Rhoda Fleming | Page 9

fearful as bankruptcy (shorn of the horror of the word).
And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find Anthony displaying
humanity at all, that anything might be expected of him. "Let's see what
he will do," thought the farmer in an interval of his wrath; and the
wrath is very new which has none of these cool intervals. The passions,
do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.
As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say
that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move
into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young
housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance
with the world, would be agreeable to him. His project was that one of

his nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to
reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in
the time to come. Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite
unctuously. Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed
miser? "Tell her," he said, "there's fruit at stalls at every street-corner
all the year through--oysters and whelks, if she likes-- winkles, lots of
pictures in shops--a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on
omnibuses--bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to
see the military on horseback, if she's for soldiers." Indeed, he joked
quite comically in speaking of the famous horse-guards--warriors who
sit on their horses to be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are
trained so thoroughly. "Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red," he
wrote--"the blue only want boiling." There is reason to suppose that his
disrespectful joke was not original in him, but it displayed his character
in a fresh light. Of course, if either of the girls was to go, Dahlia was
the person. The farmer commenced his usual process of sitting upon the
idea. That it would be policy to attach one of the family to this chirping
old miser, he thought incontestable. On the other hand, he had a dread
of London, and Dahlia was surpassingly fair. He put the case to Robert,
in remembrance of what his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would
amorously stop his painful efforts to think fast enough for the occasion.
Robert, however, had nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia
depart. The only opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly,
humble relative of the farmer's, widowed out of Sussex, very loving
and fat; the cook to the household, whose waist was dimly indicated by
her apron-string; and, to aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master
Gammon, an old man with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the
slowest old man of his time--a sort of foreman of the farm before
Robert had come to take matters in hand, and thrust both him and his
master into the background. Master Gammon remarked emphatically,
once and for all, that "he never had much opinion of London." As he
had never visited London, his opinion was considered the less weighty,
but, as he advanced no further speech, the sins and backslidings of the
metropolis were strongly brought to mind by his condemnatory
utterance. Policy and Dahlia's entreaties at last prevailed with the
farmer, and so the fair girl went up to the great city.

After months of a division that was like the division of her living veins,
and when the comfort of letters was getting cold, Rhoda, having
previously pledged herself to secresy, though she could not guess why
it was commanded, received a miniature portrait of Dahlia, so beautiful
that her envy of London for holding her sister away from her, melted in
gratitude. She had permission to keep the portrait a week; it was
impossible to forbear from showing it to Mrs. Sumfit, who peeped in
awe, and that emotion subsiding, shed tears abundantly. Why it was to
be kept secret, they failed to inquire; the mystery was possibly not
without its delights to them. Tears were shed again when the portrait
had to be packed up and despatched. Rhoda lived on abashed by the
adorable new refinement of Dahlia's features, and her heart yearned to
her uncle for so caring to decorate the lovely face.
One day Rhoda was at her bed-room window, on the point of
descending to encounter the daily dumpling, which was the principal
and the unvarying item of the midday meal of the house, when she
beheld a stranger trying to turn the handle of the iron gate. Her heart
thumped. She divined correctly that it was her uncle. Dahlia had now
been absent for very many months, and Rhoda's growing fretfulness
sprang