"Did you hear me tell you to go?" exclaimed Miser Farebrother.
Tom Barley received a kind look from Mrs. Farebrother as he left the room, and he went away perfectly happy.
In another hour the house was quiet and the light extinguished. Miser Farebrother was in secure possession of Parksides, and he fell asleep in the midst of a calculation of how much money he would save in rent in the course of the next twenty years. Other calculations also ran through his head in the midst of his fitful slumbers—calculations of figures and money, and interest, and sharp bargains with needy men, clients he was bleeding to his own profit. No thought in which figures and money did not find a place did he bestow upon the more human aspect of his life, in which there was to be almost immediately an important change.
Within a fort-night of her entrance into the desolate house Mrs. Farebrother lay upon her death-bed. She had been weak and ailing for months past, and the night's journey from London, no less than the deep unhappiness which, since her marriage, had drawn the roses from her cheeks and made her heart heavy and sad, now hastened her end. As she lay upon the ancient stately bed from which she was never to rise, a terrible loneliness fell upon her. Her darling child was by her side, mercifully asleep; her husband was moving about the apartment; the sunbeams falling through the window brought no comfort to the weary heart—all was so desolate, so desolate! In a trembling voice she called her husband to her.
"Well?" he asked.
"I must see my sister," she said.
"I will not have her," he cried. "You are well enough without her. I will not have her here!"
"I am well enough—to die!" she murmured. "I must see my sister before I go."
"You are frightening yourself unnecessarily," said Miser Farebrother, fretfully. "You are always full of fancies, and putting me to expense. You never had the slightest consideration for me—not the slightest. You think of nobody but yourself."
"I am frightened of this place," she found strength to say. "I cannot, I will not, die here alone! I must see my sister, I must see my sister!"