Aunt Deborah | Page 5

deceive the dullest observer. His
very flattery had a tone of falseness that affronted the person flattered;
and Mrs. Deborah, in particular, who did not want for shrewdness,
found it so distasteful, that she would certainly have discarded him
upon that one ground of offence, had not her love of power been
unconsciously propitiated by the perception of the efforts which he
made, and the degradation to which he submitted, in the vain attempt to
please her. She liked the homage offered to "les beaux yeux de sa

cassette" pretty much as a young beauty likes the devotion extorted by
her charms, and for the sake of the incense tolerated the worshipper.
Nevertheless there were moments when the conceit which I have
mentioned as the leading characteristic of Mr. Adolphus Lynfield had
well nigh banished him from Chalcott. Piquing himself on the variety
and extent of his knowledge, the universality of his genius, he of course
paid the penalty of other universal geniuses, by being in no small
degree superficial. Not content with understanding every trade better
than those who had followed it all their lives, he had a most unlucky
propensity to put his devices into execution, and as his information was,
for the most part, picked up from the column headed "varieties," in the
county newspaper, where of course there is some chaff mingled with
the grain, and as the figments in question were generally ill understood
and imperfectly recollected, it is really surprising that the young
gentleman did not occasion more mischief than actually occurred by
the quips and quiddities which he delighted to put in practice whenever
he met with any one simple enough to permit the exercise of his talents.
Some damage he did effect by his experiments, as Mrs. Deborah found
to her cost. He killed a bed of old-fashioned spice cloves, the pride of
her heart, by salting the ground to get rid of the worms. Her broods of
geese also, and of turkeys, fell victims to a new and infallible mode of
feeding, which was to make them twice as fat in half the time.
Somehow or other, they all died under the operation. So did half a
score of fine apple-trees, under an improved method of grafting; whilst
a magnificent brown Bury pear, that covered one end of the house,
perished of the grand discovery of severing the bark to increase the
crop. He lamed Mrs. Deborah's old horse by doctoring him for a prick
in shoeing, and ruined her favourite cow, the best milch cow in the
county, by a most needless attempt to increase her milk.
Now these mischances and misdemeanors, ay, or the half of them,
would undoubtedly have occasioned Mr. Adolphus's dismission, and
the recall of poor Edward, every account of whom was in the highest
degree favourable, had the worthy miller been able to refrain from
lecturing his cousin upon her neglect of the one, and her partiality for

the other. It was really astonishing that John Stokes, a man of sagacity
in all other respects, never could understand that scolding was of all
devisable processes the least likely to succeed in carrying his point with
one who was such a proficient in that accomplishment, that if the old
penalty for female scolds, the ducking-stool, had continued in fashion,
she would have stood an excellent chance of attaining to that
distinction. But so it was. The same blood coursed through their veins,
and his tempestuous good-will and her fiery anger took the same form
of violence and passion.
Nothing but these lectures could have kept Mrs. Deborah constant in
the train of such a trumpery, jiggetting, fidgetty little personage as Mr.
Adolphus,--the more especially as her heart was assailed in its better
and softer parts, by the quiet respectfulness of Mrs. Thornly's
demeanour, who never forgot that she had experienced her protection in
the hour of need, and by the irresistible good-nature of Cicely, a
smiling, rosy, sunny-looking creature, whose only vocation in this
world seemed to be the trying to make everybody as happy as herself.
Mrs. Deborah (with such a humanising taste, she could not, in spite of
her cantankerous temper, be all bad) loved flowers: and Cicely, a rover
of the woods and fields from early childhood, and no despicable
practical gardener, took care to keep her beaupots constantly supplied
from the first snowdrop to the last china rose. Nothing was too large for
Cicely's good-will, nothing too small. Huge chimney jars of lilacs,
laburnums, horse-chestnuts, peonies, and the golden and gorgeous
double furze; china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich
wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange
marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and mignonette, from her own little
garden, or woodland posies that might beseem the hand of the faerie
queen,