Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
“That is as you please, and as Mr.--as the heir pleases,” Miss Susan
said, making a pause before the last words. Her cheek colored, her blue
eyes grew warm with the new life and energy in her. She went out of the
kitchen with a certain swell of anticipated triumph in her whole person.
Mr. Farrel-Austin should soon discover that he was not to have
everything his own way. Probably she would find he had deceived the old
man at Bruges, that these poor people knew nothing about the true value
of what they were relinquishing. Curiously enough, it never occurred to
her, to lessen her exhilaration, that to leave the house of her fathers
to an old linen-draper from the Low-Countries would be little more
agreeable than to leave it to Farrel-Austin--nay, even as Everard had
suggested to her, that Farrel-Austin, as being an English gentleman, was
much more likely to do honor to the old house than a foreigner of
inferior position, and ideas altogether different from her own. She
thought nothing of this; she ignored herself, indeed, in the matter,
which was a thing she was pleased to think of afterward, and which gave
her a little consolation--that is, she thought of herself only through
Farrel-Austin, as the person most interested in, and most likely to be
gratified by, his downfall.
As the day wore on and the sun got round and blazed on the south front
of the house, she withdrew to the porch, as on the former day, and sat
there enjoying the coolness, the movement of the leaves, the soft,
almost imperceptible breeze. She was more light-hearted than on the
previous day when poor Herbert was in her mind, and when nothing but the
success of her adversary seemed possible. Now it seemed to her that a
new leaf was turned, a new chapter commenced.
Thus the day went on. In the afternoon she had one visitor, and only
one, the vicar, Mr. Gerard, who came by the north gate, as her visitors
yesterday had done, and crossed the lawn to the porch with much less
satisfaction of mind than Miss Susan had to see him coming.
“Of course you know what has brought me,” he said at once, seating
himself in a garden-chair which had been standing outside on the lawn,
and which he brought in after his first greeting. “This chantry of your
sister’s is a thing I don’t understand, and I don’t know how I can
consent to it. It is alien to all the customs of the time. It is a thing
that ought to have been built three hundred years ago, if at all. It
will be a bit of bran new Gothic, a thing I detest; and in short I don’t
understand it, nor what possible meaning a chantry can have in these
days.”
“Neither do I,” said Miss Susan smiling, “not the least in the world.”
“If it is meant for masses for the dead,” said Mr. Gerard--“some people
I know have gone as far as that--but I could not consent to it, Miss
Austin. It should have been built three hundred years ago, if at all.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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