Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before.
I am not sure that she knew what the words were:
but she looked at Lydgate and the tears fell over
her cheeks. There could have been no more complete
answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything
else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness
at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature
depended on him for her joy, actually put his arms
round her, folding her gently and protectingly—
he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and
kissed each of the two large tears. This was
a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but
it was a short way. Rosamond was not angry,
but she moved backward a little in timid happiness,
and Lydgate could now sit near her and speak less incompletely.
Rosamond had to make her little confession, and he
poured out words of gratitude and tenderness with
impulsive lavishment. In half an hour he left
the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own,
but the woman’s to whom he had bound himself.
He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy,
who, just returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure
that it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone’s
demise. The felicitous word “demise,”
which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his
spirits even above their usual evening pitch.
The right word is always a power, and communicates
its definiteness to our action. Considered as
a demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a
merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his
snuff-box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent
affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy hated both
solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe struck
about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real
property? Mr. Vincy was inclined to take a jovial
view of all things that evening: he even observed
to Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution
after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as ever
again; and when his approbation of Rosamond’s
engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing
facility, passing at once to general remarks on the
desirableness of matrimony for young men and maidens,
and apparently deducing from the whole the appropriateness
of a little more punch.
CHAPTER XXXII.
“They’ll take
suggestion as a cat laps milk.”
—SHAKESPEARE:
Tempest.
The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on
Mr. Featherstone’s insistent demand that Fred
and his mother should not leave him, was a feeble
emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts
of the old man’s blood-relations, who naturally
manifested more their sense of the family tie and
were more visibly numerous now that he had become
bedridden. Naturally: for when “poor
Peter” had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoted
parlor, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook prepares
