“I think that to our other treats we shall have to add that of educating her.”
“Oh, I would not bother about that!” replied he, departing from his golden rule of never offering advice to that consort, who had had so much longer a time to learn wisdom in than had been his portion. “I would not bother about that. Let her ride through life upon her broom, if it amuses her.”
“That may be your happy-go-lucky way,” replied she, crisply, “but it is not mine.”
Happy-go-lucky! He repeated the epithet over to himself several times, in the dogcart, as he sent his horse along the flat old coach road, liberal of margin, to Swinston station; while the idle question put itself to his intelligence, whether a compound word, of which neither of the component parts was true, could be true as a whole? Happy-go-lucky. He was neither “happy” nor “lucky.” Could he, therefore, be truly said to be happy-go-lucky?
There was another traveller on the same line of railway, in the afternoon of that day, who made the hour’s journey from Paddington in a train that preceded the express which brought Mr. Tancred back from the City, and whose reflections, despite the lark-quality with which she was credited, were not much more rosy-tinted than his own.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, as her great eyes, that were no longer under any compulsion to look grateful, or affectionate, or docile, in the matchless freedom of an empty railway-carriage, followed the yellow-brick squalors of the sliding slums. “I wonder how long it will be before Edward puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a bad berth! What asses most men are! and all what brutes! No, not all! Old Tom is not a brute! How kind he was on the day of the funeral during that horrible drive to Kensal Green! But what an ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington before you! God bless you, dear!’”
She chuckled a little, and the lark—a very sophisticated town lark—began to re-awake in her.
Presently, having the carriage to herself, she left her seat and flitted to the opposite window, then back again, standing up to command the landscape better. Not that she had any taste for landscape, an appreciation of the beauties of Nature being as much a matter of education as spelling or ciphering, and possessed as little by the peasant as the dog. She knew that Italy or Switzerland expect to be admired; but that the tame, Alpless, templeless Berkshire, through which the G.W.R. was carrying her, could command any approbation would never have occurred to her, even though November seemed reluctant yet to tear from the pleasant countryside its red and sombre garment of autumn.
But though gifted with no love of the picturesque, Miss Ransome was endowed with plenty of alert curiosity, which grew sharper as the little diamond-set watch at her wrist told her that she must be nearing her destined station, and caused her to scan with a keener interest the “country seats”—in advertisement phrase—which here and there were indicated by a lodge visible from the line, or a gable peeping through red woods. She had not been informed as to the distance from Swinston to Stillington Manor. Any one of those half or quarter revealed houses might therefore prove to be her future home. If not, it might prove to be the home of a neighbour and acquaintance. Any one of those neighbours might possess an eldest son.
“Marriage is the only possible outlet for me,” she said to herself, relapsing into gloom, as her eye rested appraisingly upon the brand-new machicolations of a pretentious mansion on a low hillside. “It is an odious one, yet there is no other; but whatever old Felicity may say, I will not have more than two children. If I have not a very good settlement, I will have none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched little adventurer like myself?”