Robert Elsmere | Page 9

'It is more comfortable, dear mother, and takes much less time,' said
Catherine, reddening.
'Poor Mrs. Thornburgh!' remarked Agnes dryly.
'Oh, Rose will make up!' said Catherine, glancing, not without a spark
of mischief in her gray eyes, at Rose's tortured locks; 'and mamma's
new cap, which will be superb!'

CHAPTER II
.
About four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked
in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh's 'high tea,'
that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her spectacles on her nose,
a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper
on her lap. The neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an
intermittent pretence of reading; but in reality the energies of her

house-wifely mind were taken up with quite other things. The vicar's
wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest.
All her solid preparations for the evening were over, and in her own
mind she decided that with them there was no possible fault to be found.
The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish and
fastidious, breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no
plumper chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night
were to be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district.
And so with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the
hostess felt no anxieties.
But a 'tea' in the north-country depends for distinction, not on its solids
or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural hostess earns her reputation,
not by a discriminating eye for butcher's-meat, but by her inventiveness
in cakes and custards. And it was just here, with regard to this 'bubble
reputation,' that the vicar's wife of Long Whindale was particularly
sensitive. Was she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of
Whinborough--odious woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent on her to
do well, nay to do brilliantly, in the eyes of this local magnate? And
how was it possible to do brilliantly in this matter with a cook whose
recipes were hopelessly old-fashioned, and who had an exasperating
belief in the sufficiency of buttered 'whigs' and home-made marmalade
for all requirements?
Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. Thornburgh had gone prowling about the
neighboring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain
newly arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with the
most airy and appetizing trifles--of a make and coloring quite
metropolitan. She had flattened her gray curls against the window for
one deliberative moment; had then rushed in; and as soon as the
carrier's cart of Long Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting,
should have arrived, bearing with it the produce of that adventure, Mrs.
Thornburgh would be a proud woman, prepared to meet a legion of
rectors' wives without flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects a woman at
peace with herself and the world. In the country, where every
household should be self-contained, a certain discredit attaches in every
well-regulated mind to 'getting things in.' Mrs. Thornburgh was also
nervous at the thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually out
of the weekly money. For 'William' was to know nothing of the matter,

except so far as a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of his
own dazzled eyes might inform him. But after all, in this as in
everything else, one must suffer to be distinguished.
The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have
described, and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped unheeded to her
feet. The vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new
gray-stone building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what
had once been the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the
primitive dwelling house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after
sundry augmentations, amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year.
The modern house, though it only contained sufficient accommodation
for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one guest and two maids, would have
seemed palatial to those rustic clerics of the past from whose
ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its spiritual sustenance in
times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to another race--a race
sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole of life in very close
contact and very homely intercourse with their mother earth. Mr.
Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few years before from
a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and who had no
inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had only a very
faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what these mythical
predecessors of his, with their strange social status and unbecoming
occupations,