I think it highly probable that these young people forgot from that moment that there was a girls’ school in Watcham at all, much more that the mistress had ran away from it, or that there was any occasion for moving heaven and earth, as Mr. Osborne had intended when he entered the Rectory, to get a substitute for Mrs. Brown.
L
Mr. Osborne went off and had a long walk after this little scene, and Florence retreated to her own room. Neither of them for that first hour felt at all disposed to face the looks and possible inquiries of those ridiculously composed and commonplace persons to whom nothing had happened. The presence of these people surrounding them on every side, prying at them, laughing or wondering, or making investigation into their feelings, is at once a trouble and an astonishment to the hero and heroine. On a day which is the beginning of a new life to them, to think there should be so many in the world to whom it was only the fifteenth of May. How grotesque it seems! Only a day like another to be written down quite calmly as the date of their letters, and never thought of more, just the same as the sixteenth or the twenty-second! There are so many stupidities, so much that is dull and common in this life.
And in the afternoon there was that other event, so much less important, but yet meaning much, in Lady William’s cottage. That the Rector, after spending all the morning out of doors, should have gone out again in the afternoon was a contrariety which Mr. Osborne for one could scarcely believe. When he came back in the afternoon to see his chief and to tell his tale, the curate’s face, on hearing that once more that chief was out, was a study. Astonishment, annoyance, even displeasure were written on it, as well as a subduing consciousness that Florence would laugh, which Florence did accordingly with a strong inclination partially mastered to mimic the curate to his face: an inclination which, perhaps—who can tell?—if indulged in might have been too much for that gentleman, though he was very much in love. She laughed, and explained that poor papa could not mean any offence, seeing he was quite unaware what great intimation was about to be made to him.
‘I tried to keep him,’ she said, ‘but he had business with Aunt Emily, and frowned upon me when I tried to insinuate that there might be more important business at home.’
Florence had come out to meet her curate at the gate. She put her hand within his arm as they came together across the lawn, and as she said these words she looked up into his face with so exact a representation of the Rector’s frown, and his ‘Go away, child, don’t worry me with nonsense,’ that Mr. Osborne, all grave, provoked, and half offended as he was, could not help but laugh.
‘Florry, darling,’ he said, pressing her arm to his side, ‘it is very funny—but when you are a clergyman’s wife, you know——’ Poor Florry had not had the heart to mimic anybody since that April day: but now she only laughed at the reproof: she was ready to have ‘taken off’ the Archbishop of Canterbury had His Grace come in her way.
I need scarcely say that the sight of Florry coming across the lawn with her arm within that of the curate, laughing and looking up at him, while he looked down, and shook his head, and had the air of reproving, though with a smile on his face, had the greatest effect upon the people in the drawing-room who saw that scene from the windows.
‘Emmy—Emmy!’ cried Mrs. Plowden to her daughter, who was coming in calmly with the basket of stockings to be darned—and as soon as Emmy was within reach, her mother seized her by the skirts and pulled her forward to the window. ‘What does that mean?’ cried the Rector’s wife. Mrs. Plowden’s heart had leaped up into her throat, beating almost as fast and as tumultuously as the curate’s heart had done when he stooped down in that very spot to look for the scissors. ‘Tell me, what does that mean?’ she said imperiously, while Emmy in consternation gazed out, not knowing what to say.
‘Well, mamma, you are not angry, are you?’ said Emmy, with a sympathetic jump of her heart, too.