That last evening was very odd and constrained.
We could not help looking on the lovers as new specimens
over which some strange transformation had passed,
though for the present it had stiffened them in public
into the strictest good behaviour. They would
have been awkward if it had been possible to either
of them, and, save for a certain look in their eyes,
comported themselves as perfect strangers.
The three elder gentlemen held discussions in the
dining-room, but we were not trusted in our playground
adjoining. Mrs. Fordyce nailed Griff down to
an interminable game at chess, and my mother kept
the two girls playing duets, while Clarence turned
over the leaves; and I read over The Lady of the
Lake, a study which I always felt, and still feel,
as an act of homage to Ellen Fordyce, though there
was not much in common between her and the maid of
Douglas. Indeed, it was a joke of her father’s
to tease her by criticising the famous passage about
the tears that old Douglas shed over his duteous
daughter’s head—’What in the
world should the man go whining and crying for?
He had much better have laughed with her.’
Little did the elders know what was going on in the
next room, where there was a grand courtship among
the dolls; the hero being a small jointed Dutch one
in Swiss costume, about an eighth part of the size
of the resuscitated Celestina Mary, but the only
available male character in doll-land! Anne
was supposed to be completely ignorant of what passed
above her head; and her mother would have been aghast
had she heard the remarkable discoveries and speculations
that she and Martyn communicated to one another.
CHAPTER XXI—THE OUTSIDE OF THE COURTSHIP
’Or framing, as a fair excuse,
The book, the pencil, or the muse;
Something to give, to sing, to say,
Some modern tale, some ancient lay.’
Scott.
It seems to me on looking back that I have hardly
done justice to Mrs. Fordyce, and certainly we—as
Griffith’s eager partisans—often
regarded her in the light of an enemy and opponent;
but after this lapse of time, I can see that she
was no more than a prudent mother, unwilling to see
her fair young daughter suddenly launched into womanhood,
and involved in an attachment to a young and untried
man.
The part of a drag is an invidious one; and this must
have been her part through most of her life.
The Fordyces, father and son, were of good family,
gentlemen to their very backbones, and thoroughly
good, religious men; but she came of a more aristocratic
strain, had been in London society, and brought with
her a high-bred air which, implanted on the Fordyce
good looks, made her daughter especially fascinating.
But that air did not recommend Mrs. Fordyce to all
her neighbours, any more than did those stronger,
stricter, more thorough-going notions of religious
Copyrights
Chantry House from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
