Polly’s real name was Mariana, but, as everyone in the county said, Polly seemed more appropriate. Sir Giles Overshott had no other child, and sometimes seemed not to regret this limitation of his family circle. Lady Overshott had been dead some five years when the story opens, and Sir Giles was beginning to speak of himself as a widower, which to experienced ears means much.
The estate of Overshott Foxbrush was a fine one, unencumbered, and yielding a handsome rent-roll. It was understood that Polly would have nearly everything. She had consented in the most daughterly manner to become engaged to the eldest son of a county neighbor, a young gentleman with whom she was very much in love, Costebald Ianson Smithgill, commonly known as “Cis” Smithgill, his united initials forming the caressing little name. He was six feet high, and had a bass voice with treble inflections, which he was training for a parliamentary career. He had, until the demise of an elder brother removed him from the service of his country, held a lieutenancy in the Guards. As to his family, who does not know that the Smithgills are a family of extreme antiquity, descended from that British Princess and daughter of Vortigern who drank the health of Hengist, proffering the Saxon General the mead-horn of welcome when he first set his conquering foot on British soil? Who does not know this, knows nothing. The mead-horn is said to be enclosed in the masonry of the eldest portion of Hengs Hall, the family seat in the country of Mixshire, where, of course, the scene of our story is laid. And Polly and Cis had been engaged about two months when Mrs. Osborne took The Sabines, and was called on by the county, because Osborne had been the cousin of an Earl, and she herself came of a very good family. You don’t want any name much better than that of Weng. And Mrs. Osborne came of the Wengs of Hollowshire.
She took The Sabines for the sake of her health, which required country air. It was an old-fashioned, square Jacobean house of red brick faced with stone, and it boasted a yew walk, the yews whereof had been wrought by some long-moldered-away tree-clipper into arboreal representatives of the Rape of the Sabines. That avenue was one of the lions of the county, and every fresh tenant of the place had to bind him or herself, under fearful penalties, to keep the Sabine ladies and their abductors properly clipped.
Mrs. Osborne was destitute of the faculty of reverence, Lady Smithgill of Hengs said afterwards. Because early in June, when she drove over to call—it would not become even a Smithgill to ignore a Weng of Hollowshire—upon turning a curve in the avenue so as to command the house, the lawn, and the celebrated Yew Tree Walk, the new tenant of The Sabines, exquisitely attired in a Paris gown and carrying a marvelous guipure sunshade, appeared to view; Sir Giles Overshott was with her, and the lady and the baronet were laughing heartily.
“Mrs. Osborne simply shrieked,” Lady Smithgill said afterwards, in confidence to a few dozen dear friends; “and Sir Giles was quite purple—that unpleasant shade, don’t you know?
“It turned out that they were amusing themselves at the expense of The Sabines. I looked at her, and I fancy I showed my surprise at her want of taste.
“‘We think a great deal of them in the county,’ I said, ‘and Sir Giles can tell you how severe a censure would be pronounced by persons of taste upon the tenant who was so audacious as to deface or so careless as to neglect them, or even, ignorantly, to make sport of them.’
“At that Sir Charles became a deeper shade, almost violet, and she uncovered her eyes and smiled. I think somebody has told her she resembled Bernhardt in her youth.
“‘Dear Lady Smithgill,’ she said, or rather cooed (and those cooing voices are so irritating!), ‘depend on it, I shall make a point of keeping them in the most perfect condition. To be obliged to pay a forfeit to my landlord would be a nuisance, but to be censured by persons of taste residing in the county, that would be quite insupportable.’ Then she rang for tea, and there were eight varieties of little cakes, which must have been sent down from Buszard’s, and a cut-glass liqueur bottle of rum upon the tray. ‘Do you take rum?’ she had the audacity to ask me. I did not stoop to decline verbally, but shook my head slightly, and she gave me another of those smiles and passed on the rum. Sir Charles brought it me, and I waved it away, speechless, absolutely speechless, at the monstrosity of the idea.
“She overwhelmed me with apologies, of course.