Volume II Part 14 (1/2)
”Why, mamma?'
”Because anybody hearing you might suppose you were not quite right in your mind.”
The d.u.c.h.ess's visit put Mrs. Winstanley in good-humour with all the world, but especially with Roderick Vawdrey. She sent him an invitation to her next dinner, and when her husband seemed inclined to strike his name out of her list, she defended her right of selection with a courage that was almost heroic.
”I can't understand your motive for asking this fellow,” the Captain said, with a blacker look than his wife had ever before seen on his countenance.
”Why should I not ask him, Conrad? I have known him ever since he was at Eton, and the dear Squire was very fond of him.”
”If you are going to choose your acquaintance in accordance with the taste of your first husband, it will be rather a bad look out for your second,” said the Captain.
”What objection can you have to Roderick?”
”I can have, and I have, a very strong objection to him. But I am not going to talk about it yet awhile.”
”But, Conrad, if there is anything I ought to know----” began Mrs.
Winstanley, alarmed.
”When I think you ought to know it you will be told, my dear Pamela. In the meantime, allow me to have my own opinion about Mr. Vawdrey.”
”But, Conrad, in dear Edward's time he used to come to this house whenever he liked, as if he had been a near relation. And he is the d.u.c.h.ess's nephew, remember; and when he marries Lady Mabel, and the Duke dies, he will be one of the largest landowners in South Hamps.h.i.+re.”
”Very well, let him come to your dinner. It can make very little difference.”
”Now you are offended, Conrad,” said Mrs. Winstanley, with a deprecating air.
”No, I am not offended; but I have my own opinion as to your wisdom in giving any encouragement to Mr. Vawdrey.”
This sounded mysterious, and made Mrs. Winstanley uncomfortable. But she was determined not to offend the d.u.c.h.ess, who had been so particularly gracious, and who had sent Captain and Mrs. Winstanley a card for a dinner to be given on the last day of the year.
So Roderick got his invitation, and accepted it with friendly prompt.i.tude. He was master of the hounds now, and a good many of his days were given up to the pleasures of the hunting-field. He was an important person in his way, full of business; but he generally found time to drop in for an hour on Mrs. Winstanley's Tuesday afternoons, to lounge with his back against the ma.s.sive oaken chimney-breast and talk to Violet, or pat Argus, while the lady-visitors gossiped and t.i.ttered over their tea-cups.
This last dinner of Mrs. Winstanley was to take place a few days before Christmas, and was to be given in honour of a guest who was coming to spend the holidays at the Abbey House. The guest was Captain Winstanley's Irish friend, Lord Mallow, the owner of Bullfinch.
Vixen's heart gave an indignant bound when she heard that he was coming.
”Another person for me to hate,” she said to herself, almost despairingly. ”I am becoming a ma.s.s of envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness.”
Lord Mallow had spent the early morning of life in the army, it appeared, with no particular expectations. He and Captain Winstanley had been brother-officers. But the fell sergeant Death had promoted Patrick Hay to his elder brother's heritage, and he had surrendered a subaltern's place in a line regiment to become Viscount Mallow, and the owner of a fine stretch of fertile hill and valley in County Cork. He had set up at once as the model landlord, eager for his tenantry's welfare, full of advanced ideas, a violent politician, liberal to the verge of radicalism. If the Irish Church had not been disestablished before Lord Mallow went into Parliament, he would have gripped his destructive axe and had a chop or two at the root of that fine old tree. Protestant, and loyal to the Church of England in his own person--so far as such loyalty may be testified by regular attendance at divine service every Sunday morning, and a gentlemanlike reverence for bishops--it seemed to him not the less an injustice that his native land should be taxed with the maintenance of an alien clergy.
The late Lord Mallow had been a violent Tory, Orange to the marrow of his bones. The new Lord Mallow was violently progressive, enthusiastic in his belief in Hibernian virtues, and his indignation at Hibernian wrongs. He wanted to disestablish everything. He saw his country as she appears in the eyes of her poets and song-writers--a fair dishevelled female, oppressed by the cruel Sa.s.senach, a lovely sufferer for whose rescue all true men and leal would fight to the death. He quoted the outrages of Elizabeth's reign, the cruelties of Cromwell's soldiery, the savagery of Ginkell, as if those wrongs had been inflicted yesterday, and the House of Commons of to-day were answerable for them.
He made fiery speeches which were reported at length in the Irish newspapers. He was a fine speaker, after a florid pattern, and had a great command of voice, and a certain rugged eloquence that carried his hearers along with him, even when he was harping upon so hackneyed a string as the wrongs of ”Ould Ireland.”
Lord Mallow was not thirty, and he looked younger than his years. He was tall and broad-shouldered, robust, and a trifle clumsy in figure, and rode fourteen stone. He had a good-looking Irish face, smiling blue eyes, black hair, white teeth, bushy whiskers, and a complexion inclining to rosiness.
”He is the perfection of a commonplace young man,” Vixen said, when she talked him over with her mother on the day of his arrival at the Abbey House.
”Come, Violet, you must admit that he is very handsome,” remonstrated Mrs. Winstanley, who was sitting before her dressing-room fire, with her feet on a fender-stool of her own crewel-work, waiting for Pauline to commence the important ceremony of dressing for dinner. ”I think I never saw a finer set of teeth, and of course at his age they must all be real.”