them. Mrs Meredon and Claudia, the blind father too probably, had lain awake many an hour reading in imagination Lady Mildred’s reply. Would it be curt and cold, at once negativing all hopes, or condescendingly benevolent, or simply kind and kinswomanlike? The last, after so many years, and after too her expressed disapproval of her nephew’s marriage, was scarcely to be hoped for. It was none of all these, for in the shape of a letter her answer never came at all.
But one late August afternoon, about a month before the rainy Saturday when Charlotte and Gervais Waldron sat discussing the expected “new girl” at Miss Lloyd’s, the nameless heiress of Silverthorns, the old fly from Welby, the Britton-Garnett railway station, turned in at the Rectory gate and slowly crawled up the drive, already slushy with early autumn rains and want of rolling,—for carriage wheels were rare at the Meredons’—and in answer to the scared little maid’s information that “missus was at home,” a tall, upright old lady in deep mourning descended, and was ushered into the drawing-room. It was empty. She had time to look about her—to note the shabby furniture, the scrupulous care with which the carpet, faded though it was, was covered to protect it from the sun, the darned curtains looped up so as to show to the best advantage, the one real ornament of the room, a lovely nosegay of roses, freshly cut and fragrant, placed so as to make a bright spot where most wanted.
“Yes,” she decided, “there has been no exaggeration. They are very poor, but they are not degraded by it. They have kept up their self-respect.”
But she was scarcely prepared for the vision that met her eyes when, an instant later, the door opening made her turn round.