Page:The Last Chronicle of Barset Vol 2.djvu/41

Rh soon as the business in hand would permit him. "I shall get on very well with him," he said to his wife before he started; "but I am afraid of the woman. If she interferes, there will be a row." "Then, my dear," said his wife, "there will be a row, for I am told that she always interferes." On reaching the palace about half-an-hour before dinner-time, Dr. Tempest found that other guests were expected, and on descending to the great yellow drawing-room, which was used only on state occasions, he encountered Mrs. Proudie and two of her daughters arrayed in a full panoply of female armour. She received him with her sweetest smiles, and if there had been any former enmity between Silverbridge and the palace, it was now all forgotten. She regretted greatly that Mrs. Tempest had not accompanied the doctor;—for Mrs. Tempest also had been invited. But Mrs. Tempest was not quite as well as she might have been, the doctor had said, and very rarely slept away from home. And then the bishop came in and greeted his guest with his pleasantest good-humour. It was quite a sorrow to him that Silverbridge was so distant, and that he saw so little of Dr. Tempest; but he hoped that that might be somewhat mended now, and that leisure might be found for social delights;—to all which Dr. Tempest said but little, bowing to the bishop at each separate expression of his lordship's kindness.

There were guests there that evening who did not often sit at the bishop's table. The archdeacon and Mrs. Grantly had been summoned from Plumstead, and had obeyed the summons. Great as was the enmity between the bishop and the archdeacon, it had never quite taken the form of open palpable hostility. Each, therefore, asked the other to dinner perhaps once every year; and each went to the other, perhaps, once in two years. And Dr. Thorne from Chaldicotes was there, but without his wife, who in these days was up in London. Mrs. Proudie always expressed a warm friendship for Mrs. Thorne, and on this occasion loudly regretted her absence. "You must tell her, Dr. Thorne, how exceedingly much we miss her." Dr. Thorne, who was accustomed to hear his wife speak of her dear friend Mrs. Proudie with almost unmeasured ridicule, promised that he would do so. "We are so sorry the Luftons couldn't come to us," said Mrs. Proudie,—not alluding to the dowager, of whom it was well known that no earthly inducement would have sufficed to make her put her foot within Mrs. Proudie's room;—"but one of the children is ill, and she could not leave him." But the Greshams were there from Boxall Hill, and the Thornes from Ullathorne, and, with the exception of a single chaplain, who pretended to carve, Dr. Tempest and the archdeacon were