Dorrien of Cranston. Mitford Bertram
that,” answered the eldest of the three, with a slightly scared look around. “If anyone were to hear you, what would be said?”
“That a man’s foes are they of his own household,” came the reply with a merry, ringing laugh. “That if our dad must give us such a long and elaborate function on so heavenly a morning as this, he might at least let us off a twenty minutes sermon.”
Even more startled looked the remonstrant, as at the moment some acquaintances passed within earshot. What if they should have heard?
“It’s no use shaking your solemn old head at me, Margaret,” went on the first speaker. “I meant what I said, and I don’t care who knows it. Now we shan’t have time for a walk.”
Margaret Ingelow made no reply. She was a fair, good-looking girl of twenty-five, with a thoughtful, refined face. Her bright young sister’s levity often jarred upon her uncomfortably when exercised upon sacred or ecclesiastical subjects, for which she herself entertained the profoundest reverence. Left motherless at an early age, upon her had devolved the care of the younger children, and this, combined with her position as head of the household, had endowed the rector’s eldest daughter with a gravity of thought and manner beyond her years.
“Olive, look! Who is that, I wonder!” exclaimed Sophie, aged seventeen.
“That” was a masculine figure a little in front on the opposite side of the street, for they had left the churchyard now. Olive, following her sister’s glance, recognised the stranger who had attracted her notice in church.
“Perhaps someone down here for the Whitsun holidays,” struck in Margaret’s quiet voice. But for some occult reason the remark was received by Olive with a little frown.
“In other words, something between a cheap trippist and a bank clerk,” she said. “No—not exactly.”
“Keep your temper, Olive dear,” laughed Sophie maliciously. “We didn’t know the subject was a tender one or we’d have—”
“Why, what a pace you girls walk at!” cried a cheery voice behind them. “I thought I should have to return home in my own sweet society.”
“Oh, father, there you are at last,” cried Margaret, stopping as the rector joined them. “We quite thought it would be of no use waiting.”
“That tiresome Mr Barnes always keeps you prosing in the vestry for half an hour,” struck in Sophie. “What an old bore he is! I can’t see the use of churchwardens at all.”
“Our friends at the Radical club do, dear,” rejoined her father with a twinkle in his eyes. “How on earth would they emphasise their arguments without a goodly number of ‘churchwardens’ to smash?”
“Now, father, you know I don’t mean that kind of churchwarden, so don’t try and be sarcastic,” cried Sophie. And the rector burst into a hearty laugh.
It is a pleasant sight that quartette wending homewards along the sunny street already given over to the stillness of a provincial town at the Sunday dinner hour. The girls in their light, tasteful summer dresses looking as fresh and cool as roses on which the dew yet lingers, grouped around the tall upright form of their father, who, with one hand thrust in easy attitude through the sash of his long flowing cassock, walked among them looking supremely happy and contented, now and again bestowing a nod and a pleasant smile in response to the greeting of some passer-by.
“Father,” said Olive, thrusting her hand through the rector’s arm and nestling up to his side with the most bewitchingly affectionate gesture. “Do you know you’re a dear, sweet old dad, and I’m very proud of you?”
“And wherefore this sudden honour, darling?” enquired he, gazing down into her upturned face with a fond smile. He was afraid to own to himself how he loved this beautiful, wayward second daughter, who tyrannised over him in all things domestic, to an incredible extent. For the fact must be recorded that this one was the spoilt child of the house.
“You sang the service beautifully to-day—and it was worth something to hear you,” she replied. “And yet you want to make us believe you are losing your voice—like Mr Medlicott, who can’t even monotone on G without getting flat.”
“My dear little critic, perhaps it is that Medlicott has more to worry him than I. Though to be sure he is spared such a dreadful little plague as this,” rejoined the rector with his sunny laugh, pressing the arm, passed through his, to his side.
“Oh, indeed! Well then, for that let me tell you you gave us too long a sermon,” she retorted.
“Did I? It was only eighteen minutes.”
“Far too long. Look now. We are done out of our walk all through that. And just look what a heavenly day it is.”
“Poor little things!”
Margaret, turning her head, encountered her father’s ruefully comic, mock-penitent glance, and was hardly reassured. She regarded his sacred office as so great—so tremendous—a thing, that to hear him taken to task by this giddy child in his discharge of it always grated upon her. And all accustomed to this kind of talk as she was, yet she felt uncomfortable under it. For she was pre-eminently one of those who took life seriously. But the rector and his favourite daughter thoroughly understood each other.
“Goodness!” cried Sophie, as a neat brougham drawn by a pair of fine greys swept past them. “Why if that isn’t the Dorriens’ carriage.”
“Surely they weren’t in church!” said Margaret wonderingly.
“Hardly, I think,” said the rector, with a lurking smile and a flash of quiet merriment in his dark eyes. “Poor Mrs Dorrien looks upon the parish church as a very well of iniquity—and myself, the Pope, and a certain personage who shall be nameless, as an excellently matched trio.”
“Old pig!” muttered Olive to herself.
“Why then, it must have been Hubert Dorrien after all,” said Sophie. “I thought it was, but he was too far back to be sure. Every time I looked round I caught that detestable eyeglass glaring at me.”
“‘Every time’—ahem! And pray how many times was that?” said her father, drily.
“Oh, there now, I’ve done it,” cried Sophie with a laugh and a blush. “But it was only once or twice as the procession was coming round, and that was all behind us, so we couldn’t see anything of it unless we did look back. Will that satisfy you, dad, dear?”
“Well explained!” said the rector with a hearty laugh. “We must let her down easily on a great occasion, mustn’t we, Margaret?”
“But all the same that Hubert Dorrien angers me—he looks so conceited and supercilious always,” went on Sophie. “He’s a horrid boy?”
“‘Boy!’ Why hear her! Why he’s five years older than you, Sophie,” laughed her father.
“Well then he doesn’t look it,” retorted she. “And he’s always tied to his mother’s apron-string.”
“I wonder what Roland, the eldest one, is like,” said Margaret; “the one in America. I wonder he doesn’t come home.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t get on well at home,” suggested Olive. “But I wish he would come. He’s sure to be nice, if only as a change from his utterly horrid family. And nice people—or at any rate nice men—are conspicuous here by their absence.”
The rector frowned ever so slightly—for his favourite daughter added to her other peccadilloes a decided penchant for flirtation. But like a wise man he said nothing, and by this time they had reached the gates of their pretty and cheerful-looking home.
Chapter Four.