Volume I Part 4 (1/2)
”Who? Lady Maxwell?”
”Yes. You remember I have been four years out of England. She was in town, I suppose, the year before I left, but I never came across her.”
”I prophesy you will like her enormously,” said Letty, with decision. ”At least, I know that's what happens to me when Aunt Watton abuses anybody.
I couldn't dislike them afterwards if I tried.”
”That, allow me to impress upon you, is _not_ my disposition! I am a human being--I am influenced by my friends.”
He turned round towards her so as to appropriate her again.
”Oh! you are not at all the poor creature you paint yourself!” said Letty, shaking her head. ”In reality, you are the most obstinate person I know--you can never let a subject alone--you never know when you're beaten.”
”Beaten?” said George, reflectively; ”by a headache? Well, there is no disgrace in that. One will probably 'live to fight another day.' Do you mean to say that you will take no notice--no notice--of all that array of facts I laid before you this morning on the subject of Captain Addison?”
”I shall be kind to you, and forget them. Now, do listen to Aunt Watton!
It is your duty. Aunt Watton is accustomed to be listened to, and you haven't heard it all a hundred times before, as I have.”
Mrs. Watton, indeed, was haranguing her end of the table on a subject that clearly excited her. Contempt and antagonism gave a fine energy to a head and face already sufficiently expressive. Both were on a large scale, but without commonness. The old-lace coif she wore suited her waved and grizzled hair, and was carried with conscious dignity; the hand, which lay beside her on the table, though long and bony, was full of nervous distinction. Mrs. Watton was, and looked, a tyrant--but a tyrant of ability.
”A neighbour of theirs in Brooks.h.i.+re,” she was saying, ”was giving me last week the most extraordinary account of the doings at Mellor. She was the heiress of that house at Mellor”--here she addressed young Bayle, who, as a comparative stranger in the house, might be supposed to be ignorant of facts which everybody else knew--”a tumbledown place with an income of about two thousand a year. Directly she married she put a Socialist of the most unscrupulous type--so they tell me--into possession. The man has established what they call a 'standard rate' of wages for the estate--practically double the normal rate--coerced all the farmers, and made the neighbours furious. They say the whole district is in a ferment. It used to be the quietest part of the world imaginable, and now she has set it all by the ears. _She_, having married thirty thousand a year, can afford her little amus.e.m.e.nts; other people, who must live by their land, have their lives worried out of them.”
”She tells me that the system works on the whole extremely well,” said Edward Watton, whose heightened colour alone betrayed the irritation of his mother's chronic aggression, ”and that Maxwell is not at all unlikely to adopt it on his own estate.”
Mrs. Watton threw up her hands again.
”The _idiocy_ of that man! Till he married her he was a man of sense. And now she leads him by the nose, and whatever tune he calls, the Government must dance to, because of his power in the House of Lords.”
”And the worst of it is,” said Harding Watton, with an unpleasant laugh, ”that if she were not a handsome woman, her influence would not be half what it is. She uses her beauty in the most unscrupulous way.”
”I believe that to be _entirely_ untrue,” said Edward Watton, with emphasis, looking at his brother with hostility.
George Tressady interrupted. He had an affection for Edward Watton, and cordially disliked Harding. ”Is she really so handsome?” he asked, bending forward and addressing his hostess.
Mrs. Watton scornfully took no notice.
”Well, an old diplomat told me the other day,” said Lord Fontenoy--but with a cold unwillingness, as though he disliked the subject--”that she was the most beautiful woman, he thought, that had been seen in London since Lady Blessington's time.”
”Lady Blessington! dear, dear!--Lady Blessington!” said Lady Tressady with malicious emphasis--an unfortunate comparison, don't you think? Not many people would like to be regarded as Lady Blessington's successor.”
”In any other respect than beauty,” said Edward Watton, haughtily, with the same tension as before, ”the comparison, of course, would be ridiculous.”
Harding shrugged his shoulders, and, tilting his chair back, said in the ear of a shy young man who sat next him:
”In my opinion, the Count d'Orsay is only a question of time! However, one mustn't say that to Edward.”
Harding read memoirs, and considered himself a man of general cultivation. The young man addressed, who read no printed matter outside the sporting papers that he could help, and had no idea as to who Lady Blessington and Count d'Orsay might be, smiled vaguely, and said nothing.
”My dear,” said the squire, plaintively, ”isn't this room extremely hot?”
There was a ripple of meaning laughter from all the young people, to many of whom this particular quarrel was already tiresomely familiar. Mr.
Watton, who never understood anything, looked round with an inquiring air. Mrs. Watton condescended to take the hint and retire.