The Golden Calf | Page 7

was she who had inspired Bessie with the desks to come to
Mauleverer Manor, to be finished, after having endured eight years of
jog-trot education from a homely little governess at home--who
grounded the boys in Latin and mathematics before they went to
Winchester, and made herself generally useful. Miss Rylance was the
daughter of a fashionable physician, whose head-quarters were in
Cavendish Square, but who spent his leisure at a something which he
called 'a place' at Kingthorpe, a lovely little village between Winchester
and Romsey, where the Wendovers were indigenous to the soil, whence
they seemed to have sprung, like the armed men in the story; for
remotest tradition bore no record of their having come there from
anywhere else, nor was there record of a time when the land round
Kingthorpe belonged to any other family.
Dr. Rylance, whose dainty verandah shaded cottage stood in gardens of
three and a half acres, and who rented a paddock for his cow, was

always lamenting that he could not buy more land.
'The Wendovers have everything,' he said. 'It is impossible for a new
man to establish himself.'
It was to be observed, however, that when land within a reasonable
distance of Kingthorpe came into the market, Dr. Rylance did not put
himself forward as a buyer. His craving for more territory always ended
in words.
Urania Rylance had spent much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had
always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the
Wendovers established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and
revered by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction
that Dr. Rylance, of Cavendish Square, and Dr. Rylance's daughter
were altogether superior to these country bumpkins, with their narrow
range of ideas and their strictly local importance.
The summer days wore on at Mauleverer Manor, not altogether
unpleasantly for the majority of the girls, who contrived to enjoy their
lives in spite of Miss Pew's tyranny, which was considered vile enough
to rank that middle-aged, loud-voiced lady with the Domitians and
Attilas of history. There was a softening influence, happily, in the
person of Miss Dulcibella, who was slim and sentimental, talked about
sweetness and light, loved modern poetry, spent all her available funds
upon dress, and was wonderfully girlish in her tastes and habits at
nine-and-thirty years of age.
It was a splendid summer, a time of roses and sunshine, and the girls
were allowed to carry on their studies in the noble old garden, in the
summer-houses and pleasure domes which the extinct Mauleverers had
made for themselves in their day of power. Grinding at history,
grammar, and geography did not seem so oppressive a burden when it
could be done under the shade of spreading cedars, amid the scent of
roses, in an atmosphere of colour and light. Even Ida's labours seemed
a little easier when she and her pupils sat in a fast-decaying old
summer-house in the rose-garden, with a glimpse of sunlit river
flashing athwart the roses.

So the time wore on until the last week in July, and then all the school
was alive with excitement, and every one was looking forward to the
great event of the term, 'breaking up.' 'Old Pew,' had sent out her
invitations for a garden party, an actual garden party--not a mere
namby-pamby entertainment among the girls themselves, in which a
liberal supply of blanc-mange and jam tarts was expected to atone for
the absence of the outside world. Miss Pew had taken it into her head
that Mauleverer Manor ought to be better known, and that a garden
party would be a good advertisement. With this idea, she had ordered a
hundred invitation cards, and had disseminated them among the most
eligible of her old pupils, and the parents and guardians of those
damsels now at the Manor. The good old gardens, where velvet
greensward and cedars of Lebanon cost little labour to maintain in
perfect order, were worthy to be exhibited. The roses, Miss Dulcibella's
peculiar care, were, in that lady's opinion, equal to anything outside
Chatsworth or Trentham. A garden party, by all means, said Miss
Dulcibella, and she gave the young ladies to understand that the whole
thing was her doing.
'I waited till Sarah was in a good temper,' she told her satellites, half a
dozen or so of the elder girls who worshipped her, and who, in the
slang phraseology of the school, were known as Miss Dulcie's 'cracks,'
'and then I proposed a garden party. It required a great deal of talking to
bring her even to think about such a thing. You see the expense will be
enormous! Ices, tea and coffee, cakes, sandwiches, claret-cup. Thank
goodness it's too late in the year for people