A Duet in Paradise THE well-furnished drawing-room, with the open grand piano and the pleasant outlook down a sloping garden to a boat-house by the side of the Floss, is Mr Deane's.The neat little lady in mourning, whose light brown ringlets are falling over the coloured embroidery with which here fingers are busy, is of course Lucy Deane; and the fine young man who is leaning down from his chair to snap the scissors in the extremely abbreviated face of the `King Charles' lying on the young lady's feet, is no other than Mr Stephen Guest, whose diamond ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure at twelve o'clock in the day are the graceful and odoriferous result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St Ogg's.There is an apparent triviality in the action with the scissors, but your discernment perceives at once that there is a design in it which makes it eminently worthy of a large-headed, long-limbed young man; for you see that Lucy wants the scissors and is compelled, reluctant as she may be, to shake her ringlets back, raise her soft hazel eyes, smile playfully down on the face that is so very nearly on a level with her knee, and holding out her little shell-pink palm, to say, `My scissors, please, if you can renounce the great pleasure of persecuting my poor Minny.'
The foolish scissors have slipped too far over the knuckles, it seems, and Hercules holds out his entrapped fingers hopelessly.
`Confound the scissors! The oval lies the wrong way.Please, draw them off for me.'
`Draw them off with your other hand,' says Miss Lucy, roguishly.
`O but that's my left hand: I'm not left-handed.' Lucy laughs and the scissors are drawn off with gentle touches from tiny tips, which naturally dispose Mr Stephen for a repetition da capo.Accordingly, he watches for the release of the scissors that he may get them into his possession again.
`No, no,' said Lucy, sticking them in her band, `you shall not have my scissors again - you have strained them already.Now don't set Minny growling again.Sit up and behave properly, and then I will tell you some news.'
`What is that?' said Stephen, throwing himself back and hanging his right arm over the corner of his chair.He might have been sitting for his portrait, which would have represented a rather striking young man of five and twenty, with a square forehead, short dark-brown hair standing erect with a slight wave at the end like a thick crop of corn, and a half-ardent, half-sarcastic glance from under his well- marked horizontal eyebrows.
`Is it very important news?'
`Yes, very.Guess.'
`You are going to change Minny's diet, and give him three ratafias soaked in a dessertspoonful of cream daily.'
`Quite wrong.'
`Well, then, Dr Kenn has been preaching against buckram, and you ladies have all been sending him a round robin, saying "This is a hard doctrine;who can bear it?"'
`For shame!' said Lucy, adjusting her little mouth gravely.`It is rather dull of you not to guess my news, because it is about something I mentioned to you not very long ago.'
`But you have mentioned many things to me not long ago.Does your feminine tyranny require that when you say, the thing you mean is one of several things, I should know it immediately by that mark?'
`Yes, I know you think I am silly.'
`I think you are perfectly charming.'
`And my silliness is part of my charm?'
`I didn't say that.'
`But I know you like women to be rather insipid.Philip Wakem betrayed you: he said so one day when you were not here.'
`O I know Phil is fierce on that point - he makes it quite a personal matter.I think he must be love-sick for some unknown lady - some exalted Beatrice whom he met abroad.'
`By the by!' said Lucy, pausing in her work.`It has just occurred to me that I have never found out whether my cousin Maggie will object to see Philip, as her brother does.Tom will not enter a room where Philip is if he knows it: perhaps Maggie may be the same and then we shan't be able to sing our glees, shall we?'
`What, is your cousin coming to stay with you?' said Stephen, with a look of slight annoyance.
`Yes; that was my news, which you have forgotten.She's going to leave her situation, where she has been nearly two years, poor thing - ever since her father's death, and she will stay with me a month or two - many months, I hope.'
`And am I bound to be pleased at that news?'
`O no, not at all,' said Lucy, with a little air of pique.` I am pleased, but that, of course, is no reason why you should be pleased.There is no girl in the world I love so well as my cousin Maggie.'
`And you will be inseparable, I suppose, when she comes.There will be no possibility of a tête-à-tête with you any more, unless you can find an admirer for her, who will pair off with her occasionally.What is the ground of dislike to Philip? He might have been a resource.'
`It is a family quarrel with Philip's father.There were very painful circumstances, I believe - I never quite understood them or knew them all.
My uncle Tulliver was unfortunate and lost all his property, and I think he considered Mr Wakem was somehow the cause of it.Mr Wakem bought Dorlcote Mill, my uncle's old place, where he always lived.You must remember my uncle Tulliver, don't you?'
`No,' said Stephen, with rather supercilious indifference.`I've always known the name, and I daresay I knew the man by sight, apart from his name.
I know half the names and faces in the neighbourhood in that detached, disjointed way.'
`He was a very hot-tempered man.I remember, when I was a little girl and used to go to see my cousins, he often frightened me by talking as if he was angry.Papa told me there was a dreadful quarrel the very day before my uncle's death, between him and Mr Wakem, but it was hushed up.