“I don’t know about that,” dissented Dick; he was rather given to argue from the mere pleasure of opposition. “Mountains and glaciers are all very well in their way; but I think, on the whole, I would as soon be here. You see, I am so accustomed to mix with a lot of fellows, that I am afraid of finding the pater’s sole company rather slow.”
“For shame!” remarked his usual monitress. But she spoke gently: in her heart she knew why Dick failed to find the mountains alluring.
“Why could not one of you girls join us?” he continued, 16 wrathfully. The rogue had fairly bullied the unwilling Mrs. Mayne into giving that invitation.
“Do ask her, mother; she will be such a nice companion for you when the pater and I are doing our climbing; do, there’s a dear good soul!” he had coaxed. And the dear good soul, who was secretly jealous of Nan, and loved her about as much as mothers usually love an only son’s choice, had bewailed her hard fate in secret; and had then stepped over to the cottage with a bland and cheerful exterior, which grew more cheerful as Mrs. Challoner’s reluctance made itself felt.
“It is not wise; it will throw them so much together,” Nan’s mother had said. “If it were only Phillis or Dulce; but you must have noticed––”
“Oh, yes, I have noticed!” returned Mrs. Mayne, hastily. She was a stout, comely-looking woman, but beside Mrs. Challoner she looked like a housekeeper dressed in her mistress’s smart clothes. Mrs. Mayne’s dresses never seemed to belong to her; it could not be said that they fitted her ill, but there was a want of adaptability,—a lack of taste that failed to accord with her florid style of beauty.
She had been a handsome woman when Richard Mayne married her, but a certain deepening of tints and broadening of contour had not improved the mistress of Longmead. Her husband was a decided contrast: he was a small, wiry man, with sharp features that expressed a great deal of shrewdness. Dick had got his sandy hair; but Richard Mayne the elder had not his son’s honest, kindly eyes. Mr. Mayne’s were small and twinkling; he had a way of looking at people between his half-closed lids, in a manner half sharp and half jocular.
He was not vulgar, far from it; but he had a homely air about him that spoke of the self-made man. He was rather fond of telling people that his father had been in trade in a small way and that he himself had been the sole architect of his fortune. “Look at Dick,” he would say; “he would never have a penny, that fellow, unless I made it for him: he has come into the world to find his bread ready buttered. I had to be content with a crust as I could earn it. The lad’s a cut above us both, though he has the good taste to try and hide it.”
This sagacious speech was very true. Dick would never have succeeded as a business man; he was too full of crotchets and speculations to be content to run in narrow grooves. The notion of money-making was abhorrent to him; the idea of a city life, with its hard rubs and drudgery, was utterly distasteful to him. “One would have to mix with such a lot of cads,” he would say. “English, pure and undefiled, is not always spoken. If I must work, I would rather have a turn at law or divinity; the three old women with the eye between them knows which.”
It could not be denied that Dick winced a little at his father’s homely speeches; but in his heart he was both proud and fond 17 of him, and was given to assert to a few of his closest friends “that, take it all in all, and looking at other fellows’ fathers, he was a rattling good sort, and no mistake.”