Aunt Deborah | Page 5

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, composed of those gems of flowers, the scarlet pimpernel, and the blue anagallis, the rosy star of the wild geranium, with its aromatic crimson-tipped leaves, the snowy star of the white ochil, and that