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The day after the Lavingtons' return, when Lancelot walked up to the Priory with a fluttering heart to inquire after all parties, and see one, he found the squire in a great state of excitement.
'And a curse upon the Lavingtons, sighed Argemone to herself in an undertone. Lancelot heard what she said. The vicar entered, but he was too late. The old man's strength was failing, and his mind began to wander. 'Windy, he murmured to himself, 'windy, dark and windy birds won't lie not old Harry's fault. How black it grows! We must be gone by nightfall, squire. Where's that young dog gone?
I hope you have made good use of your time? But Lancelot spoke no word all the way home, and wandered till dawn in the woods around his cottage, kissing the hand which Argemone's palm had pressed. Some three months slipped away right dreary months for Lancelot, for the Lavingtons went to Baden-Baden for the summer.
It was part of her breadth that congeniality could never for her be based on the half automatic affinities of caste and occupation; and it was part of her narrowness, or, rather, of her inexperience, that she could see people only as individuals and would not recognize the real charm of the Lavingtons, which consisted in their being, like their house and park, part of the landscape and of an established order of things.
Make a great fountain in it beautiful marble to bubble and gurgle, and trickle and foam, for ever and ever, and wash away the sins of the Lavingtons, that the little rosy children may play round it, and the poor toil-bent woman may wash and wash and drink Water! water! I am dying of thirst!
He observed, with a lover's fond pride, that Karen, in her shrunken white serge and white straw hat, Karen, with her pleasant imperturbability, her mingled simplicity and sophistication, did, most decisively, make the Lavingtons seem flavourless. Among them, while Mrs.
'And now the curse of the Lavingtons had truly come upon her. To perish by the people whom they made. Their neglect, cupidity, oppression, are avenged on me! Why not? Have I not wantoned in down and perfumes, while they, by whose labour my luxuries were bought, were pining among scents and sounds, one day of which would have driven me mad! And then they wonder why men turn Chartists!
But the country-folk believe, sir, that the nun's curse holds true; and they say, that Whitford folks have been getting poorer and wickeder ever since that time, and will, till the Nun-pool runs up to Ashy, and the Lavingtons' name goes out of Whitford Priors. Lancelot said nothing. A presentiment of evil hung over him. He was utterly down-hearted about Tregarva, about Argemone, about the poor.
The only reason why she did not appear like this to the Lavingtons was that, immutably unimaginative as they were, they knew that she wasn't a princess, was, indeed, only the odd appendage of an odd celebrity with whom their friend had chosen, oddly, to fall in love. They weren't perplexed, because, since he had fallen in love with her, she was placed.
Art, to most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest.
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