“Not like you, certainly,” said light-hearted Edgar. “I rather liked to see you, do you know, beside them; you looked like a young queen.”
Clare was pleased, though she did not care to confess it. “It does not require much to make one look like a queen beside that good, fat Mrs. Pimpernel,” she said, with more charity than she had ever before felt towards her recent visitors. “If you are not very late, Edgar, perhaps I shall see you when you come home.”
And she watched him as he drove his dogcart down the avenue with a less anxious mind. “He is not like an Arden,” she said to herself; “but yet one could not but remark him wherever he went. He has so much heart and spirit about him; and I think he is clever. He knows a great deal more than most people, though that does not matter much. But still I think perhaps he would not be so easily carried away after all.”
Edgar, for his part, went away in very good spirits. He liked the rapid sense of motion, the light vehicle, the fine horse, the swiftness which was almost flight. He rather liked making a dive out of the formal world which had absorbed him, into another hemisphere; and he even liked, which would have vexed Clare had she known it, to be alone. He would not suffer himself to think so, for it seemed ungrateful, unbrotherly, unkind; but still a man cannot get over all the habits of his life in three weeks, and it was a pleasure to him to be alone. He seemed to have thrown off the burden of his responsibilities as he swept through the village and along the rural road to the Red House. He expected to be amused, and he was pleased that in his amusement he would be subject to no criticism. Criticism is very uncomfortable, especially when it comes from your nearest and dearest. To feel in your freest moments that an eye is upon you, that your proceedings are subject to lively comment, is always trying. And Edgar had not been used to it. Thanks to the sweetest temper in the world, he took it very well on the whole. But this night he certainly did feel the happier that he was free. The Pimpernels greeted him with a cordiality that was almost overpowering. The father shook both his hands, the mother pounced upon him and introduced him to a dozen people in a moment, and as for poor Alice, she blushed, and smiled, and buttoned her gloves, which was her usual occupation. When the business of the introduction was over Edgar fell back out of the principal place, and took a passing note of the guests. A dozen names had been said to him, but not one had he made out, except that of Lord Newmarch, who was a tall, spare young man in spectacles, with a thin intellectual face. There were two men of Mr Pimpernel’s stamp, with vast white waistcoats, and heads slightly bald—men very well known upon ’Change, and holding the best of reputations in Liverpool—with two wives, who were ample and benign, like the mistress of the house; and there were two or three men in a corner, with Oxford written all over them, curiously looking out through spectacles, or as it were out of mists, at the other part of the company. Lord Newmarch did not attach himself to either of these parties. It was not very long indeed since he had been an Oxford man himself, but he was now a politician, and had emerged from the academical state.
There was one other among the guests who attracted Edgar’s attention, he could not tell why—a tall man about ten years older than himself, with black hair, just touched in some places with grey, and deep-set dark-blue eyes, which shone like a bit of frosty sky out of his dark bearded face. The face was familiar to him, though he felt sure he had never seen this individual man before; and though he kept himself in the background there was an air about him which Edgar recognised by instinct. Among the old merchants and the young Dons—men limited on one hand within a very material universe, and on the other by the still straiter limitations of a purely intellectual sphere—this man looked, what he was, a man of the world. Edgar came to this conclusion instinctively, feeling himself drawn by an interest which was only half sympathy to the only individual in the party who deserved that name. Chance or Mrs. Pimpernel arranged it so that this man was placed at the opposite end of the table at dinner, quite out of Edgar’s reach. Mr. Arden of Arden had to conduct one of the most important ladies present to dinner, and was within reach of Mrs. Pimpernel with Alice on his other hand; but the stranger who interested him was at the foot of the table, being evidently a person of no importance. It was only Edgar’s second English party, and certainly at this moment it was not nearly so pleasant as the dinner at Thorne, with pretty Gussy telling him everything. Mrs. Buxton, who sat between him and Lord Newmarch, was too anxious to attend to her noble neighbour’s conversation to give very much attention to Edgar. Now and then she turned to him indeed, and was very affable; but her subject was still Newmarch, and they were too near to that personage to make the discussion agreeable. “You should hear Lord Newmarch on the education question,” the lady said; “his ideas are so clear, and then they are so charmingly expressed. I consider his style admirable. You don’t know it? How very strange, Mr. Arden! He contributes a good deal to the Edinburgh. I thought of course you must have been acquainted with his works.”
“I never read any of them,” said Edgar; and I trust I never shall, he felt he should have liked to have said; but he only added instead, “I have spent all my time wandering to and fro over the face of the earth, which leaves one in the depths of ignorance of everything one ought to know.”
“Oh, do you think so?” said Mrs. Buxton. “For my part, I think there is nothing like travelling for expanding the mind. Lord Newmarch published a charming book of travels last year—From Turnstall to Teneriffe. Turnstall is one of his family places, you know. It made quite a commotion in the literary world. I do think he is one of the most rising young men of the age.”
“Do you admire Lord Newmarch very much?” Edgar whispered to Alice, who was eating her fish very sedately by his side. Poor Alice grew very red, and gave a little choking cough, and put down her fork, and cleared her throat. She looked as if she had been caught doing something which was very improper, and dropped her fork as if it burned her. And it was a moment before she could speak. “Oh yes, Mr. Arden,” was the reply she made, giving a shy glance at him, and then looking down upon her plate.
“But don’t you think he looks a little too much as if the fate of the country rested on his head?” said Edgar, valiantly trying again. “Tell me, please, is he a bore?”
“Oh no, Mr. Arden!” said Alice, and she looked at her plate again. “Does she want to finish her fish, I wonder?” Edgar asked himself; and then he turned to Mrs. Buxton, to leave his younger companion at liberty. But Mrs. Buxton had tackled Lord Newmarch, and they were discussing the question of compulsory education, with much authoritative condescension on the gentleman’s part, and eager interest on the lady’s. Edgar was not uninterested in such questions, but he had come to the Red House with a light-hearted intention of amusing himself, and he sighed for Gussy Thornleigh and her gossip, or anything that should be pleasant and nonsensical. Alice had returned to her fish, not that she cared for the fish, but because it was the only thing for her to do. If Edgar had but known it, she was quite disposed to go on saying, “Oh yes, Mr. Arden,” and “Oh no, Mr. Arden,” all the time of dinner, without caring in the least for the entrees, or even for the jellies and creams and other dainties with which the banquet wound up. But then he did not know that, and could not but imagine that her fish was what she liked best.