They entered the chamber, regardless of the landlady’s eagerness to show them to a room for their own use. Mrs. Betteridge would thereupon have ushered their man servant and lady’s maid to the room she had chosen, but these menials refused to proceed without orders, and so remained outside Foxwell’s door, laden with small impedimenta of various sizes and uses, from pistols to scent-bottles.
“One never knows who may turn up,” said Rashleigh. “I was thinking of you only yesterday, Bob, and wondering if I should ever see you again.”
“And what ill wind for you,” asked Foxwell, “blows this good to me?—for an ill wind it must be to any civilized person that blows him to these wilds.”
“I have the honour to be escorting these ladies back to London from Lady Strange’s country-seat by the Tweed, where they have been for the recovery of their health.”
“And our good looks,—tell the truth, Cousin Rashleigh,” said Lady Strange. “My dear Foxwell, we have rusticated till we are near dead of dulness,—is it not so, Isabella?”
“Dead and buried, Diana,” said Mrs. Winter, in a matter-of-fact tone. “And to think you are still alive, Foxwell? ’Tis so long since you disappeared from the town, I swear I had forgot you.”
“Cruel Mrs. Winter!” replied Foxwell. “But ’tis not for you to speak of being dead and buried. You know not what rustication is. You have passed, I suppose, a month or so out of the world, and are now going back to it; while I have been a recluse in this county these two years, and may be so for the rest of my life. The town, as you say, has forgot me, and God knows whether I shall ever return. See what poverty brings one to, and take warning.”
The reader is doubtless aware that country-house life did not occupy in the eighteenth century the place it does to-day in the routine of the “smart” world. People of fashion had their town houses and their country-seats then, of course; but many such were wont to pursue more exclusively the one life or the other,—to be town mice who sometimes went to the country, or country mice who sometimes came up to town. Those who preferred the gaiety of the town were more prone to count that time lost which they had to pass out of it, and to look down upon those who spent most of their days in the country. When the town mice left London by choice, it was to take the waters at Bath, or to make the “grand tour” of the Continent. Week-end house-parties had not come in, there were no seaside resorts, and the rich did not hie themselves in August to the moors of Scotland. “Beyond Hyde Park all is desert,” said the fop in the play; and Robert Foxwell and his friends were so far of Sir Fopling’s mind; they valued wit, and used “fox-hunter” as a name of scorn. No wonder, then, that Foxwell declared himself miserable in his exile.
“’Tis for your sins, Bob,” said Lady Strange. “You were a monstrously wicked man in London, as I remember.”
Mrs. Betteridge now contrived to insinuate herself into the notice of Rashleigh, addressing him as “my lord,” and begging to know the wishes of himself and their ladyships upon the matter of dinner and rooms.