Friendship and Folly: The Merriweather Chronicles Book I Read Free

and her pride of ownership being thus engendered, she took a particular interest in everything that concerned this latest acquisition, and watched over her with a possessive eye. Kitty was always a delicate, nervous infant, given to starts, and bouts of inexplicable weeping; but Julia’s somewhat dutiful stewardship changed to enchantment upon the discovery that Kitty would smile and babble for her, when even the caresses of a nursemaid provoked only heart-broken tears.
    No mere doting grandfather could hope to compete with these inarticulate attractions, and he, perhaps disillusioned by this evidence of inconstancy in one he had hitherto deemed flawless in all particulars, came gradually to a more reasonable estimation of Julia’s merits. Taking warning from this experience, he never again offered his heart so freely to fickle youth, and his regard for the subsequent little Parrys was on a restrained order which much relieved the minds of their parents. Not even Clive, who, when on his good behavior, was surely the most winsome child ever to patter across the earth, could call forth much beyond the phrase, “a remarkably fine boy, Fanny, remarkably fine,” a tentative pat on the head, and once, at least, the offer of a fob-watch for inspection. As it is rumored that Lord Meravon’s watch had kept time perfectly well B.C.--“B.C.” signifying, in this instance, as if often did in the Parry home, “Before Clive”--it is possible that his lordship’s reserve may have sprung from this very circumstance.
    In Julia’s fifth year Lady Meravon was struck by a fever as swift as it was fatal, and her loss plunged the Earl into a black depression, which astonished his acquaintances as much as it alarmed his intimates. Lady Frances was urged to join him in his retreat to the country, and a canvas of the many advantages was spread persuasively before her: she would be able to bring up her increasing family in an environment entirely free from the influences of town, whilst at the same time providing comfort to her father in his distress, and the guidance of a mother to her two youngest brothers, whenever they should not be in school (the twins Torial and Thomas, aged twelve years, and rather less acquainted with their father than was the butler). In addition, may it be said, to relieving all of his lordship’s many solicitous relations of a great uneasiness, by allowing them to pity him very earnestly, untouched by any fear of ever being called upon to aid him in any practical and inconvenient fashion.
    Lady Frances and Mr. Parry were not proof against this depiction; or it is conceivable that their minds were entirely decided before its presentation. However it may have been, they were soon making plans to take up residence in the Dower House, against the advice of any number of friends, who, familiar with the ways of the Earl, predicted in strong language that to imagine it possible to raise up a family under any roof belonging to him, without being prepared to submit to all manner of interference, was sheerest folly.
    But so it did not prove. Lord Meravon, recovering gradually from the oppression of spirits, if not from the grief that had caused it, showed no disposition to meddle in the rearing of his grandchildren. His tendresse for Julia had been but an aberration: he did not understand children, and took no pains to dissemble it. They made him nervous, and he did not know what to do with them if some authoritative figure was not by to whisk them away when they asked incomprehensible questions, or became troublesome. He liked “Fanny’s darlings” very well, but he wished them to remain tucked up quietly in the nursery until they were old enough to grasp his views on the State of the Nation, and listen with proper appreciation to his exhaustive denunciations of the Hon. Charles Fox.
    And so the Parrys, who had envisioned perhaps a year or two north of the Avon, became inevitably fixed at Merriweather. There the three