Dale, was no doubt happy enough; as, let us hope,
was the young lady also; but they added very little
to the general hilarity of the company. John Eames
was seated between his own sister and the parson,
and did not at all enjoy his position. He had
a full view of the doctor’s felicity, as the
happy pair sat opposite to him, and conceived himself
to be hardly treated by Lily’s absence.
The party was certainly very dull, as were all such
dinners at Guestwick Manor. There are houses,
which, in their everyday course, are not conducted
by any means in a sad or unsatisfactory manner,—in
which life, as a rule, runs along merrily enough; but
which cannot give a dinner-party; or, I might rather
say, should never allow themselves to be allured into
the attempt. The owners of such houses are generally
themselves quite aware of the fact, and dread the
dinner which they resolved to give quite as much as
it is dreaded by their friends. They know that
they prepare for their guests an evening of misery,
and for themselves certain long hours of purgatory
which are hardly to be endured. But they will
do it. Why that long table, and all those supernumerary
glasses and knives and forks, if they are never to
be used? That argument produces all this misery;
that and others cognate to it. On the present
occasion, no doubt, there were excuses to be made.
The squire and his niece had been invited on special
cause, and their presence would have been well enough.
The doctor added in would have done no harm. It
was good-natured, too, that invitation given to Mrs
Eames and her daughter. The error lay in the
parson and his wife. There was no necessity for
their being there, nor had they any ground on which
to stand, except the party-giving ground. Mr and
Mrs Boyce made the dinner-party, and destroyed the
social circle. Lady Julia knew that she had been
wrong as soon as she had sent out the note.
Nothing was said on that evening which has any bearing
on our story. Nothing, indeed, was said which
had any bearing on anything. The earl’s
professed object had been to bring the squire and young
Eames together; but people are never brought together
on such melancholy occasions. Though they sip
their port in close contiguity, they are poles asunder
in their minds and feelings. When the Guestwick
fly came for Mrs Eames, and the parson’s pony-phaeton
came for him and Mrs Boyce, a great relief was felt;
but the misery of those who were left had gone too
far to allow of any reaction on that evening.
The squire yawned, and the earl yawned, and then there
was an end of it for that night.
CHAPTER LIV
The Second Visit to the Guestwick Bridge
Bell had declared that her sister would be very happy
to see John Eames if he would go over to Allington,
and he had replied that of course he would go there.
So much having been, as it were, settled, he was able
to speak of his visit as a matter of course at the
breakfast-table, on the morning after the earl’s
dinner-party. “I must get you to come round
with me, Dale, and see what I am doing to the land,”
the earl said. And then he proposed to order
saddle-horses. But the squire preferred walking,
and in this way they were disposed of soon after breakfast.