“What do you mean, Charles? I never saw a man more polite to ladies in my life.”
“Yes, but—”
“But what? You are always so mysterious, Charles dear.”
“Mysterious! No, Carry; but if you could hear what the Doctor says of the ladies sometimes.”
“Ay, when you men get together, my dear. I know what that means—pretty things you say of us. But you are all alike; you know you are, love!”
“I am sure,” said the Parson, simply, “that I have good cause to speak well of the sex—when I think of you, and my poor mother.”
Mrs. Dale, who, with all her “tempers,” was an excellent woman, and loved her husband with the whole of her quick little heart, was touched. She pressed his hand, and did not call him dear all the way home.
Meanwhile the Italian passed the fields, and came upon the high-road about two miles from Hazeldean. On one side stood an old-fashioned solitary inn, such as English inns used to be before they became railway hotels—square, solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable and comfortable, with their great signs swinging from some elm tree in front, and the long row of stables standing a little back, with a chaise or two in the yard, and the jolly landlord talking of the crops to some stout farmer, who has stopped his rough pony at the well-known door. Opposite this inn, on the other side the road, stood the habitation of Dr. Riccabocca.
A few years before the date of these annals, the stage-coach, on its way to London, from a seaport town, stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen—not gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees, with that cursed railway whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears! It was the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the neighboring rill were famous, and so was the mutton which came from Hazeldean Park.
From the outside of the coach had descended two passengers who, alone, insensible to the attractions of mutton and trout, refused to dine—two melancholy-looking foreigners, of whom one was Signor Riccabocca, much the same as we see him now, only that the black suit, was less threadbare, the tall form less meagre, and he did not then wear spectacles; and the other was his servant. They would walk about while the coach stopped. Now the Italian's eye had been caught by a mouldering dismantled house on the other side the road, which nevertheless was well situated; half-way up a green hill, with its aspect due south, a little cascade falling down artificial rock-work, and a terrace with a balustrade, and a few broken urns and statues before its Ionic portico; while on the roadside stood a board, with characters already half effaced, implying that the house [pg 670] was to be “Let unfurnished, with or without land.”