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Updated: May 19, 2025
"I should like to go down to Aunt Jane's and be married quietly from there," explained Miss Hodskiss to her father. Aunt Jane resided on the outskirts of a small Hampshire village, and "sat under" a clergyman famous throughout the neighbourhood for having lost the roof to his mouth. "You can't be married by that old fool," thundered her father Mr.
Half an hour before it was time to start for church her mother looked her up again. She had grown still paler, if possible, during the interval, and also more nervous and irritable. She threatened to go to bed and stop there if she was not left quite alone. She almost turned her mother out of the room, locking the door behind her. Mrs. Hodskiss had never known her daughter to be like this before.
"You, you " "My wife, don't forget that, mother," said Lord C coming between them, and slipping Mary's hand on to his arm. "We are both sorry to have had to go about the thing in this roundabout way, but we wanted to avoid a fuss. I think we had better be getting away. I'm afraid Mr. Hodskiss is going to be noisy." The doctor poured himself out a glass of claret, and drank it off.
Mary's name was never mentioned, and the suggestion of immediate marriage was listened to without remonstrance. Wiser folk would have puzzled their brains, but both her ladyship and ex-Contractor Hodskiss were accustomed to find all things yield to their wishes.
"That girl is as eager about the thing," remarked Mrs. Hodskiss, "as though it was her own marriage." In the morning Clementina was still suffering from her headache, but asserted her ability to go through the ceremony, provided everybody would keep away, and not worry her. The "treasure" was the only person she felt she could bear to have about her.
"A clean, wholesome girl," said of her Contractor Hodskiss, who cultivated affability towards the lower orders; "knows her place, and talks sense. You keep that girl, Clemmy." "Do you think she knows enough?" hazarded the maternal Hodskiss. "Quite sufficient for any decent woman," retorted the contractor.
Hodskiss made up her mind at first to run down and see to the preliminaries, but really when the time arrived it hardly seemed necessary to take that trouble. The ordering of the whole affair was so very simple, and the "treasure" appeared to understand the business most thoroughly, and to be willing to take the whole burden upon her own shoulders.
Hodskiss always thundered; he thundered even his prayers. "He christened me," urged Miss Clementina. "And Lord knows what he called you. Nobody can understand a word he says." "I'd like him to marry me," reiterated Miss Clementina. Neither her ladyship nor the contractor liked the idea. The latter in particular had looked forward to a big function, chronicled at length in all the newspapers.
Much to the surprised delight of their respective parents, there came about a change in the attitude hitherto assumed towards one another by Miss Clementina Hodskiss and Lord C . All objections to his lordship's unwilling attentions were suddenly withdrawn by the lady.
It was not, therefore, until the evening before the wedding that the Hodskiss family arrived in force, filling Aunt Jane's small dwelling to its utmost capacity. The swelling figure of the contractor, standing beside the tiny porch, compelled the passer-by to think of the doll's house in which the dwarf resides during fair-time, ringing his own bell out of his own first-floor window.
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