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Updated: June 20, 2025
It was not altogether surprising then that Jim, when he had been back at Mountfield for three or four days, should have taken her into his confidence.
"I'm going to Mountfield," he said as he swung the horse round and the groom jumped up behind. The groom would wonder at his change of plan and when he got back he would talk. If he told him not to he would talk all the more. Wisest to say nothing at present.
But she was quite happy as a woman, looking after her poultry and her garden out of doors, and her dogs and her household within. She had hardly moved from Mountfield since her marriage thirty years before, and the only fly in the ointment of content in which she had embalmed herself was that she would have to leave it when Jim married.
Jim's honest, weathered face was very frequently turned towards Cicely's fair, young one, and there was a light in his eyes which made her turn hers away a little confusedly when they met it. But Jim's voice was level enough, and his speech ordinary. "I'm jolly glad to get back again," he said. "I've never liked Mountfield half so well. I was up at six o'clock this morning, and out and about."
"That was when you told Graham that you couldn't sleep, I suppose, in the middle of the night." "I walked over from Mountfield, and she came to me in the garden, as I had asked her to. We were together about three minutes." Dick addressed Cicely again, still with the same cold authority. "You were discontented at home. You can tell me why afterwards.
The wedding, if not "a scene of indescribable beauty, fashion and profusion," as the Bathgate reporter, scenting promotion, described it, was a very pretty one. The two big houses produced for the occasion a sufficient number of guests, and the surrounding country of neighbours, to fill Mountfield church with a congregation that was certainly well dressed, if not noticeably reverent.
Come and have a look at the nags. There has been such a bustle that I haven't been near them to-day." But Cicely refused to go and look at the nags. Nags were rather a sore point with her, and the constant inspection and weighing of the qualities of those at Kencote was enough for her without the addition of the stables at Mountfield.
For the mistresses of houses like Kencote and Mountfield were really a sort of superior housekeeper, allowed to live with the family, but placed where they were with the sole object of serving their lords and masters, with far less independence than a paid housekeeper, who could take her money and go if she were dissatisfied with her position. What a prospect!
The confectioner who supplied the cake, the head gardeners at Kencote and Mountfield who obligingly supplied the floral decorations; the organist who presided, as organists always do, at the organ, and gave a rendering, a very inefficient one, of Mendelssohn's Wedding March; the schoolmaster who looked after the children who strewed flowers on the churchyard path; the coachman who drove the happy pair to the station; the station-master who arranged for them a little salvo of his own, which took the form of fog-signals, as the train came in they were all there, and there was not an error in their initials or in the spelling of their names, although there were a good many in the list of distinguished guests, and still more in the long catalogue of presents.
The old stable buildings, untouched by the restorer, flanked the house on one side and the high red brick wall of the gardens on the other. The drive sloped gently up from the gates through an undulating park more closely planted than that of Kencote. There were some very old trees at Mountfield and stretches of bracken here and there beneath them.
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