‘You’re decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,’ the vindictive little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him at the steps of a certain hotel.
‘Best hotel in the town!’ Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta, reading her constraint with this comical object before her. It was the admiral’s hotel they stopped at.
‘Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss Mr. Woodseer’s fly,’ Livia mildly addressed her squire. He stared: again he had to go, muttering: ‘That nondescript’s footman!’ and his mischance in being checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a dirty-fisted vagabond impostor astounded him. He sent the flyman to the carriage for orders.
Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended. Sir Meeson heard her cry out: ‘Is it you!’ and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack, affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,--bowing, smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the young lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker’s air; he roused the admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss Fakenham more than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of the preposterous figure he cut. Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the disintegration of his country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those clothes could be permitted to amuse English ladies of high station, quite at home with them. Among the signs of England’s downfall, this was decidedly one. What to think of the admiral’s favourite when, having his arm paternally on her shoulder, she gave the tramp her hand at parting, and then blushed! All that the ladies had to say about it was, that a spread of colour rather went to change the character of her face.
Carinthia had given Woodseer her hand and reddened under the recollection of Chillon’s words to her as they mounted the rise of the narrow vale, after leaving the lame gentleman to his tobacco on the grass below the rocks. Her brother might have counselled her wisely and was to be obeyed. Only, the great pleasure in seeing the gentleman again inspired gratitude: he brought the scene to her; and it was alive, it chatted and it beckoned; it neighboured her home; she had passed it on her walk away from her home; the gentleman was her link to the mountain paths; he was just outside an association with her father and mother. At least, her thinking of them led to him, he to them. Now that she had lost Chillon, no one was near to do so much. Besides, Chillon loved Henrietta; he was her own. His heart was hers and his mind his country’s. This gentleman loved the mountains; the sight of him breathed mountain air. To see him next day was her anticipation: for it would be at the skirts of hilly forest land, where pinetrees are a noble family, different from the dusty firs of the weariful plains, which had tired her eyes of late.