On these occasions the two younger sisters always found it impossible to give an answer without an appeal to their senior, and Mr Littlewood waited with exemplary patience while Eira made some excuse for penetrating into her father’s sanctum, and there conveying by means of some “family masonic” sign a hint to Frances that she was wanted.
Things fitted themselves in marvellously well and apparently without effort. The three elders of the two groups scarcely realised how much the young people were together. Horace’s utmost tact was employed to propitiate Mr Morion in various ways. Now and then he made a special call upon him, during which the ladies of the family were not alluded to, or he would ask his advice on some matter on which the elder man’s opinion was really worth having, as he himself knew. And, if her husband was content, Lady Emma, who had thoroughly learnt the lesson, not perhaps uncongenial to her temperament, of letting well alone, was not likely to make or notice rocks ahead of any description.
But there remained Mrs Littlewood, as a matter of fact the most acute and the most powerful of those concerned. She knew much more than the parents of her young neighbours, whose worldly experience through disuse had grown rusty, the possible complications that this familiar daily intercourse might initiate. But it was a rule of life with her to refrain from acting till she was pretty sure of being able to do so effectually. She contented herself negatively with reflections that “Horace knew what he was about”—“All young men were the same”—“Conrad,” naturally far more inflammable than his younger brother, “could not have done better for himself than he had done, and even Madeleine—well, Madeleine might be Quixotic and romantic in certain ways”—for Mrs Littlewood gauged the impulsive side of her daughter’s character more accurately than that daughter suspected—“but au fond she had her brother’s real interest at heart.” And, positively, Mrs Littlewood now and then exerted herself to bring a fresh element into the group. It was she who suggested Horace’s inviting his old friend, Mark Brandon, to give them a day or two on his way south from Scotland; though as far as Madeleine was concerned such a visit could result in nothing, Sir Mark Brandon not being in the very least to her taste. It was also by a hint from Mrs Littlewood as to the kindliness of such an attention that the curate-in-charge at Craig Bay was more than once invited to join their expeditions, and on the one or two occasions when Frances or her sisters were at luncheon at the big house, to make one of the party.
“For that now,” said Mrs Littlewood to herself, with the comfortable ignoring of ways and means below a certain level, peculiar to the rich, “is the sort of marriage that a sensible girl like Frances Morion should make. She would have nothing new to face considering her present life.”
But curates-in-charge, like more important people, may be led with facility to the water’s edge, and arrived there refuse all attempt to drink thereof. Mr Darnley had eyes and ears for no one except Miss Littlewood, whose growing concern as to Scaling Harbour and the grave questions of what could be done for it made her always ready to respond to the young man’s gratification in her interest in his work.
There came a day on which some self-invited guests for a couple of nights at Craig-Morion opened the way, naturally enough, to asking Mr Morion, his wife and eldest daughter to join the party there at dinner in a quite unceremonious way.
It was Horace who undertook the negotiation, for his mother hesitated not a little as to the propriety of such a step.
“The poorer people are, the prouder they are, of course,” she reminded him, “and, old-fashioned as Lady Emma is in her ideas, I should greatly dread offending her.”
“Put it upon your own health, my dear mother, and make a favour of it—a great favour of it on their side. Say how kind it would be of them to help us to entertain the Charlemonts coming to us so unexpectedly, or something of that kind. No one is cleverer than you, mother, at saying the right thing. And I’ll take the note this afternoon and see what I can do.”
“After all,” said Mrs Littlewood quietly, “we are not at all obliged to have them, and it does not matter whether they come or not except—”