The Daughters of Mrs Peacock Read Online Free PDF Page B

bed happy, all five. Next morning Mr Peacock got into urban uniform and resumed his career as a solicitor. The girls, as usual, between breakfast and luncheon did as their mother ordained, each also as usual loyally playing up to her pretence—or was it an illusion?—that they were perfectly free agents, suffering no shadow of compulsion. And in the afternoon Mr Pardew paid them a call.
    He was shown into the ‘garden room’, so called to distinguish it from the other and larger drawing-room, to which it was a comparatively recent supplement.
    Designed in an earlier century as a farmhouse, not as a gentleman’s residence, the general layout of Peacock Place had features that would have discontented a prouder, less sensible man than Edmund: he, because it had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him,found no fault with it. The house faced west, fronting the prevailing wind, the slanting rain, the glory of sunset. At the north end, flanking the house, was the farmyard, accessible equally from road and from dairy; and beyond the yard, to the east, lay the orchard and all that now remained to the Peacocks of the once-extensive farmlands. The garden, with its lawns and shrubberies, its winding paths and green arbours, its distant spinney of tall trees and its frequent hedges that by dividing it into many rooms, as it were, made it full of happy surprises, was situated not at the back of the house but on the south side, shut off from the street by a mellow brick wall. The windows of the drawing-room, which was sometimes called the music room out of compliment to the piano, looked to the east, and so were flooded with sunshine only in the mornings, when the room was unoccupied; and the adjacent garden room, which Mr Peacock had supplied with two wide windows and a double glass-panelled door giving on to the nearer lawn, represented his retort to that inconvenient circumstance. The alterations had been planned primarily with a view to his wife’s comfort, that she might enjoy the benefit of sunshine from the southern sky whenever that commodity was available; but in practice she used the room less often than did her younger daughters, and it was to Sarah and Catherine that Mr Pardew made his bow on this Monday afternoon.
    Catherine, curled up in an easy chair with a book in her lap, raised her head reluctantly and looked at the intruder with dazed eyes, hardly recognizing him, unable or unwilling to rally her romance-enchanted wits.Sarah, with a nicer sense of the proprieties, put down her sewing and got up.
    â€˜Mr Pardew! How nice!’
    â€˜Good afternoon, Miss Sarah.’ He bowed over her extended hand. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Catherine. Pray don’t let me disturb you.’ But Catherine, blushing for her bad manners, was now on her feet, ready for the ceremonial handshake. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said again. ‘And
what
a good afternoon it is!’ He smiled wistfully, as at some secret solemn joke. ‘One only wishes one deserved it.’
    â€˜Do sit down, won’t you?’ said Sarah. ‘I don’t know where my mother is. I’ll go and find her, if you’ll excuse me.’
    â€˜No, no. Please not. Anything but. Delighted though I should be,’ he added hastily, ‘I would not dream of troubling her.’
    â€˜I fancy she may be resting,’ said Catherine, longing to get back to her book and knowing that Mama, if she appeared, would insist on his prolonging the visit and staying to tea.
    â€˜Quite so. Quite so. I hope she is in good health, your dear mother? Splendid. Splendid. I need not ask whether
you
are,’ he said, with a glance at Catherine and a longer glance at Sarah. ‘Your looks, if I may say so, proclaim it.’
    He punctuated his remarks with a series of little nervous laughs. Breaking the awkward silence that followed, Sarah said:
    â€˜Is this a pastoral visit, Mr Pardew, or merely a social