‘Oh yes, I shall help him,’ said Jim in a magisterial way, ‘fast enough. He isn’t a bad sort of fellow when you know him. I said I’d go down with him when the fellows were at home in the evening whenever he liked. Of course, as he said, I know them all; half of them I’ve licked or they’ve licked me. He has sense to see the advantage of that, and, of course, now he’s asked me I’ll do whatever I can for him; and see if I don’t have them up to hear all the tootle-te-tooting and you girls singing and all the rest.’
‘If your father approves, Jim,’ said Mrs. Plowden. ‘We cannot make quite sure that your father approves.’
‘Oh, papa will approve,’ cried Emmy. ‘I am sure he really knows how much good there is in Mr. Osborne. He only does not like his little—— Well, I don’t like to call it conceit.’
‘Excellent opinion of himself; but that’s so common with young men,’ said the Hector’s wife.
And Florence—Florence who was the lively one, who on any ordinary occasion would have been in the heat of the discussion, talking now in the tones of Mr. Osborne, now like old Mrs. Lloyd, now like all the ‘fellows’ at Riverside—Florence said nothing at all! That is, nothing to speak of—nothing for her. She kept her face away from the light, and threw in a monosyllable now and then; and when Mr. Osborne’s conceit was spoken of, threw up her head with an indignation which happily nobody perceived. To think they should discuss him so, who was doing all this, giving up his pride in his superior management, for their sake—appealing to Jim! It seemed to Florry that the force of noble self-abnegation could not further go.
XXXVII
The Rector, when he came home upon that day, when Jim’s alliance with Mr. Osborne began, did not show any such pleasure in the circumstances as his wife expected. He mumbled and coughed, and with a lowering brow said that anything was an excuse that kept the boy from his work, and that if Jim picked up Osborne’s fads in addition to his own faults they would make a pretty hash of it altogether. Mrs. Plowden, however, made the less of this that the Rector was evidently in but an indifferent state of temper and spirits generally. ‘He has been put out about something,’ his interpreter said to the girls; ‘something has gone wrong with him in town; he has not got his business done as he wished.’ But what that business was, his wife was obliged to allow that she did not know. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ she said, ‘that it’s something about your uncle Reginald. What else could Emily have come over in such hot haste about? And then your father going up to town in this wild way without giving any reason. I can’t imagine what can be the cause unless it was something about Reginald. They are dreadful for sticking to each other, the Plowdens; they would think, perhaps, that I would make a remark, and I am sure that there are plenty of remarks I might make, for if ever there was a man who was utterly unbearable in a house it was Reginald Plowden, and nothing in the world would make me consent to have him here again, nothing! Your father has had something on his mind for some time back. Don’t you remember he burst in one day as if he were full of something to tell us, and then stopped short all at once?’
‘But that looked as if it was good news, mamma. He had met Mr. Swinford and he was just going to tell us.’
‘What good news could come to us through Leo Swinford?’ cried Mrs. Plowden scornfully: which was to poor Emmy as if somebody had given her a blow in the face. She fell back quite suddenly behind her sister, and attempted no reply.
‘It did look at first as if it was something good,’ Mrs. Plowden allowed; ‘but when I tried to draw it out of him he only got into a fuss you know, as he does so often, and told me I’d hear it all in good time. I am sure ever since he has had something on his mind; and when he came back from town last night he could have torn us all in pieces. If it is not about Reginald I am sure I can’t imagine what it can be.’