“You taught the fine lady one useful lesson,” Mrs. Walsh encouraged her daughter.
But though Lady Bell might try, and might sometimes succeed in asserting her supremacy and in distancing her foes, she could not fight with their weapons. When they invaded her privacy, invited themselves to be her companions, spied upon her, if that could be called spying which was open and bold, and all to do her good, they drove her nearly frantic.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ELECTION AT PEASMARSH.
Goaded as Lady Bell was, and with the summer sunshine on the wane, and the autumn gloom approaching, she was ready to welcome any change. She heard with satisfaction, one afternoon, a surly announcement from her husband that she was to accompany him to Peasmarsh, and that she had better make preparations for remaining several weeks in the county town.
Lady Bell took such slight notice of what was passing around her, and had so little knowledge of the world, that she did not connect the announcement with the circumstance that there had been a great deal of whipping and spurring of gentlemen lately to Trevor Court, where they were shut up with the Squire of a morning, or drinking with him after dinner. They were visitors to whom Lady Bell was indifferent, in addition to the Squire’s not caring for her having intercourse with them.
Lady Bell had no idea what the family were going into Peasmarsh for, till Sally Walsh insulted her by the incredulous demand—
“You don’t mean to say, Lady Bell, that you don’t know the elections are coming on, and that the Squire is to stand as member? My ears, what do you hear? Father and mother and I, knew this a fortnight ago.”
The Squire, who doted on Trevor Court and hated town, who was for his day a lukewarm politician—seeing that politics concerned more men than Dick Trevor, and more places than Trevor Court—what should he do in Parliament? But Lady Bell hardly stopped to ask, and to put two and two together, to argue that there must be an opponent in the field, for the Squire, like a mad bull, would run blindly at an opponent.
Here was deliverance, here was a lightening of her load. With the giddiness by no means rooted out of her, and without considering that she had made the same reflection not greatly to her profit once before now, she reflected, it is an ill wind which blows nobody good.
To escape from Trevor Court, to leave the Walshes behind her, even for a season, to have a chance of being restored to her beloved town and the countenance of her old friends, for such a gain it was almost worth while to have married Squire Trevor.