At last Mrs. Mountford felt that she could stay no longer. She rose up from her chair, and gathered her wools in one arm. ‘The girls will be coming in from their ride,’ she said. ‘I must really go.’
The girls had all the machinery of life at Mount in their hands; in other houses it is ‘the boys’ that are put forward as influencing everything. The engagements and occupations of the young people map out the day, and give it diversity, though the elder ones move the springs of all that is most important. It was generally when ‘the girls’ were busy in some special matter of their own that Mrs. Mountford came to ‘sit with’ her husband in the library, and furnished him with so much information. But their positions had been changed to-day. It was he who had been her informant, telling her about things more essential to be known than any of her gossip about Anne’s intentions or Rose’s habits. She lingered even as she walked across the floor, and dropped her little plaited sheaf of many colours and stooped to pick it up, inviting further confidence. But her husband did not respond. He let her go without taking any notice of her proceedings or asking any question as to her unusual reluctance to leave him. At last, when she had fairly turned her back upon him, and had her hand upon the handle of the door, his voice startled her, and made her turn round with anxious expectation.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I forgot to tell you: I have a letter to-day from Heathcote Mountford, offering a visit. I suppose he wants to spy out the nakedness of the land.’
‘Heathcote Mountford!’ cried his wife, bewildered; then added, after a little interval, ‘I am sure he is quite welcome to come when he pleases—he or anyone. There is no nakedness in the land that we need fear.’
‘He is coming next week,’ said Mr. Mountford. ‘Of course, as you perceive, I could not refuse.’
Mrs. Mountford paused at the door, with a great deal of visible interest and excitement. It was no small relief to her to find a legitimate reason for it. ‘Of course you could not refuse: why should you refuse? I shall be very glad to see him; and’—she added, after a momentary pause, which gave the words significance, ‘so will the girls.’
‘I wish I could think so; the man is forty,’ Mr. Mountford said. Then he gave a little wave of his hand, dismissing his wife. Even the idea of a visit from his heir did not excite him. He was not even conscious, for the moment, of the hostile feeling with which men are supposed to regard their heirs in general, and which, if legitimate in any case, is certainly so in respect to an heir of entail. It is true that he had looked upon Heathcote Mountford with a mild hatred all his life as his natural enemy; but at the present crisis the head of the house regarded his successor with a kind of derisive complacency, as feeling that he himself was triumphantly ‘keeping the fellow out of it.’ He had never been so certain of living long, of cheating all who looked for his death, as he was after he had made use of that instrument of terrorism against his daughter. Heathcote Mountford had not been at Mount for nearly twenty years. It pleased his kinsman that he should offer to come now, just to be tantalised, to have it proved to him that his inheritance of the family honours was a long way off, and very problematical in any sense. ‘A poor sort of fellow; always ailing, always delicate; my life is worth two of his,’ he was saying, with extreme satisfaction, in his heart.
CHAPTER XI.
PROJECTS OF MARRIAGE.
The girls had just come in from their ride; they were in the hall awaiting that cup of tea which is the universal restorative, when Mrs. Mountford with her little sheaf of wools went to join them. They heard her come softly along the passage which traversed the house, from the library, in quite the other end of it, to the hall,—a slight shuffle in one foot making her step recognisable. Rose was very clear-sighted in small matters, and it was she who had remarked that, after having taken her work to the library ‘to sit with papa,’ her mother had generally a much greater acquaintance with all that was about to happen on the estate or in the family affairs. She held up her finger to Anne as the step was heard approaching. ‘Now we shall hear the last particulars,’ Rose said; ‘what is going to be done with us all, and if we are to go to Brighton, and all that is to happen.’ Anne was much less curious on these points. Whether the family went to Brighton or not mattered little to her. She took off her hat, and smoothed back her hair from her forehead. It was October by this time, and no longer warm; but the sun was shining, and the afternoon more like summer than autumn. Old Saymore had brought in the tray with the tea. There was something on his very lips to say, but he did not desire the presence of his mistress, which checked his confidences with the young ladies. Anne, though supposed generally to be proud, was known by the servants to be very gentle of access, and ready to listen to anything that concerned them. And as for Rose, old Saymore—who had, so to speak, seen her born—did not feel himself restrained by the presence of Rose. ‘I had something to ask Miss Anne,’ he said, in a kind of undertone, as if making a remark to himself.
‘What is it, Saymore?’