The Westcotes | Page 3

when the brothers would marry. Time went on, repeating these assemblies; and the question became, Will they ever marry? Apparently they had no thought of it, no idea that it was expected of them; and since they had both passed forty, the question might be taken as answered. But that so personable a man as Endymion Westcote would let the family perish was monstrous to suppose. He kept his good looks and his fresh complexion; even now some maiden would easily be found to answer his Olympian nod; and a vein of recklessness sometimes cropped up through his habitual caution, and kept his friends alert for surprises. In the hunting-field, for instance,--and he rode to hounds twice a week,--he made a rule of avoiding fences; but the world quite rightly set this down to a proper care for his person rather than to timidity, since on one famous occasion, riding up to find the whole field hesitating before a "rasper" (they were hunting a strange country that day), he put his horse at it and sailed over with a nonchalance relieved only by his ringing laugh on the farther side. It was odds he would clear the fence of matrimony, some day, with the same casual heartiness; and, in any case, he was masterful enough to insist on Narcissus marrying, should it occur to him to wish it.
Oddly enough, the gossips who still arranged marriages for the brothers had given over speculating upon their hostess, Miss Dorothea. She could not, of course, perpetuate the name; but this by no means accounted for all the difference in their concern. Dorothea Westcote was now thirty- seven, or five years younger than Narcissus, whose mother had died soon after his birth. The widower had created one of the few scandals in the Westcote history by espousing, some four years later, a young woman of quite inferior class, the daughter of a wholesale glover in Axcester. The new wife had good looks, but they did not procure her pardon; and she made the amplest and speediest amends by dying within twelve months, and leaving a daughter who in no way resembled her. The husband survived her just a dozen years.
Dorothea, the daughter, was a plain girl; her brothers, though kind and fond of her after a fashion, did not teach her to forget it. She loved them, but her love partook of awe: they were so much cleverer, as well as handsomer, than she. Having no mother or friend of her own sex to imitate, she grow into an awkward woman, sensitive to charm in others and responding to it without jealousy, but ignorant of what it meant or how it could be acquired. She picked up some French from her brother Endymion, and masters were hired who taught her to dance, to paint in water colours, and to play with moderate skill upon the harp. But few partners had ever sought her in the ballroom; her only drawings which anyone ever asked to see were half-a-dozen of the Bayfield pavement, executed for Narcissus' monograph; and her harp she played in her own room. Now and then Endymion would enquire how she progressed with her music, would listen to her report and observe: "Ah, I used to do a little fiddling myself." But he never put her proficiency to the test.
Somehow, and long before the world came to the same conclusion, she had resolved that marriage was not for her. She adored babies, though they usually screamed at the sight of her, and she thought it would be delightful to have one of her own who would not scream; but apart from this vague sentiment, she accepted her fate without sensible regret. By watching and copying the mistresses of the few houses she visited she learned to play the hostess at Bayfield, and, as time brought confidence, played it with credit. She knew that people laughed at her, and that yet they liked her; their liking and their laughter puzzled her about equally. For the rest, she was proud of Bayfield and content, though one day much resembled another, to live all her life there, devoted to God and her garden. Visitors always praised her garden.
Axcester lies on the western side and mostly at the foot of a low hill set accurately in the centre of a ring of hills slightly higher-the raised bottom of a saucer would be no bad simile. The old Roman road cuts straight across this rise, descends between the shops of the High Street, passes the church, crosses the Axe by a narrow bridge, and climbing again passes the iron gates of Bayfield House, a mile above the river. So straight is it that Dorothea could keep her brothers in view from the gates until they dismounted before their