Now it was not extraordinary that Squire Lavington had ‘assimilated’ a couple of bottles of Carbonel’s best port; for however abstemious the new lord himself might be, he felt for the habits, and for the vote of an old-fashioned Whig squire. Nor was it extraordinary that he fell fast asleep the moment he got into the carriage; nor, again, that his wife and daughters were not solicitous about waking him; nor, on the other hand, that the coachman and footman, who were like all the squire’s servants, of the good old sort, honest, faithful, boozing, extravagant, happy-go-lucky souls, who had ‘been about the place these forty years,’ were somewhat owlish and unsteady on the box. Nor was it extraordinary that there was a heavy storm of lightning, for that happened three times a-week in the chalk hills the summer through; nor, again, that under these circumstances the horses, who were of the squire’s own breeding, and never thoroughly broke (nothing was done thoroughly at Whitford), went rather wildly home, and that the carriage swung alarmingly down the steep hills, and the boughs brushed the windows rather too often. But it was extraordinary that Mrs. Lavington had cast off her usual primness, and seemed to-night, for the first time in her life, in an exuberant good humour, which she evinced by snubbing her usual favourite Honoria, and lavishing caresses on Argemone, whose vagaries she usually regarded with a sort of puzzled terror, like a hen who has hatched a duckling.

‘Honoria, take your feet off my dress. Argemone, my child, I hope you spent a pleasant evening?’

Argemone answered by some tossy commonplace.

A pause — and then Mrs. Lavington recommenced —

‘How very pleasing that poor young Lord Vieuxbois is, after all!’

‘I thought you disliked him so much.’

‘His opinions, my child; but we must hope for the best. He seems moral and well inclined, and really desirous of doing good in his way; and so successful in the House, too, I hear.’

‘To me,’ said Argemone, ‘he seems to want life, originality, depth, everything that makes a great man. He knows nothing but what he has picked up ready-made from books. After all, his opinions are the one redeeming point in him.’

‘Ah, my dear, when it pleases Heaven to open your eyes, you will see as I do!’

Poor Mrs. Lavington! Unconscious spokeswoman for the ninety-nine hundredths of the human race! What are we all doing from morning to night, but setting up our own fancies as the measure of all heaven and earth, and saying, each in his own dialect, Whig, Radical, or Tory, Papist or Protestant, ‘When it pleases Heaven to open your eyes you will see as I do’?

‘It is a great pity,’ went on Mrs. Lavington, meditatively, ‘to see a young man so benighted and thrown away. With his vast fortune, too — such a means of good! Really we ought to have seen a little more of him. I think Mr. O’Blareaway’s conversation might be a blessing to him. I think of asking him over to stay a week at Whitford, to meet that sainted young man.’

Now Argemone did not think the Reverend Panurgus O’Blareaway, incumbent of Lower Whitford, at all a sainted young man, but, on the contrary, a very vulgar, slippery Irishman; and she had, somehow, tired of her late favourite, Lord Vieuxbois; so she answered tossily enough —

‘Really, mamma, a week of Lord Vieuxbois will be too much. We shall be bored to death with the Cambridge Camden Society, and ballads for the people.’

‘I think, my dear,’ said Mrs. Lavington (who had, half unconsciously to herself, more reasons than one for bringing the young lord to Whitford), ‘I think, my dear, that his conversation, with all its faults, will be a very improving change for your father. I hope he’s asleep.’

The squire’s nose answered for itself.

‘Really, what between Mr. Smith, and Colonel Bracebridge, and their very ineligible friend, Mr. Mellot, whom I should never have allowed to enter my house if I had suspected his religious views, the place has become a hotbed of false doctrine and heresy. I have been quite frightened when I have heard their conversation at dinner, lest the footmen should turn infidels!’

‘Perhaps, mamma,’ said Honoria, slyly, ‘Lord Vieuxbois might convert them to something quite as bad. How shocking if old Giles, the butler, should turn Papist!’

‘Honoria, you are very silly. Lord Vieuxbois, at least can be trusted. He has no liking for low companions. He is above joking with grooms, and taking country walks with gamekeepers.’

It was lucky that it was dark, for Honoria and Argemone both blushed crimson.

‘Your poor father’s mind has been quite unsettled by all their ribaldry. They have kept him so continually amused, that all my efforts to bring him to a sense of his awful state have been more unavailing than ever.’

Poor Mrs. Lavington! She had married, at eighteen, a man far her inferior in intellect; and had become — as often happens in such cases — a prude and a devotee. The squire, who really admired and respected her, confined his disgust to sly curses at the Methodists (under which name he used to include every species of religious earnestness, from Quakerism to that of Mr. Newman). Mrs. Lavington used at first to dignify these disagreeables by the name of persecution, and now she was trying to convert the old man by coldness, severity, and long curtain-lectures, utterly unintelligible to their victim, because couched in the peculiar conventional phraseology of a certain school. She forgot, poor earnest soul, that the same form of religion which had captivated a disappointed girl of twenty, might not be the most attractive one for a jovial old man of sixty.

Argemone, who a fortnight before would have chimed in with all her mother’s lamentations, now felt a little nettled and jealous. She could not bear to hear Lancelot classed with the colonel.

‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘if amusement is bad for my father, he is not likely to get much of it during Lord Vieuxbois’s stay. But, of course, mamma, you will do as you please.’

‘Of course I shall, my dear,’ answered the good lady, in a tragedy-queen tone. ‘I shall only take the liberty of adding, that it is very painful to me to find you adding to the anxiety which your unfortunate opinions give me, by throwing every possible obstacle in the way of my plans for your good.’

Argemone burst into proud tears (she often did so after a conversation with her mother). ‘Plans for my good!’— And an unworthy suspicion about her mother crossed her mind, and was peremptorily expelled again. What turn the conversation would have taken next, I know not, but at that moment Honoria and her mother uttered a fearful shriek, as their side of the carriage jolted half-way up the bank, and stuck still in that pleasant position.

The squire awoke, and the ladies simultaneously clapped their hands to their ears, knowing what was coming. He thrust his head out of the window, and discharged a broadside of at least ten pounds’ worth of oaths (Bow Street valuation) at the servants, who were examining the broken wheel, with a side volley or two at Mrs. Lavington for being frightened. He often treated her and Honoria to that style of oratory. At Argemone he had never sworn but once since she left the nursery, and was so frightened at the consequences, that he took care never to do it again.

But there they were fast, with a broken wheel, plunging horses, and a drunken coachman. Luckily for them, the colonel and Lancelot were following close behind, and came to their assistance.

The colonel, as usual, solved the problem.

‘Your dog-cart will carry four, Smith?’

‘It will.’

‘Then let the ladies get in, and Mr. Lavington drive them home.’

‘What?’ said the squire, ‘with both my hands red-hot with the gout? You must drive three of us, colonel, and one of us must walk.’

‘I will walk,’ said Argemone, in her determined way.

Mrs. Lavington began something about propriety, but was stopped with another pound’s worth of oaths by the squire, who, however, had tolerably recovered his good humour, and hurried Mrs. Lavington and Honoria, laughingly, into the dog-cart, saying &............