'It isn't enough to increase much. We may as well use it. But how? Take
a bigger house--what's the use? Give up the organ?--then I shall be
rather worse off than I am at present. Positively, it is the most
provoking amount anybody could have invented had they tried ever so long.
Poor Lucy, to do that, and not even to come near us when father died. . .
. Ah, I know what we'll do. We'll go abroad--we'll live in Italy.'
SEQUEL. ANGLEBURY--ENCKWORTH--SANDBOURNE
Two years and a half after the marriage of Ethelberta and the evening
adventures which followed it, a man young in years, though considerably
older in mood and expression, walked up to the 'Red Lion' Inn at
Anglebury. The anachronism sat not unbecomingly upon him, and the voice
was precisely that of the Christopher Julian of heretofore. His way of
entering the inn and calling for a conveyance was more off-hand than
formerly; he was much less afraid of the sound of his own voice now than
when he had gone through the same performance on a certain chill evening
the last time that he visited the spot. He wanted to be taken to
Knollsea to meet the steamer there, and was not coming back by the same
vehicle.
It was a very different day from that of his previous journey along the
same road; different in season; different in weather; and the humour of
the observer differed yet more widely from its condition then than did
the landscape from its former hues. In due time they reached a
commanding situation upon the road, from which were visible knots and
plantations of trees on the Enckworth manor. Christopher broke the
silence.
'Lord Mountclere is still alive and well, I am told?'
'O ay. He'll live to be a hundred. Never such a change as has come over
the man of late years.'
'Indeed!'
'O, 'tis my lady. She's a one to put up with! Still, 'tis said here and
there that marrying her was the best day's work that he ever did in his
life, although she's got to be my lord and my lady both.'
'Is she happy with him?'
'She is very sharp with the pore man--about happy I don't know. He was a
good-natured old man, for all his sins, and would sooner any day lay out
money in new presents than pay it in old debts. But 'tis altered now.
'Tisn't the same place. Ah, in the old times I have seen the floor of
the servants' hall over the vamp of your boot in solid beer that we had
poured aside from the horns because we couldn't see straight enough to
pour it in. See? No, we couldn't see a hole in a ladder! And now, even
at Christmas or Whitsuntide, when a man, if ever he desires to be
overcome with a drop, would naturally wish it to be, you can walk out of
Enckworth as straight as you walked in. All her doings.'
'Then she holds the reins?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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