Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story - Page 4/572

Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable

part of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the

Hollingford ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid

as visitors during the many months that she and her daughters were

away. And the various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to

the call of their liege lady, and gave her their service as required;

and along with it, a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration.

"How good of the countess! So like the dear countess--always thinking

of others!" and so on; while it was always supposed that no strangers

had seen Hollingford properly, unless they had been taken to the

countess's school, and been duly impressed by the neat little pupils,

and the still neater needlework there to be inspected. In return,

there was a day of honour set apart every summer, when with much

gracious and stately hospitality, Lady Cumnor and her daughters

received all the school visitors at the Towers, the great family

mansion standing in aristocratic seclusion in the centre of the large

park, of which one of the lodges was close to the little town. The

order of this annual festivity was this. About ten o'clock one of the

Towers' carriages rolled through the lodge, and drove to different

houses, wherein dwelt a woman to be honoured; picking them up by ones

or twos, till the loaded carriage drove back again through the ready

portals, bowled along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited its

covey of smartly-dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading

to the ponderous doors of Cumnor Towers. Back again to the town;

another picking up of womankind in their best clothes, and another

return, and so on till the whole party were assembled either in the

house or in the really beautiful gardens. After the proper amount of

exhibition on the one part, and admiration on the other, had been

done, there was a collation for the visitors, and some more display

and admiration of the treasures inside the house. Towards four

o'clock, coffee was brought round; and this was a signal of the

approaching carriage that was to take them back to their own homes;

whither they returned with the happy consciousness of a well-spent

day, but with some fatigue at the long-continued exertion of behaving

their best, and talking on stilts for so many hours. Nor were

Lady Cumnor and her daughters free from something of the same

self-approbation, and something, too, of the same fatigue; the

fatigue that always follows on conscious efforts to behave as will

best please the society you are in.