“He had called him ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ in the afternoon; that is always a very bad sign. Nothing makes Rupert wince so much as being called ‘Rupert of the Rhine.’”
Mrs. Darcy’s neck turns a little aside, so as partially to avert a face on which a scarcely sketched smile that has not much real amusement in it is dimly visible.
“But things turned out better than I expected,” pursues the girl, with a lilt of recovering spirits in her not very low but yet agreeable voice. “The dear old fellow put great constraint upon himself, and was quite civil to—us”—with a small challenging smile, as she lays an obstinate emphasis upon the plural pronoun—“and ‘we’ tried our best not to be offensive, and even asked one or two quite sporting questions, and did not make any very egregious mistakes.”
The end of her sentence is half drowned in the ringing of a very loud one-o’clock bell. The Rectory lunches half an hour earlier than the Place.
“I must be off!” cries the visitor, starting up; “and I have never got my eggs, after all. Ah, here are the children!”
As she speaks, a burst, rather than opened, door announces the entry of three young creatures between the ages of eight and fourteen, in whose faces and persons dirt and good looks strive in amicable emulation for the mastery.
“Miss Brine had to go off again to her sick sister this morning,” says the mother, in placid explanation. “I do not believe that any one ever had a governess with so many and such diseased relatives as I,” she laughs; but her amusement is not echoed by her husband, who, correct and glossy, at the moment enters the room from his study. On the contrary, he regards with a fidgety distress the vestures which some unknown quest has dyed in mud; not even sparing the rosy countenances above them. He testily orders off his son and daughters at once to change their clothes.
Six protesting eyes turn to the mother, “Need we? It is quite dry,” exhibiting their caked stockings, petticoats, and trousers.
“You might try what a brush will do,” replies she indifferently, overriding the paternal fiat.
The compromise is joyfully accepted, and the children drag off Lavinia with them, partly to aid in their purification, but chiefly to display to her the evidence of that patriotism which the joyful tidings of yesterday have called forth. For though averse from soap and water, the Misses and Master Darcy are avid of military glory, and the walls of the schoolroom, cheerful in its large shabbiness, are thick with South African heroes. Each child possesses and displays on the wall photographs of every general of any distinction; but as there are wide and envenomed differences of estimate as to the respective places occupied by those warriors in the hierarchy of fame, each has his or her special favourite enshrined in a showy frame, the centre of a circle of lesser lights, and the theme of many a wordy battle. To a stranger not acquainted with the fact that to a cult of glory the Darcy family add a taste for breeding poultry, and combine the two by naming their favourites of the farmyard after those of the battle-field, irrespective of differences of sex, it would be somewhat startling to hear that Colonel Baden-Powell has just begun to lay, and that General French is “such a good sitter that he can cover more eggs than any of the others.” But Miss Carew, since the inception of the campaign, had heard too many eye-opening facts in natural history of the kind adduced to turn a hair, and having admired the laurel wreaths beneath which disappears Lord Roberts, who alone of all his officers is allowed to keep his manhood, and is godfather to the Andalusian cock, she departs.