The Hoyden by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (best value ebook reader TXT) 📖

between upon her visiting list, and to have an actual cousin for one of them sounds promising. Tita will probably be the means of getting her into the Society for which she longs; therefore Tita is to be cultivated. She had told Tom that he must be _very_ specially delightful to Tita; Tom, so far, has seemed to find no difficulty in obeying her. To him, indeed, Tita is once more the little merry, tiny girl whom he had taught to ride and drive in those old, good, past, sweet days, when he used to spend all his vacations with his uncle.

"Will you come and help us?" says Tita, turning to Gower.

That young man spreads his arms abroad as if in protestation.

"What a question from you to me!" says he reproachfully.


"'Call, and I follow; I follow, _though_ I die!'"


"You're too silly for anything," returns she most ungratefully, turning her back upon him.

"'Twas ever thus,'" says Mr. Gower, who seems to be in a poetical mood. "Yet what have I done?"

"Oh, nothing--nothing!" cries Tita petulantly. "It is only the day! Surely it would depress anyone!"

Her eyes wandered down the room, and are now fixed upon the curtains that hide the window where Mrs. Bethune and her husband are conversing.

"Anyone but _me!"_ says Mr. Gower, with an exalted air. "I was up early this morning to----"

"Up early! I like that! When _were_ you up?" asks Mrs. Chichester, between whom and Randal there is always a living feud. "Why, you can't get up even on Sundays, I hear, to be in time for service!"

"What it is to be clever!" says Mr. Gower, looking at her with enthusiastic admiration. "One hears _so much"_--pause--"that isn't true!"

"That's a mere put off," says she. "When were you up this morning? Come now--honour bright!"

"At shriek of day," says Gower with dignity. "Were _you_ ever up at that time?"

"Never!" says Mrs. Chichester, laughing.

She has evidently that best of all things--a sense of humour; she gives in.

"Well, I was. I wish I hadn't been," says Mr. Gower. "When I opened my window the rain beat upon me so hard that I felt it was a sort of second edition kind of thing when I took my bath later on."

"I'm so sorry the weather is turning out so horrid," says Tita.

"I don't see why you should ever be sorry about anything," says Tom Hescott, in his slow, musical voice.

"Don't you?" She turns to him in a little quick way--a way that brings her back to that hateful window down below there. "You are right," she laughs gaily. It seems as if she had really cast that window and its occupants behind her for ever. "Well, I _won't_ be. By-the-by, I told you all that we are to go to a dance at Lady Warbeck's on Thursday week? Thursday!--yes. Thursday week."

"I remember! How delightful!" cries Mrs. Chichester.

"Lady Warbeck! I know her," says Gower; "she has a son!"

"Yes--a son."

"Oh, _do_ go on! Lady Rylton, do tell us about him," says Mrs. Chichester, who is ever in search of fresh fields and pastures new.


CHAPTER XVII.

HOW TITA SUGGESTS A GAME OF BLIND MAN'S BUFF, AND WHAT COMES OF IT.


"Well, I hardly can," says Tita, struggling with her memory. "He seems a big man, with--_airs_, you know, and--and----"

"Trousers!" puts in Mr. Gower. "I assure you," looking confidently around him, "the checks on his trousers are so loud, that one can hear him _rattle_ as he walks."

"Oh! is that the Mr. Warbeck?" says Minnie. "I know; I met him in town last July."

"You met a hero of romance, then," says Gower. "That is, a thing out of the common."

"I know him too," says Mrs. Chichester, who has been thinking. "A big man, a sort of giant?"

"A horrid man!" says Tita.

Mrs. Chichester looks at her as if amused.

"Why horrid?" asks she.

"Oh, I don't know," says Tita, shrugging her shoulders. "I didn't like him, anyway."

"I'm sure I'm not surprised," says Tom Hescott.

He takes a step closer to Tita, as if to protect her. It seems hideous to him that she should have to discuss--that she should even have known him.

"Well, neither am I," says Mrs. Chichester. "He _is _horrid, and as ugly as the----" She had the grace to stop here, and change her sentence. "As ugly can be."

It is a lame conclusion, but she is consoled for it by the fact that some of her audience understand what the natural end of that sentence would have been.

"And what manners!" says she. "After all," with a pretty little shake of her head, "what can you expect of a man with hair as red as a carrot?"

"Decency, at all events," says Tom Hescott coldly.

"Oh! That--last of all," says Mrs. Chichester.

"Lady Warbeck is a very charming old lady," says Margaret Knollys, breaking into the conversation with a view to changing it.

"Yes," says Mrs. Chichester. She laughs mischievously. "And such a delightful contrast to her son! She is so good."

"She's funny, isn't she?" says Tita, throwing back her lovely little head, and laughing as if at some late remembrance.

"No; good--_good!"_ insists Mrs. Chichester. "Captain Marryatt, were you with me when she called that day in town? No? Oh! _well,"_ with a little glance meant for him alone--a glance that restores him at once to good humour, and his position as her slave once more--"you ought to have been."

"What did she say, then?" asks Minnie Hescott.

"Nothing to signify, really. But as a contrast to her son, she is perhaps, as Lady Rylton has just said, 'funny.' It was about a book--a book we are all reading nowadays; and she said she couldn't recommend it to me, as it _bordered_ on impropriety! I was so enchanted."

"I know the book you mean," says Mrs. Bethune, who has just sauntered up to them in her slow, graceful fashion.

"Well, of course," says Mrs. Chichester. "Such nonsense condemning it! As if anybody worried about impropriety nowadays. Why, it has gone out of fashion. It is an exploded essence. Nobody gives it a thought."

"That is _fatally true,"_ says old Miss Gower in a sepulchral tone. She has been sitting in a corner near them, knitting sedulously until now. But now she uplifts her voice. She uplifts her eyes, too, and fixes them on Mrs. Chichester the frivolous. "Do your own words never make you shiver?" asks she austerely.

"Never," gaily; "I often wish they would in warm weather."

Miss Gower uprears herself.

"Be careful, woman! be careful!" says she gloomily. "There is a warmer climate in store for some of us than has been ever known on earth!"

She turns aside abruptly, and strides from the room.

Randal Gower gives way to mirth, and so do most of the others. Mrs. Chichester, it is true, laughs a little, but Tita can see that the laughter is somewhat forced.

She goes quickly up to her and slips her hand into hers.

"Don't mind her," says she. "As if a little word here and there would count, when one has a good heart, and I know you have one. We shall all go to heaven, I think, don't you? Don't mind what she hinted about--about that other place, you know."

"Eh?" says Mrs. Chichester, staring at her as if astonished.

"I _saw_ you didn't like it," says Tita.

"Well, I didn't," says Mrs. Chichester, pouting.

"No, of course, one wouldn't."

"One wouldn't what?"

"Like to be told that one would have to go to--_you_ know."

"Oh, I see," says Mrs. Chichester, with some disgust. "Is that what you mean? Oh, I shouldn't care a fig about that!"

"About what, then?" asks Tita anxiously.

"Well, I didn't like to be called _a woman!"_ says Mrs. Chichester, frowning.

"Oh!" says Tita.

"Lady Rylton, where are you? You said you were going to get up blind man's buff," cries someone at this moment.

"Yes, yes, indeed. Maurice, will you come and help us?" says Tita, seeing her husband, and going to him gladly, as a means of getting out of her ridiculous interview with Mrs. Chichester, which has begun to border on burlesque.

"Certainly," says Sir Maurice; he speaks rapidly, eagerly, as if desirous of showing himself devoted to any project of hers.

"Well, then, come on--come on," cries she, gaily beckoning to her guests right and left, and carrying them off, a merry train, to the ball-room.

"Now, who'll be blinded first?" asks Mr. Gower, who has evidently constituted himself Master of the Ceremonies.

"You!" cries Miss Hescott.

"Not at all. There is only one fair way of arranging that," says Tita. "I'll show you. Now," turning to her husband, "make them all catch hands, Maurice--all in a ring, don't you know--and I'll show you."

They all catch hands; there is a slight tussle between Captain Marryatt and Mr. Gower (who is nothing if not a born nuisance wherever he goes), as to which of them is to take Mrs. Chichester's right hand. This, providentially, is arranged by Mr. Gower's giving in, and consenting on a grimace from her to take her _left_ hand. Not that he wants it. Tom Hescott has shown himself desirous of taking Tita's small fingers into his possession for the time being, at all events--a fact pointed out to Rylton by Mrs. Bethune with a low, amused little laugh; but Tita had told him to go away, as she couldn't give her hand to _anybody_ for a moment, as she was going to have the conduct of the affair.

"Now, are you all ready?" asks she, and seeing them standing in a circle, hands entwined, she runs suddenly to Maurice, disengages his hand from Mrs. Bethune's with a little airy grace, gives her right hand to the latter, and the left to Maurice, and, having so joined the broken ring again, leans forward.

"Now," cries she gaily, her lovely little face lit up with excitement, "who ever the _last_ word comes to, he or she will have to hunt us! See?"

She takes her right hand from Mrs. Bethune's, that she may point her little forefinger at each one in succession, and begins her incantation with Mr. Gower, who is directly opposite to her, nodding her head at each mystic word; and, indeed, so far as the beginning of it goes, this strange chant of hers mystifies everybody--everybody except Tom Hescott, who has played this game with her before, in the not so very distant past--Tom Hescott, who is now gazing at her with a most profound regard, all his soul in his eyes, oblivious of the fact that two pairs of eyes, at all events, are regarding _him _very curiously.


"Hena, Dena, Dina, Dus."


"Good heavens!" interrupts Mr. Gower, with extravagant admiration. "What command of language! I"--to miss Hescott--"didn't know she was a linguist, did you?"


"Calto, Wheela, Kila, Kus."


"Oh, I say!" murmurs Mr. Gower faintly. "It can't be right, can it, to say 'cuss words' at us like that? Oh, really, Rylton, _would _you mind if I retired?"


"Hot pan, Mustard, Jan,
Tiddledum, taddledum, twenty-one,
You raise up the latch, and walk straight out."


The last word