Mr. Mountford’s countenance relaxed while this description was made—an almost imperceptible softening crept about the corners of his mouth. He seemed to feel the arms of the little puss creeping round his neck, and her pretty little rosebud face close to his own. But he shook off the fascination abruptly, and frowned to make his wife think him insensible to it. ‘I hope I am not such a weak fool,’ he said. ‘And there is not much chance that Anne would try that way,’ he added, with some bitterness. Rose was supposed to be his favourite child, but yet he resented the fact that no such confession of his absolute authority and homage to his power was to be looked for from Anne. Mrs. Mountford had no deliberate intention of presenting his eldest daughter to him under an unfavourable light, but if she wished him to perceive the superior dutifulness and sweetness of her own child, could anyone wonder? Rose had been hardly used by Nature. She ought to have been a boy and the heir of entail, or, if not so, she ought to have had a brother to take that position, and protect her interests; and neither of these things had happened. That her father should love her best and do all in his will that it was possible to do for her, was clearly Rose’s right as compensation for the other injustices of fate.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Mountford, after a longer piece of mental arithmetic than usual, ‘that is not Anne’s way; but still you must do Anne justice, St. John. She will never believe, any more than Rose, that you will go against her. I don’t say this from anything she has said to me. Indeed, I cannot say that she has spoken to me at all on the subject. It was I that introduced it; I thought it my duty.’
‘And she gave you to understand that she would go on with it, whatever I might say; and that, like an old fool, if she stuck to it, I would give in at the end?’
‘St. John! St. John! how you do run away with an idea! I never said that, nor anything like it. I told you what, judging from what I know of girls, I felt sure Anne must feel. They never dream of any serious opposition: as we have given in to them from their childhood, they think we will continue to give in to them to the end; and I am sure it is quite reasonable to think so; only recollect how often we have yielded, and done whatever they pleased.’
‘This time she will find that I will not yield,’ said Mr. Mountford, getting up angrily, and planting himself in front of the polished fireplace, which was innocent of any warmth. He set himself very firmly upon his feet, which were wide apart, and put his hands under his coat tails in the proverbial attitude of an Englishman. To see him standing there you would have thought him a man who never would yield; and yet he had, as his wife said, yielded to a great many vagaries of the girls. She gave various curious little glances of investigation at him from over her wools.
‘I should like to know,’ she said, ‘why you object so much to Mr. Douglas? he seems a very gentlemanly young man. Do you know something more of him than we know?’
‘Nobody,’ said Mr. Mountford, with solemnity, ‘knows any more of the young man than we know.’
‘Then why should you be so determined against him?’ persisted his wife.
Mr. Mountford fixed his eyes severely upon her. ‘Letitia,’ he said, ‘there is one thing, above all others, that I object to in a man; it is when nobody knows anything about him. You will not deny that I have had some experience in life; some experience you must grant me, whatever my deficiencies may be; and the result of all I have observed is that a man whom nobody knows is not a person to connect yourself with. If he is a member of a well-known family—like our own, for instance—there are his people to answer for him. If, on the other hand, he has made himself of consequence in the world, that may answer the same purpose. But when a man is nobody, you have nothing to trust to; he may be a very good sort of person; there may be no harm in him; but the chances are against him. At all times the chances are heavily against a man whom nobody knows.’
Mr. Mountford was not disinclined to lay down the law, but he seldom did it on an abstract question; and his wife looked at him, murmuring ‘one, two, three’ with her lips, while her eyes expressed a certain mild surprise. The feeling, however, was scarcely so strong as surprise; it was rather with a sensation of unexpectedness that she listened. Surely nobody had a better right to his opinion: but she did not look for a general dogma when she had asked a particular question. ‘But,’ she said, ‘papa! he was known very well, I suppose, or they would not have had him there—to the Ashleys, at least.’