A Country Gentleman and His FamilyOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
A Country Gentleman and His Family
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Marriage -- Fiction
"Yes." Then Mrs. Warrender burst into a laugh which might as well have
been a fit of crying. "But you must prepare yourself to see not Minnie,
but the Eustace Thynnes," she said. And then the mother and daughter
kissed each other and retired to their respective rooms, where Chatty
was a long time going to bed. She sat and thought, with her pretty hair
about her shoulders, going over a great many things, recalling a great
many simple little scenes and words said,--which were but words after
all,--and then of a sudden the tears came, and she sat and cried very
quietly, even in her solitude making as little fuss as possible, with an
ache of wonder at the trouble that had come upon her, and a keen pang of
shame at the thought that she had expected more than was coming, more
perhaps than had ever been intended. A man is not ashamed of loving when
he is not loved, however angry he may be with himself or the woman who
has beguiled him; but the sharpest smart in a girl's heart is the shame
of having given what was not asked for, what was not wanted. When those
tears had relieved her heart, Chatty put up her hair very neatly for the
night, just as she always did, and after a while slept,--much better
than Dick.
He came next day, however, for a final visit, and the day after to see
them away, without any apparent breach in the confidence and friendship
with which they regarded each other. There might be, perhaps, a faint
almost imperceptible difference in Chatty, a little dignity like that
which her mother had discovered in her, something that was not altogether
the simple girl, younger than her years, whom Mrs. Warrender had brought
to town. On the very last morning of all, Dick had also a look which was
not very easy to be interpreted. While they were on their way to the
station he began suddenly to talk of Underwood and the Wilberforces, as
if he had forgotten them all this time, and now suddenly remembered that
there were such people in the world. "Did I ever tell you," he said,
"that one of the houses in the parish belongs to an uncle of mine, who
bought it merely as an investment, and let it?"
"We were talking of that," said Mrs. Warrender. "Mr. Wilberforce hoped
you had persuaded your uncle to leave the drainage alone in order to
make a nuisance and drive undesirable tenants away."
He laughed in a hurried, breathless way, then said quickly, "Is it true
that the people who were there are gone?"
"Quite true. They seem to have melted away without any one knowing, in a
single night They were not desirable people."
"So I heard: and gone without leaving any sign?"
"Have they not paid their rent?" said Mrs. Warrender.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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