So Miss Maria transferred her affections to Mr. Joseph. The second Christmas passed away, and a third spring dawned for Ipswich. The Inn was just as comfortable as ever and so were apparently the two Mr. Foxleys but for one fact and that was, Mr. George's health was not as good as it had been. Always delicate, he had gradually failed, growing more and more languid, more and more whimsical in spite of his comfortable abode and the diligent care of his landlady. Poor Milly! How she worked for him too, between hours, after hours, before hours! When the attacks of pleurisy, painful in the extreme, from which he suffered, came on either in the night or during the day, Milly was always near with her strong young arms, not quite so pink as they used to be, and her quick young eyes, a shade more subtle than they used to be, ready to apprehend and quiet the pain before it came. How Miss Maria at the Rectory and Charlotte Dexter in her lonely cottage would have envied her had they known, but though there were gossips in plenty in the village, nothing that occurred in the rose-scented drawing-room ever went out into that tattling little Ipswichian world.
“Are your young gentlemen with you yet, Mrs. Cox? And one of 'em not over strong? Deary me! that makes it hard for you and the young gal But you be standing it remarkable well. And gentlemen born you say! They do say that the other one wi' the specked skin be making fools of Miss Maria up at the Rectory and old Miss Dexter at the cottage. Well! well! Poor Miss Ellen was gone afore we knew it like, poor soul, that was so kind!”
Much of this cunning volubility sprung upon Mrs. Cox in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs. If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. Cox to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no such landlady, no such woman could exist out of England But why not? My story, remember, deals with people and things as they were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago there were such Inns, though few at number, to be found in Western Canada—ay—and as English as any that a certain Mrs. Lupin presided over in fascinating fiction, and much more English than many Inns of the present day in England. Twenty years ago there was such a landlady, rosy and plump and cheerful, wearing a flowered gown, a black silk apron and a cap with a purple pansy in it and broad and comfortable lappets, who, when her work was done, would sit in her small private room opposite the bar also hung with red curtains, making patchwork quilts or playing a demure rubber with the Scotch store-keeper, or Irish stage driver, or an occasional gentleman from town. Such was Mrs. Cox, widow of Captain Cox, able seaman, but bad lot, who died when they had been five years in Canada, leaving her with her one child. The public business had attracted her after her loss and she accordingly went into it on the advice of her numerous friends. People who despise her calling need not listen to me if I allude to—for I have not time to recount—all her kindness, her cheerfulness, her powers of dispensing comfort, and warmth, and happiness, and promoting the direct and indirect welfare of everyone who came in her path. By what strange coincidence the brothers Foxley had been led to her glowing fireside and her motherly arms brimming over with zeal and kindness for the whole human race, does not matter. It is sufficient that they found her and found with her a sense of comparative peace and security which compensated for the one big slice of trouble Fortune had treated them to before their departure from England. For them did the wall flowers bloom and the mignonette at the window, for them did the oleander blossom and the old clock strike, for them did the jessamine climb and the one hawthorn tree yield its annual soft white drift of snow, and yet who shall say that they were altogether unworthy, even, if with that picture of poor Ellen Dexter in my mind, I have to say that they did not deserve it?
CHAPTER III.
If Mr. Joseph Foxley had but known the sentiments animating the couple of maiden breasts that awaited his Saturday visits in Ipswich, he would have been genuinely surprised. The truth is Mr. Joseph was rather what is termed a general lover. He liked the sex in its entirety. Collectively he loved all women and belonged to that hand-pressing section of humanity which I have alluded to as mischievous. Were there not at least five young ladies in town, at whose houses he visited, and who were more or less interested in the young Englishman as he in them? Did Miss Charlotte dream of them or Miss Maria at the rectory? If so, they never dared to ask Mr. Joseph to give any account of his doings in town, although they managed to glean what he did with himself in the village. He respected Charlotte Dexter enough to intend at some future day to tell her a little more about himself and his brother than he had yet done; as for Miss Maria, she only bored him and fed his contempt.
“When a rather elderly old girl giggles after everything she says, conversation is difficult and sympathy out of the question,” he had said to his brother! When Mr. Joseph had known these young ladies for four years, Miss Maria took her revenge in her way, that was by marrying the younger brother of Mr. Simon P. Rattray, partner in the mill and the red brick house by the river. The vision of becoming the cherished wife of an English aristocrat and going home to reside in a manor house built in the sixteenth century, with occasional visits to London and glimpses of the Royal Family had gradually faded, and she accepted the less rose-coloured lot that Mr. Lyman B. Rattray offered her, sitting in her father's study, with his hair very much brushed up on one side and very much flattened down on the other, a white tie and light-yellow duster adorning his spare person.
Such was the American of those days—twenty years ago—there are none such now I allow.
Miss Maria, who was considered “very English,” shuddered as she regarded him. It so fell out that it being Saturday, Mr. Joseph was just then passing—“kind of happening along” Mr. Rattray would have said—en route to the Inn and his brother, on foot in spite of the dusty road and the hot August sun, clad in trim tight knickerbockers and carrying an immense bunch of red field lilies, a gun, and a leather satchel over his shoulder. Slight and straight and cool, he looked the picture of a contented cheerful energetic young English man. Along the road he came whistling an old country tune. Miss Maria who had sighted him afar off, begged her visitor's pardon and went to the window to arrange the blind. How her heart warmed to that cruel Mr. Joseph, how she loved him then just for that last moment! Her heart—that foolish old maid's heart—beat quickly, beat thickly, she remembered to have read something somewhere about people who could will other people to look at them, to speak to them, to even think of them, to move across a room at their pleasure. If she could but do that! She did try, with her fingers clenched on the blind, and her eyes fixed on Mr. Joseph, she did wish with all her might that he would turn his head and see her at the window and wave his hand gallantly as he had done on one or two previous occasions. Then she would beckon and he would run across and entering the room disconcert this odious Mr. Lyman B. Rattray and put an end to his stony wooing. But alas! for Miss Maria and her mesmeric powers! The harder she tried, the less she succeeded. On came Mr. Joseph, supremely unconscious of the injured heart beating behind the windowpane. At one moment it seemed as if he were about to turn and look in her direction. A very brilliant wild yellow canary crossed over his head and lit on a small shrub just inside the garden paling. Had it remained there, would Miss Maria have ever become the wife of Mr. Lyman B. Rattray? No one knows, for the canary flew away again to the other side of the road and Mr. Joseph's eyes followed it In a moment he was past, and the chance was gone for ever. Miss Maria left her window and sat down opposite her visitor. There was nothing to keep her now, nothing to give her courage and hope for the future, new fire for her faded eyes, new strength for her jaded limbs. Yet she was only thirty-four. How strange it is that some unmarried women are old at that age, even while living in luxury and surrounded by every care and all affection, while many a married woman, though beset with trials and weaknesses and perhaps a brood of restless little ones to pull her gown and get in the way of her busy feet, retains her figure and her step, her smile and her complexion, her temper and her nerves!