“Oh, please, do not look so grave, as if you could eat me. I believe you are a little like Clare after all. Of course it is the pretty daughter: they say she is just like it; peeps from behind her leaves—I mean her mamma—and never says a word. Don’t you think all girls should do so? Now, confess, Mr. Arden. I am sure that is what you think, if you would allow yourself to speak.”
“I don’t suppose all girls should follow one rule any more than all boys,” said Edgar, with polite equivocation; and then Gussy returned to her first subject, and gave him sketches of everybody at the table. Mr. Blundell, who was stupid and good, and his wife, who was stupid and not very good; and the Honourable pair, who were close to their young historian—so close, that she had to speak half in whisper, half in metaphor. “They have both been so dreadfully taken in,” Gussy said. “She thought his elder brother was dying; and he thought she was as rich as the Queen of Sheba; whereas she has only got a little money, and poor Newmarch is better again. Hush, I can’t say any more. Yes, he is better; and they say he is going to be married, which would be dreadfully hard upon them. How wicked it is to talk like this!—but then everybody does it. You hear just the same things everywhere till you get to believe them, and are so glad of somebody fresh to tell them to. Oh yes, there is that man. If you were to listen to him for an hour, you would think there was not a good man nor a good woman in the world. He tells you how all the marriages are made up, and how she was forced into it, and he was cheated; or how they quarrelled the day before the wedding, and broke it off; or how the husband was trapped and made to marry when he did not want to. Oh, don’t you hate such men? Yet he is very amusing, especially in the country. I don’t remember his name. He is in some office or other—somebody’s secretary; but there are dozens just like him. We are going to town next week, and I shall hate the very sight of such men; but in the country he is well enough. Oh, there is mamma moving; do pick up my glove for me, please.”
Thus Gussy was swept away, leaving her companion a little uncertain as to the impression she had made upon him. It was a new world, and his head swam a little with the novelty and the giddiness. When the gentlemen gathered round the table, and began to talk in a solid agricultural way about steady-going politics, and the state of the country, and the prospects of the game, he found his head relieved a little. Clare had given him a glance as she left the room, but he had not understood the glance. It was an appeal to him not to commit himself; but Edgar had no intention of committing himself among the men as they drank their wine and got through their talk. He was far more likely to do that with Gussy, to make foolish acknowledgments, and betray the unsophistication of his mind. But he did not betray himself to Mr. Blundell and Mr. Thornleigh. They shook their heads a little, and feared he was affected by the Radical tendencies of the age. But so were many of the young fellows, the Oxford men who had distinguished themselves, the young dilettante philanthropists and revolutionists of the time. If he sinned in that way, he sinned in good company. There was Lord Newmarch, for instance, the Earl’s eldest son, and future magnate of the county, who was almost Red in his views. Edgar got on very well with the men. They said to each other, “Old Arden treated that boy very badly. It is a wonder to see how well he has turned out;” and the ladies in the drawing-room were still more charitably disposed towards the young Squire. There was thus a certain amount of social success in Edgar Arden’s first entrance into his new sphere.
CHAPTER XII.
After the dinner at Thorne there was nothing said between Edgar and Clare about that other humbler invitation which had caused the first struggle between them. She took Mr. Fielding into her confidence, but she said nothing more to her brother. As for the Rector, he was not so hard on the Pimpernels as was the young lady at the Hall. “They are common people, I allow,” he said. “They have not much refinement, nor—nor education perhaps; and I highly disapprove of that perpetual croquet-playing, which wastes all the afternoons, and puts young Denbigh off his head. I do not like it, I confess, Clare; but still, you know—if I may say exactly what I think—there are worse people than the Pimpernels.”
“I don’t suppose they steal,” said Clare.
“My dear, no doubt it is quite natural, with your education and habits—but I wish you would not be quite so contemptuous of these good people. They are really very good sort of people,” said Mr. Fielding, shaking his head. She looked very obdurate in her severe young beauty as the Rector looked at her, bending his brows till his eyes almost disappeared among the wrinkles. “They find us places for our boys and girls in a way I have never been able to manage before; and whenever there is any bad case in the parish——”
“Mr. Fielding, that is our business,” said Clare, almost sharply. “I don’t understand how you can talk of our people to anybody but Edgar or me.”
“I don’t mean the people here,” said Mr. Fielding meekly, “but at the other end of the parish. You know that new village, which is not even on Arden land—on that corner which belongs to old Stirzaker—where there are so many Irish? I don’t like to trouble you always about these kind of people. And when I have wanted anything——”
“Please don’t want anything from them again,” said Clare. “I don’t like it. What is the good of our being lords of the manor if we do not look after our own people? Mr. Fielding, you know I think a great deal of our family. You often blame me for it; but I should despise myself if I did not think of our duties as well. All that is our business. Please—please don’t ask anything of those Pimpernels again!”