He told her of his engagements, and gave her a full account of his sayings and doings, and those of his friends. “I was at Colonel Barnard’s last night,” he would mention. “We had games, and the ladies proposed riddles. I wish my plaguey memory had retained them for the benefit of Deb and you, Miss Barlowe. What do you think? Miss Polly, the colonel’s daughter, stood up and danced a jig first-rate with her brother the sailor.”
He confessed that he had been longing desperately for his commission, but he was not so impatient now that Miss Barlowe had kindly consented to bear his sister company. They formed quite a little colony at home, who could play cribbage, piquet, or Pope Joan, of an evening, and be independent of the great world without—not that he was not going where glory waited him, that he did not mean to earn his right to sit down like an old man by his modest fire-side.
Lady Bell, though she had sufficient caution to keep her narratives within bounds, repaid Master Charles’s confidences by fine stories out of her short life with the players, out of the plays she had seen acted, and the few books which she had read.
She took his advice seriously on the feather trimmings which she was manufacturing for Miss Kingscote’s furbelows, whether the turkeys’ feathers did not “come in vastly pretty as a silver grey after the golden brown of the pheasants’ feathers?”
With a little pressing she sang to him, as an appropriate echo of his military aspirations, “Over the hills and far away;” she suffered him to escort her—to be sure Miss Kingscote was generally with her—when he overtook her on these country roads, which, in the shortening winter days, were not only barely surmountable in their mud and mire, but which were frequently forbidden to unattended women in the end of the last century.
In short, Master Charles and Miss Barlowe were gliding fast into an innocent, inconsiderate, highly perilous intimacy, which was almost inevitable between the pair shut up together and shut out from the world.
Young men were scarce about Lumley, and this young man was popular among the neighbours who had rescued him. Master Charles was freely welcome, where Miss Kingscote was merely tolerated and laughed at, in most of the country houses, and in the best town houses of Lumley. He could go a-visiting, if he chose, four evenings out of the seven.
Naturally it was otherwise with Miss Kingscote’s companion.
But all at once Lady Bell had her eyes opened to the precipice on the edge of which she was unwarily walking.
In the first place Miss Kingscote’s manner changed. Her boisterous good humour and rough hospitality gave way to a halting glumness and an absolute rudeness. Her easiness grew uneasy, and testified itself in a kind of alarmed, reproachful indulgence to the follies of mankind, as distinct from, and preyed upon by, those of womankind.