When she does understand she exclaims: “Mr. B. is the noblest of men, he has offered me marriage.”
To come back to Arabella. We wish we could find a union of epithets as telling as that of Mr. B. in the exasperation of his conscious rectitude. Inane, inert, inconvenient Arabella, fairly well describes our sentiments towards her. She is a bore and a burden. She feels the heat and goes out and takes mud-baths, and comes in and shakes herself in the drawing-room. She cannot understand why she should not lie in our laps as well as the puppies. She howls mournfully outside the kitchen door unless she is invited in to assist in the cooking. She has destroyed three arm-chair covers in the servants’ hall, preferring that resting-place to her basket. “Fond” is the word that might best be used to qualify our feelings towards her. We don’t know what to do with her, but we should not like to be without her.
Then there is the black Persian, “Bunny,” our kind dead Adam’s cat. You will meet him circling round the garden. He will raise his huge bushy tail when he sees you, and fix his inscrutable amber eyes upon you, questioningly. Then he will pass on with a soundless mew. He is looking for his master, and you can watch him slink away, superb, stealthy, pursuing his fruitless quest.
The fur children come first, being the Villino’s own family, but there are other kinds with us now. The little Belgians run about the paths calling to each other with their quaint pattering intonation, so that long before you hear the words you know by the sound of the voices coming up the hill that these are the small exiles. Brown-haired Marthe, with her childish ways and her serious mind, her ripe southern-tinted face, and Philippe, with his shock of fine hair, hazel-colour, cut medieval fashion, and his little throat, which bears his odd picturesque head as a flower-stem its bloom. And sturdy Viviane, stumping up with her solemn air, precisely naming the flowers as she comes:
“Sweet Will-li-yam! Del-phi-ni-um! Canterry bells!”
Soon Thierry, the schoolboy, will be here too. The garden is full of Easter holiday memories of him; a little perspiring boy, squaring a tree-trunk with boxing-gloves five times too large for him, under the grand-paternal tuition of the Master of the Villino. It would have been difficult to say who was the more pleased, child or man. And Thierry can box with a right good will; a very excellent little boy this, with a bursting patriot’s heart under his shy, reserved ways. No doubt he fancied he was hitting a German with each of those well-directed blows.