After dinner they waited with ill-restrained impatience the hour of the train. He had rarely made himself so offensive; he went on about the doctor, who would probably be their fate as they got near forty, with inexhaustible enjoyment, and elicited from their mother that little remonstrating laugh, which they forgave her for pity, saying to each other, “Poor mamma!” Decidedly it is much better when daughters, and sons too, for that matter, are brought up in their father’s sphere. He went away in great good humour, refusing Fred’s offer to drive him to the station.
“None of your dog-carts for me,” he said: “I’ve ordered the brougham. Good-bye girls; take care of yourselves, and try to rummage out something superior to that doctor. And, Fred, you’d better think better of it, my fine fellow, or, if you won’t be warned, do as you like, and be hanged to you. Good-bye, old lady; I expect to hear you’ve got screwed up with rheumatism in this damp old den here.”
“And when will you come back, George? They say the weather is fine up to November. I hope you’ll soon come back.”
“Not for some time—unless I should have worse luck,” said the rich man. He was at the door when he said this, his wife accompanying him, while Fred stood outside with his hair blown about his eyes, at the door of the brougham. The girls, standing behind, saw it all like a picture. Their father, still with his white waistcoat showing under his overcoat, his heavy chain glittering, and the beam and the roll of triumphant money in his eye and his gait—“Not soon, unless I have worse luck,” and he paused a moment and gave a comprehensive look around him with sudden gravity, as he spoke.
Then there was a laugh, a good-bye—and the carriage rolled away, and they all stood for a moment looking out into the blackness of the night.
“What does he mean by worse luck?” they said to their mother as she came in from the door.
“He means nothing; it is just his fun. He’s got the grandest operations in hand he has ever had. What a father you have got, girls! and to think he lets you do whatever you please, and keeps you rolling in wealth all the same!”
CHAPTER XI.
The day of the party at Allonby had been a day of pleasure to Effie, but of pleasure she was half afraid of and only half understood. The atmosphere about her had been touched by something beyond her experience,—softened, brightened, glorified, she could not tell how. She did not understand it, and yet she did understand it, and this soft conflict between knowing and not knowing increased its magical effect. She was surrounded by that atmosphere of admiration, of adoration, which is the first romantic aspect of a love-making. Everything in her and about her was so beautiful and lovely in the eyes of her young and undeclared lover, that somehow in spite of herself this atmosphere got into her own eyes and affected her conception of herself. It was all an effect of fancy, unreal, not meaning, even to Fred Dirom, what it had seemed to mean.
When love came to its perfection, when he had told it, and made sure of a return (if he was to have a return), then Fred too, or any, the most romantic of lovers, would so far return to common earth as to become aware that it was a woman and not a poetical angel whom he was about to marry.