CHAPTER III.

"What a state your boots are in!" exclaimed Castalia, pausing at the foot of the stairs, which she happened to be descending as her husband entered the house. "And why did you come by the back way?"

"I was worried, and did not wish to meet people and be chattered to. I thought the meadow-path would be quiet, and so it was."

"Quiet! Yes; but how horribly muddy! Do change your wet boots at once, Ancram!"

There was little need for her to insist on this proceeding. Algernon hastened to his room, pulled off his wet boots, and desired that they should be thrown away.

"They can be dried and cleaned, sir," said plump-faced Lydia, aghast at this order.

"My good girl you may do what you please with them. I shall never wear them again. Slight boots of that sort that have once been wet through become shapeless, don't you understand? Take them away."

When the master of the house descended to the drawing-room, he found a paper, squarely folded in the shape of a letter, lying in a conspicuous position on the centre table. It was Mr. Gladwish the shoemaker's bill, accompanied by an urgent request for immediate payment.

"More wall-paper, Cassy," said her husband, flinging himself on the sofa.

"Do you know, Lydia tells me the man was quite insolent!" said Castalia. "What can be done with such people? They don't seem to me to have the least idea who we are!"

"Oh, confound the brutes! Don't let us talk about them!"

But Castalia continued to talk about them in a strain of mingled wonder and disgust. She did not cease until dinner was announced, and Algernon was by that time so thoroughly wearied by his conjugal tête-à-tête, that he even received with something like satisfaction the announcement that Castalia expected the Misses Rose and Violet McDougall to pass the evening at Ivy Lodge.

"I daresay your mother will come too," said Castalia, "and bring Rhoda Maxfield with her. I asked her."

"Rhoda? Why on earth do you invite that little Maxfield?"

"What is your objection to her, Ancram?"

"Oh, I have no objection to her in the world. But I should not have thought she was precisely the sort of person to suit you."

"That's exactly what Miss Bodkin says! Miss Bodkin tried to keep Rhoda apart from me, I am perfectly sure. And I can't fathom her motive. And now you say the same sort of thing. However, I always notice that you echo her words. But I don't intend to be guided by Miss Bodkin's likes and dislikes. I haven't the same opinion of Miss Bodkin's wisdom that the people have here, and I shall choose my friends for myself. It's quite absurd, the fuss that is made in this place about Miss Bodkin; absolutely sickening. Rose McDougall is the only person of the whole set who seems to keep her senses on the subject."

"Rose McDougall will never lose her senses from admiration of another woman," returned Algernon. And then the colloquy was broken up by the arrival of the Misses McDougall, clogged and cloaked, and attended by their maid-servant. After having exchanged greetings with these ladies, Algernon withdrew, murmuring something about going to smoke his cigar.

"You'll not be long, Ancram, shall you?" said his wife, in a complaining tone. But he disappeared from the room without replying to her.

"I'm so dreadfully afraid that I drive your husband away when I come here, my dear," said Rose McDougall with a spiteful glance at Algernon's retreating figure.

"Good gracious, no! He doesn't think of minding you at all."

"Oh, I daresay he does not mind me; does not think me of importance enough to be taken any notice of. But I cannot help observing that he always keeps out of the way as much as possible when I am spending an evening here."

"Nonsense!" said Castalia, tranquilly continuing to string steel beads on to red silk for the manufacture of a purse.

"You might as well say that it is I who drive Mr. Errington away, Rose," put in Violet.

"Not at all!" returned her sister, with sudden sharpness. "That's quite a different matter."

"I don't see why, Rose!"

The true answer to this remark, in the elder Miss McDougall's mind, would have been, "You are so utterly insignificant, compared with me, that you are effaced in my company, and are neither liked nor disliked on your own merits." But she could not quite say that, so she merely repeated with increased sharpness, "That's a very different matter."

Rose McDougall was one of those persons who prefer animosity to indifference. That any one should simply not care about her was a suggestion so intolerable that she was wont to declare of persons who did not show any special desire for her society, that they hated her. She was sure Mr. A. detested the sight of her, and Miss B. was her bitter enemy. But, perhaps, in Algernon's case, she had more reason for declaring he disliked her than in many others. He did in truth object to the sort of influence she exercised over Castalia. He knew that Castalia was insatiably curious about even the most trifling details of his past life in Whitford; and he knew that Miss McDougall was very capable of misrepresenting—even of innocently misrepresenting—many circumstances and persons in such a way as to irritate Castalia's easily-aroused jealousy; and Castalia's easily-aroused jealousy was an element of discomfort in his daily life. In a word, there had arisen since his marriage a smouldering sort of hostility between him and Rose McDougall. But he was far from conceiving the acrid nature of her feelings towards him. For his part, he laughed at her a little in a playful way, and contradicted her, and, above all, he did not permit her to bore him by exacting any attention from him which he was disinclined to pay. But there was no bitterness in all that. None in the world!

Only he did not reckon on the bitterness excited in Miss Rose's breast by being laughed at and neglected. The graceful and charming way in which the laughter and neglect were accomplished by no means mollified the sting of them; a point which graceful and charming persons would do well sometimes to consider, but to which they are often singularly blind.

"And what have you been doing with yourself all day, Castalia dear?" asked Violet with a great display of affection.

"Oh—what can one do with oneself in this horrid hole?"

"To be sure!" responded Violet. But she responded rather uncertainly. To her, Whitford seemed by no means a horrid hole. She had been content enough to live there for many years—ever since her uncle had brought her and her sister from Scotland in their mourning clothes, and received his orphan nieces into his home.

"Don't speak of it, my dear!" exclaimed Rose, on whom the reminiscences of the years spent in Whitford wrought by no means a softening effect. "What possessed Uncle James to stick himself down in this place, of all places, I cannot conjecture. He might as well have buried us girls alive at once."

"Oh, well, I suppose you have had time enough to get used to it," said Castalia, coolly. "Violet, will you ring the bell? It is close to you. Thank you.—Lydia," when the girl appeared, "where is your master?"

"In the dining-room, ma'am."

"What is he doing?"

"Smoking and reading, ma'am."

"Go and ask him to come here, with my love."

"How the woman worrits him! She doesn't leave him a minute's peace," was Lydia's comment to the cook on this embassy.

"She worrits everybody, in her slow, crawley kind o' way; but I'm sorry for her sometimes, too. It's a trying thing to care more for a person's little finger than a person cares for your whole body and soul," returned Polly, who had a kind of broad good-nature and candour. But Lydia felt no sympathy with her mistress, and maintained that it was all her own fault then! What did she be always nagging at him for?—having that pitiless contempt for other women's mistakes in the management of their husbands which is not uncommon with her sex.

Some such thoughts as Lydia's probably passed through the minds of the Misses McDougall, but, of course, that was not the time or place to express them. They exerted themselves to entertain their hostess with a variety of Whitford gossip, while Castalia—her attention divided between the purse she was making and the drawing-room door, at which she hoped to see her husband presently appear—merely threw in a languid interjection now and then as her contribution to the conversation.

At length she rose, and flung the crimson and steel purse down on the table.

"Do you want anything, dear?" asked the obliging Violet with officious alacrity.

"No; I shan't be long gone. Sit still, Violet."

"She's gone to implore her husband to honour us with a little of his society," whispered Rose, when Castalia had shut the door. "I'm certain of it. More fool she!"

The sisters sat silent for a few minutes. Then they heard the door of the dining-room open, as though Castalia were coming back, and the sound of voices. Rose was seated nearest to the door, which was separated from that of the little dining-room opposite by a very narrow passage, and she distinctly heard Algernon say, "Pooh! The old girl doesn't want me." And again, "Says I hate her? Nonsense! I look on her with the veneration due to her years and virtues." And then Castalia said, "Well, she can't help her years. Besides, that's not the question. You ought to come, for my sake. It's very unkind of you, Ancram." After that there was a lower murmur of speech, as though the speakers had changed their places in the room, and Rose was able to distinguish no more.

When Mrs. Algernon Errington returned to the drawing-room, she found Violet in her old seat near the pianoforte; but Rose had shifted her position, and was standing near the window.

"What are you doing there, Rose? Enjoying the prospect?" asked Castalia. The shutters were not closed, but, as the night was very dark, there certainly did not seem to be any inducement to look out of the window.

"Can't you persuade your husband to come, dear? I'm so sorry!" said Rose, turning round; and her sister looked up quickly at the sound of her voice, which, to Violet's accustomed ear, betrayed in its inflections suppressed anger. Her face, too, was crimson, and her little light blue eyes sparkled with unusual brightness.

Castalia, however, noticed none of these things. "Oh, he'll come presently," she said. "He really was finishing a cigar. I told him that you were offended with him, and——"

"I offended with your husband? Oh dear no! Why on earth should I be? You ought not to have said that, Castalia."

"Well, you thought he was offended with you, or something of the sort. It's all the same," returned Castalia, with her air of weary indifference. "And he says it's nonsense."

"My dear, I am only sorry on your account that he won't come. Really, to myself, it matters very little; very little indeed. What a pity that you have not some one to amuse him! We are none of us clever enough, that is clear."

"Oh, you are quite mistaken if you think Ancram cares particularly for clever women!" said Castalia, whose thoughts instantly reverted to Minnie Bodkin. "Even Miss Bodkin, whom everybody declares to be such a wonder of talent, bores him sometimes, I can tell you. Of course he has known her from his childhood, and all that; but he said to me only yesterday that she was conceited, and too fond of preaching. So you see! I daresay, poor thing, she fancies all the time that she is enchanting him by her wisdom."

"Dear me," said Violet timidly, and with a sort of strangled sigh. "I think that, as a rule, gentlemen don't like any kind of women except pretty women! Though, to be sure, Minnie is handsome enough if it wasn't for her affliction."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of Minnie," said Rose, viciously twitching at her sewing thread. "I meant it was a pity there was no one here who was clever enough, and who thought it worth while, to play off pretty airs and graces for Mr. Errington's amusement. That's the kind of cleverness that attracts men. And your husband, my dear, was always remarkably fond of flirting."

Violet opened her eyes in astonishment, and, from her place a little behind Castalia, made a warning grimace to her sister; but Rose only responded by a defiant toss of the head. Castalia's attention was now effectually aroused, and although she still spoke in the querulous drawl that was natural to her (or had become so from long habit), it was with a countenance earnestly addressed to her interlocutor, instead of, as hitherto, with carelessly averted eyes. "I never heard any one say before that Ancram was fond of flirting," she said.

"I should have thought it was not necessary to hear it. You might see it for yourself; unless, indeed, he is very sly about it in your presence. He, he, he!"

"See it for myself? Why—there's nobody here for him to flirt with!"

This na?ve ignoring of any pretensions on the part of her present guests to be eligible for the purposes of flirtation was not lost on Rose.

"Not many who would flirt with a married man. No, I hope and believe not! But there are many kinds of flirtation, you know. There's the soft and sentimental, the shy, sweet sixteen style—little Miss Maxfield's style, for instance."

"Rhoda!"

"Yes; that is her name, I believe. I have never been intimate with the young person myself. Uncle James has always been very particular as to whom we associated with. However, since you have taken her up, my dear, I suppose she may be considered visitable."

"We have met her at Dr. Bodkin's, you know, Rose," put in Violet, who was looking and listening with a distressed expression of face.

"Oh yes; I believe Minnie asked her there at first to please Algernon. Minnie can be good-natured in that sort of way. But I don't know that it was very judicious."

"Why should you suppose it was to please my husband that Rhoda was invited to the Bodkins?" asked Castalia. "I don't see that at all. The girl might have been asked to please Miss Bodkin. I daresay she had heard of her from Mrs. Errington. Mrs. Errington is always raving about her."

Rose smiled with tightly-closed lips, and nodded. "To be sure! Poor dear Mrs. Errington—I mean no disrespect to your mother-in-law, Castalia, who is really a superior woman, only in some things she is as blind as a bat."

Castalia's sallow face was paler than ever. Her nostrils were dilated as if she had been running fast. "You never told me a word of this before," she said.

"My dear creature," said Rose, looking full at Castalia for the first time, "why, what was there to tell? The subject was led to by chance now, and I had not the least idea that you did not know all Algy's old love-stories. Everybody here—except, I suppose, poor dear Mrs. Errington—knew of the boy-and-girl nonsense between him and that little thing. But of course it never was serious. That was out of the question."

"I don't believe it!" said Castalia, suddenly.

"Well, I daresay the thing was exaggerated, as so often happens. For my part, I never could see what there was in the girl to make so many people admire her. A certain freshness, perhaps; and some men do think a great deal of that pink-and-white sort of insipidity."

"At all events, Ancram does not care about her now," said Castalia, speaking in broken sentences, and twisting her watch-chain nervously backwards and forwards in her fingers.

"Oh, of course not! I daresay he never did care about her in earnest. But that sort of philandering is a little dangerous, isn't it?"

"He does not like me to ask her to the house even."

"Doesn't he?"

"No; he has said so more or less plainly several times. He said so this very evening."

"Did he, indeed? Well, I really am glad to hear it. I scarcely gave Algy—Mr. Errington—credit for so much—prudence!"

"Mrs. Errington and Miss Maxfield," announced Lydia at the door of the drawing-room.