The spring—or is it the spring?—has been playing its genial game with Mrs. Prince, too, as is evident by the restored importance of her gait, as she sweeps out of the orchid-house, whither Lavinia has pursued her, and by the smoothed and satisfied visage—changed, indeed, from that which she had worn two months ago in announcing her daughter’s mysterious correspondence with the Cavalry Officer Commanding at Canterbury—which she turns towards her visitor.
“Did you walk,” she asks, “this warm day? Sir George wanted the horses, I suppose? It must be awkward having only one pair. If I had known, I should have been so delighted to send for you!”
There is sincere welcome in words and voice, coupled with that touch of patronage which—as employed towards a member of the oldest and somewhile most important family of the countryside, Mrs. Prince and Lavinia have—before the former’s parental woes had made both forget it—found respectively so agreeable and so galling.
“Thanks, but I like walking.”
“Féo will be here in a minute. I told them to let her know the moment you arrived. She is with her patients! She is never anywhere else now! Thrown up all her engagements; devotes herself wholly to them.”
It is clear that, in pre-Candle days, Mrs. Prince had said “’olly;” but the victory over the early infirmity is so complete as to be marked only by an intensity of aspirate unknown to those whose h’s have grown up with them.
“It is certainly the most unobjectionable craze she has ever had!” replies Lavinia, whose withers are still slightly wrung by the allusion to her horselessness; and who is reflecting how much less under-bred a thing adversity is than prosperity.
“When I say ‘patients,’” pursues Mrs. Prince, not in the least offended by, in fact, not hearing, Miss Carew’s observation, “I ought to put it in the singular; for I must own she does not take much notice of poor Smethurst”—pausing to laugh; then, proceeding in a tone of wondering admiration, “Isn’t it astonishing what they do in the way of surgery now? Nurse Blandy tells me that they are going—the doctors, I mean—to make him a new end to his nose, and turn his lip inside out, and I don’t know what all!”
“Poor creature! How terrible!”—shuddering.
“As for the other one, Binning, there is nothing good enough for him! At first she was all for nursing him entirely herself, not letting Nurse Blandy, no, nor Nurse Rice either, go near him; but there her father put his foot down!—you know Mr. Prince does put his foot down now and then—and he said to her, ‘No, Féo, my child, you may turn my house into a shambles’—we thought then there would have to be an operation—‘and a drug store, but I will not have my daughter lay herself open to a prosecution for manslaughter; and that is what it would come to—for as sure as ever you nurse him, he’ll die!”