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For the song it was settled that Frank Palmer should be asked, as he would be in Fenmarket. Usually he came but once every half year, but he had not been able, so he said, to finish all his work the last time. The recitation Madge undertook. The evening arrived, the room was crowded and a dozen private carriages stood in the 'Crown and Sceptre' courtyard. Frank called for the Hopgoods.
There was a grand piano in the drawing-room, and Frank and Cecilia became more musical than ever, and Waltham Lodge was the headquarters of a little amateur orchestra which practised Mozart and Haydn, and gave local concerts. A twelvemonth after the marriage a son was born and Frank's father increased Frank's share in the business. Mr Palmer had long ceased to take any interest in the Hopgoods.
Mrs Martin could not make friends with the Hopgoods, nor enter the cottage. It would have been a transgression of that infinitely fine and tortuous line whose inexplicable convolutions mark off what is forbidden to a society lady.
'Of course, my dear, of course; but if she was a Frenchwoman resident in England she would prefer to assume an English name, that is to say if she wished to be married. Occasionally the Miss Hopgoods were encountered, and they confounded Fenmarket sorely.
Clearly, however, the Hopgoods could be requested to co-operate at the 'Crown and Sceptre; in fact, it would be impolitic not to put some of the townsfolk on the list of patrons. So it came about that Mrs Hopgood was included, and that she was made responsible for the provision of one song and one recitation.
He was very ill last winter; and sometimes, they say, will go straight off to sleep in the middle of a sentence. I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods. We talked of Pasiance sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that clinging smell of wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as nothing but scents can.
"The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall; There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered them all." .... They brought Pasiance very simply no hideous funeral trappings, thank God the farm hands carried her, and there was no one there but John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor. They read the service over her grave.
She decided, however, that she could make perfectly plain the conditions upon which the Hopgoods would be present, and the next day she sent Madge a little note asking her if she would 'assist in some festivities' at the Hall in about two months' time, which were to be given in celebration of the twenty-first birthday of Mrs Martin's third son.
'You was here the other day, sir, asking where them Hopgoods had gone. 'Yes, said Frank, eagerly, 'do you know what has become of them? 'I helped the cabman with the boxes, and I heard Mrs Hopgood say "Great Ormond Street," but I have forgotten the number. 'Thank you very much. Frank gave the astonished and grateful Maria half-a-crown, and went off to Great Ormond Street at once.
No Fenmarket maiden, other than the Hopgoods, was supposed to have any connection whatever, or to have any capacity for any connection with anything outside the world in which 'young ladies' dwelt, and if a Fenmarket girl read a book, a rare occurrence, for there were no circulating libraries there in those days, she never permitted herself to say anything more than that it was 'nice, or it was 'not nice, or she 'liked it' or did 'not like it; and if she had ventured to say more, Fenmarket would have thought her odd, not to say a little improper.
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