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A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of guns. She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread, it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook. She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there.
She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the garden. Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds, she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten and now and then the angry screech of a parrot.
'Cadurcis, said his cousin to him one morning, 'we are all going to Hampton Court. Now is your time; Lady Annabel, the Vernons, and myself, will fill one carriage; I have arranged that. Look out, and something may be done. Speak to the Countess. Accordingly Lord Cadurcis hastened to make a suggestion to a friend always flattered by his notice.
You know the Vernons are connexions of ours, and that is one reason why they are residing at Violet-Bank now. These remarks of Felworth served to remove some unpleasant matters from my mind. I saw that I would experience no rivalry from him; and I thought myself a match for Flixton if I had but a fair field.
There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house. Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.
Was there not there a grand easy-chair of stamped-leather, minus two of its hinder legs, which had genealogical associations through the Wilcoxes with the Vernons and through the Vernons quite across the water with Old England? and was there not a dusky picture, in an old tarnished frame, of a woman of whose tragic end strange stories were whispered, one of the sufferers in the time when witches were unceremoniously helped out of the world, instead of being, as now-a-days, helped to make their fortune in it by table-turning?
"Ourselves and the Vernons! Mrs Vernon to talk to mother, then they won't have as much time to look after us. When they begin on carpets and curtains they forget everything else, and we can do as we like. Do you suppose Dan would come?" "Sure he wouldn't." "Why?" "My dear!" Clemence held out eloquent hands. "Does he ever come?
You already know that the family is one of the oldest in England, and while it is not of the highest nobility, it is quite gentle and noble enough to please those who bear its honored name. My mother boasted nobler blood than that of the Vernons. She was of the princely French house of Guise a niece and ward to the Great Duke, for whose sake I was named.
Although canting heraldry is generally reprobated, it seems nevertheless to have been adopted in the arms and mottoes of many honourable families. Thus the motto of the Vernons, VER NON SEMPER VIRET, is a perfect pun, and so is that of the Onslows, FESTINA LENTE. The PERIISSEM NI PER-IISSEM of the Anstruthers is liable to a similar objection.
You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you won't find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons not while I have servants to go my messages." Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney's life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, "Plumb crazy."
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