Lady Scudamore smiled, for she was thinking of her son, who would have jumped over any furze-bush there—and the fir-trees too, according to her conviction; Dolly also showed her very beautiful teeth; but Faith looked at him gratefully.
“It is very kind of you, Lord Dashville, to say the best of us that you can find to say. But I fear that you are laughing to yourself. You know how well they mean; but you think they cannot do much.”
“No, that is not what I think at all. So far as I can judge, which is not much, I believe that they would be of the greatest service, if the Country should unfortunately need them. Man for man, they are as brave as trained troops, and many of them can shoot better. I don't mean to say that they are fit to meet a French army in the open; but for acting on their flanks, or rear, or in a wooded country—However, I have no right to venture an opinion, having never seen active service.”
Miss Darling looked at him with some surprise, and much approval of his modesty. So strongly did most of the young officers who came to her father's house lay down the law, and criticise even Napoleon's tactics.
“How beautiful Springhaven must be looking now!” he said, after Dolly had offered her opinion, which she seldom long withheld. “The cottages must be quite covered with roses, whenever they are not too near the sea; and the trees at their best, full of leaves and blossoms, by the side of the brook that feeds them. All the rest of the coast is so hard and barren, and covered with chalk instead of grass, and the shore so straight and staring. But I have never been there at this time of year. How much you must enjoy it! Surely we ought to be able to see it, from this high ground somewhere.”
“Yes, if you will ride to that shattered tree,” said Faith, “you will have a very fine view of all the valley. You can see round the corner of Foxhill there, which shuts out most of it just here. I think you have met our Captain Stubbard.”
“Ah, I must not go now; I may be wanted at any moment”—Lord Dashville had very fine taste, but it was not the inanimate beauties of Springhaven that he cared a dash for—“and I fear that I could never see the roses there. I think there is nothing in all nature to compare with a rose—except one thing.”
Faith had a lovely moss-rose in her hat—a rose just peeping through its lattice at mankind, before it should open and blush at them—and she knew what it was that he admired more than the sweetest rose that ever gemmed itself with dew. Lord Dashville had loved her, as she was frightened to remember, for more than a year, because he could not help it, being a young man of great common-sense, as well as fine taste, and some knowledge of the world. “He knows to which side his bread will be buttered,” Mr. Swipes had remarked, as a keen observer. “If 'a can only get Miss Faith, his bread 'll be buttered to both sides for life—his self to one side, and her to do the tother. The same as I told Mother Cloam—a man that knoweth his duty to head gardeners, as his noble lordship doth, the same know the differ atwixt Miss Faith—as fine a young 'ooman as ever looked into a pink—and that blow-away froth of a thing, Miss Dolly.”
This fine young woman, to use the words of Mr. Swipes, coloured softly, at his noble lordship's gaze, to the tint of the rose-bud in her hat; and then spoke coldly to countervail her blush.
“There is evidently something to be done directly. All the people are moving towards the middle of the down. We must not be so selfish as to keep you here, Lord Dashville.”