Looking rather astonished, Ringfield said "No," and the emphasis led Mrs. Abercorn to smile as she observed him more closely. She herself was one of those people of good birth who instinctively ask, no matter where they are placed, of everybody they meet, "Is she a lady?" "Is he a gentleman?" but who, in spite of this inherent and clannish trait, manage to make friends with the mammon of No-Family. She was literally as broad as she was high; short hair, turning grey, was fantastically curled about her clever, dark eyes; she had two hats, one for summer and one for winter, the latter a man's old seal cap; her skirts and jackets were skimp and dowdy, and her features and complexion unattractive, yet the authority and ease, the whole manner of the true lady made her a delightful companion, and she would have been equally diverting and diverted at a Royal Audience in Buckingham Palace or at a bean-feast on an Indian reserve. She displayed ornaments that were not precisely jewels, the value of which was of genealogical order; thus, she wore her grandfather's fobs and seals, her mother's bracelets of bog-oak and lava, and her brooch contained the hair of her only child, long deceased. She had had one dinner-dress for ten years of black "uncrushable grenadine," cut square, and it was quite true that she was the niece of an earl and the daughter of an admiral, and that she had eloped with the Rev. Marcus Abercorn eighteen years ago.
Ringfield had never met any one like her before, but in spite of her accent, so extremely English that in the Canadian country it was almost certain to be dubbed "affected," and in spite of a bright worldliness he found unusual in a clergyman's wife, he liked her very much and watched her manipulation of the mare—Flora Macdonald—with great interest, and not a little apprehension.
The bad four miles turned out to consist of alternate patches of ancient corduroy road, the logs exposed for a foot or so above the soil, and a long hogs-back of dyke-veined limestone, the ridges of spar and quartz cutting deep into the rock.
Mrs. Abercorn sighed eloquently for the lanes of Old England as the mare pranced, and the buggy flew over the various obstructions, bumping and swinging in a reckless manner Ringfield had never seen equalled.
"We are a little late," said his aristocratic charioteer, her hat crooked and her mouth quite as vicious as Flora's when touched up with a ragged whip, "but we'll be in time for a game of croquet before tea. We have the tea at five, because it's beginning to darken so early, and then we have a nice little show in the school-house: Marcus and I both believe in amusing the people. So you see it's not exactly a picnic, but quite a lot of things put together. You'll see presently."
And he did. Father and mother of their people, Mr. and Mrs. Abercorn had instituted a remarkable series of "events," as they say on regatta programmes—nautical, terpsichorean, athletic, musical and histrionic—grouped under the head of "games" and the large and delighted crowd drawn from several parishes rewarded their cheerful and untiring efforts. The Rector was not only all things to all men but to many women and numerous children as well, and Ringfield noted that, unlike the West, the men assembled were nearly all old men; there was a marked scarcity of boys and youths, and these old men appeared to be many years older than they had any right to appear. Many of them possessed but a couple of sound teeth apiece, others had retained the lower set more or less horribly intact, while a single tusk adorned the upper gum. Absence of regular visits to the dentist, or indeed of any visits at all, had wrought this ruin in faces also wrinkled and weather-beaten by exposure to the strenuous climate. The women showed to better advantage than the men, and the French were more prepossessing and better preserved than the English, especially in the matter of teeth, owing probably to a steady diet of onions and comparative lack of meat.
Diversity among the ladies included the fat, motherly looking ones, several of whom were spinsters; the young, too-smartly dressed daughters of farmers, possessing very little beauty, but of good height and figure; one person clothed entirely in black silk and very conscious of a new kind of watch, of gold and colours and small, pinned to her left bosom; and last, a couple of conventional Englishwomen staying at the Rectory.
It was natural that Mrs. Abercorn should desire to present to her friends and a few of the "quality" so good-looking a young man as Ringfield, and as soon as the buggy had been tied up under a grove of maples, he was led about by the energetic queen of the feast, whose attire, weird enough while driving, had now culminated in a highly rational although unusual aspect. Everything upon her partook of an unpleasing and surely unnecessary brevity; thus her figure was too short for her breadth, and her skirts too short for her figure; her jacket was too short over her hips, and her gloves too short over her wrists; her hair was too short on her neck and her veil too short over her nose. Yet the rakish hat settled, and the fobs and seals shaken out, she appeared mentally fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life that amiable naturalness, inimitable airiness, ease and adaptability, which characterize the Anglican clergy and their method of doing things. Attenuated tennis, Lilliputian Badminton, swings, a greased pole, potato and sack races, fiddling, and dancing on a platform, for the French, all these he passed in review with Mrs. Abercorn and the English ladies, presently participating in a merry game of croquet on a rocky, uneven, impossible kind of ground. The Rev. Marcus, and the person in black silk joined in this game of croquet, the latter so exclusive that it gave Ringfield the feeling that people must have when they are chosen for a quadrille d'honneur.
Without relief or intermission the amusements held sway till about half-past four, when even the quality tired of their croquet; the day, though bright, was cold, and a bonfire on the rocks was greatly patronized by the very old and very young, while distant preparations for tea were viewed, at first with stealthy, half-reluctant admiration, and then with open restlessness. The patriarchs—toothless and wrinkled, yet not a man of them over fifty-eight—stood around in expectant silent clusters, and also in their best clothes, of which a great deal of faded red neck-tie and pepper and salt trousers seemed chiefly to strike the eye.
The tea was to be served in the large barn adjoining the church, surrounded on two sides by tall plantations of Indian corn, a rough kind known as horse corn, and not used at table. Very soon those engaged in the games fell away by twos and threes, and the rector and his wife gaily beating the covers afforded by forest and grove, all gradually converged to the meeting point outside the big doors of the barn, through which were now passing the wives and daughters of the plough, bearing coarse bedroom jugs of tea and coffee, plates of cakes, pies, and sandwiches. The people waiting thus in patient content at the doors were orderly and sober, and none ventured to enter till their rector, having unearthed even the remotest and shyest member of his flock, advanced in florid hurry and taking his wife and Ringfield with him, passed under the hanging branches of maize, asparagus, fern and crabapples which decorated the great door. The floor of the barn, although partially cleared, was still half full of straw, and flecks of it flew through the air as the people trooped in, decently awed but amused too, for the ripple of lowered laughter and pleased hum of voices resounded throughout the building. The walls, draped with flags and coloured curtains, held sheaves of grasses and several lamps in brackets at the sides, and the food, good, plain, with plenty of it, adorned the two long tables that ran down the middle. Ringfield, at the head of a table, was comparing the scene with some Harvest Homes of his youth, and wondering who would start the Doxology, when he heard the rector say, standing a long way off at the end of the other table:—