Her ladyship read it through very slowly, much too slowly for her landlady's impatience.
Her pale cheeks flushed with pride and joy when she comprehended what the letter meant; she drew herself up straight, and her shoulders became so sloping that the uneasy feeling about her clothes, already alluded to, once more passed through Mrs. Bormalack's sympathetic mind.
"It will be a change, indeed, for us," she murmured, looking at her husband.
"Change?" cried the landlady.
"What change?" asked his lordship. "Clara Martha, I do not want any change; I am comfortable here. I am treated with respect, the place is quiet; I do not want to change."
He was a heavy man and lethargic—change meant some kind of physical activity—he disliked movement.
His wife tossed her head with impatience.
"Oh," she cried, "he would rather sit in his armchair than walk even across the green to get his coronet. Shame upon him! Oh! Carpenter! Shh!"
His lordship quailed and said no more. That allusion to his father's trade was not intended as a sneer; the slothfulness of his parent it was which the lady hurled at his lordship's head. No one could tell, no living writer is able to depict faithfully, the difficulties encountered and overcome by this resolute woman in urging her husband to action; how she had first to persuade him to declare that he was the heir to the extinct title; how she had next to drag him away from Canaan City; how she had to bear with his moanings, lamentations, and terrors, when he found himself actually on board the steamer, and saw the land slowly disappearing, while the great ship rolled beneath his unaccustomed feet, and consequences which he had not foreseen began to follow. These were things of the past, but it had been hard to get him away even from Wellclose Square, which he found comfortable, making allowance for the disrespectful Dane; and now—but it must and should be done.
"His lordship," said the little woman, thinking she had perhaps said too much, "is one of them who take root wherever you set them down. He takes after his grandfather, the Honorable Timothy Clitheroe. Set himself down in Canaan City, and took root at once, never wanted to go away. And the Davenants, I am told, never left the village from the day they built their castle there till the last lord died there. In other people, Mrs. Bormalack, it might be called sloth, but in his lordship's case we can only say that he is quick to take root. That is all, ma'am. And when we move him, it is like tearing him up by the roots."