Her brows frowned.
"Horrible!" she said under her breath. But they did not pursue the subject. Instead the old man broke out in praise of the "won"erful "cute"
sheep dog beside him, and in the story of the accident which had slightly lamed the ewe he was carrying. Lydia"s vivacious listening, her laugh, her comments, expressed--unconsciously--with just a touch of c.u.mbria dialect, showed them natural comrades. Some deeply human gift, some spontaneity in the girl, answered to the racy simplicity of the old man.
"Tell me once more"--she said, as she rose from her seat upon a fallen tree, and prepared to go on her way--"those counting words you told me last week. I tried to tell them to my mother--but I couldn"t remember them all. They made us laugh so."
"Aye, they"re the owd words," said the shepherd complacently. "We doan"t use "em now. But my feyther minds how his feyther used allus to count by "em."
And he began the catalogue of those ancient numerals by which the northern dalesman of a hundred years ago were still accustomed to reckon their sheep, words that go back to the very infancy of man.
"Yan--tyan--tethera--methera--pimp; sethera--lethera--hovera--dovera--d.i.c.k."
Lydia"s face dissolved in laughter--and when the old man delighting in her amus.e.m.e.nt went on to the compounds of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the rest:
"Yan-a-d.i.c.k--tyan-a-d.i.c.k--tethera-a-d.i.c.k--methera-a-d.i.c.k--b.u.mfit."
At "b.u.mfit" (fifteen) they both rocked with merriment, the old man carried away by the infection of hers.
"Go on," said Lydia--the tears of laughter in her eyes--"up to twenty, and then hear me say them."
"Yan-a-b.u.mfit--tyan-a-b.u.mfit--tethera-a-b.u.mfit--methera-a-b.u.mfit--giggot"
(twenty).
"Giggot" set them both off again--and then Lydia--stumbling, laughing, and often corrected, said her lesson.
By the time she was fairly perfect, and the old man had straightened himself again under his load--a veritable "good shepherd," glorified by the evening light--they parted with a friendly nod, glad to have met and sure to meet again.
"I"ll come and see Bessie soon," she said gently, as she moved on.
"Aye. Yo"ll be varra welcome."
She stepped forward briskly, gained the high road, and presently saw in front of her a small white house, recently built, and already embowered in a blossoming garden. Lilacs sent their fragrance to greet her; rhododendrons glowed through the twilight, and a wild-cherry laden with bloom reared its white miracle against the walls of the house.
Lydia stood at the gate devouring the tree with her eyes. The blossom had already begun to drop. "Two days more"--she said to herself, sighing--"and it"ll be gone--till next year. And it"s been out such a little, little while! I seem hardly to have looked at it. It"s horrible how short-lived all the beautiful things are."
"Lydia!" A voice called from an open window.
"Yes, mother."
"You"re dreadfully late, Lydia! Susan and I have finished supper long ago."
Lydia walked into the house, and put her head into the drawing-room.
"Sorry, mother! It was so lovely, I couldn"t come in. And I met a dear old shepherd I know. Don"t bother about me. I"ll get some milk and cake."
She closed the door again, before her mother could protest.
"Girls will never think of their meals!" said Mrs. Penfold to herself in irritation. "And then all of a sudden they get nerves--or consumption--or something."
As she spoke, she withdrew from the window, and curled herself up on a sofa, where a knitted coverlet lay, ready to draw over her feet. Mrs.
Penfold was a slight, pretty woman of fifty with invalidish Sybaritic ways, and a character which was an odd mixture of humility and conceit--diffidence and audacity. She was quite aware that she was not as clever as her daughters. She could not write poetry like Susan, or paint like Lydia. But then, in her own opinion, she had so many merits they were without; merits which more than maintained her self-respect, and enabled her to hold her ground with them. For instance: by the time she was four and twenty, Lydia"s age, she had received at least a dozen proposals. Lydia"s scalps, so far as her mother knew, were only two--fellow-students at South Kensington, absurd people, not to be counted. Then, pretty as Lydia was, her nose could not be compared for delicacy with her mother"s. "My nose was always famous"--Mrs. Penfold would say complacently to her daughters--"it was that which first attracted your dear father. "It was," he said--you know he always expressed himself so remarkably--"such a sure sign of "race."" His own people--oh! they were quite nice people--but quite middle-cla.s.s." Again, her hands and feet were smaller and more aristocratic than either Lydia"s or Susan"s. She liked to remind herself constantly how everybody had admired them and talked about them when she was a girl.
Drawing her work-box toward her, while she waited for Lydia"s return, Mrs. Penfold fell to knitting, while the inner chatter of the mind went as fast as her needles--concerned chiefly with two matters of absorbing interest: Lydia"s twenty pounds, and a piece of news about Lydia, recently learnt from the rector"s wife.
As to the twenty pounds, it was the greatest blessing! Of course the school salary would have been a certainty--and Lydia had hardly considered it with proper seriousness. But there--all was well! The extra twenty pounds would carry them on, and now that Lydia had begun to earn, thought the maternal optimist, she would of course go on earning--at higher and higher prices--and the family income of some three hundred a year would obtain the increment it so desperately needed. And as Mrs.
Penfold looked upon a girls" school as something not far removed from a nunnery, a place at any rate painfully devoid of the masculine element; and as her whole mind was set--sometimes romantically, sometimes financially--on the marriage of her daughters, she felt that both she and Lydia had escaped what might have been an unfortunate necessity.
Yes, indeed!--what a _providential_ escape, if--
Mrs. Penfold let fall her knitting; her face sparkled. Why had Lydia never communicated the fact, the thrilling fact that she had been meeting at the rectory--more than once apparently--not merely _a_ young man, but _the_ young man of the neighbourhood. And with results--favourable results--quite evident to the Rector and the Rector"s wife, if Lydia herself chose to ignore and secrete them. It was really unkind....
The door opened. A white figure slipped into the room through its mingled lights, and found a stool beside Mrs. Penfold.
"Dear--are you all right?"
Mrs. Penfold stroked the speaker"s head.
"Well, I thought I was going to have a headache this morning, darling--but I didn"t--it went away. Lydia! the Rector and Mrs. Deacon have been here. _Why_ didn"t you tell me you have been meeting Lord Tatham at the rectory?"
Lydia laughed.
"Didn"t I? Well, he"s quite decent."
"Mrs. Deacon says he admired you. She"s sure he did!" Mrs. Penfold stooped eagerly toward her daughter, trying to see her face in the twilight.
"Mrs. Deacon"s a goose! You know she is, mother,--you often say so. I met him first, of course, at the Hunt Ball. And you saw him there too. You saw me dancing with him."
"But that was only once," said Mrs. Penfold, candidly. "I didn"t think anything of that. When I was a girl, if a young man liked me at a dance, we went on till we made everybody talk. Or else, there was nothing in it."
"Well, there was nothing in it, dear--in this case. And I wouldn"t advise you to give me to Lord Tatham--just yet!"
Mrs. Penfold sighed.
"Of course one knows that that kind of young man has his marriage made for him--just like royalty. But sometimes--they break out. There _are_ dukes that have married plain Misses--no better than you, Lydia--and not American either. But--Lydia--you _did_ like him?"
"Who? Lord Tatham? Certainly."
"I expect most girls do! He"s the great _parti_ about here."
"Mother, _really_!" cried Lydia. "He"s just a pleasant youth--not at all clever. And oh, how badly he plays bridge!"
"That doesn"t matter. Mrs. Deacon says you got on with him, splendidly."
"I chaffed him a good deal. He really plays worse than I do--if you can believe it."
"They like being chaffed"--said Mrs. Penfold pensively--"if a girl does it well."
"I don"t care, darling, whether they like it or not. It amuses me, and so I do it."