“And now that you have arrived,” she concluded, “I think I shall go home. I can come up here every day, and stay from morning till evening.”
“No, no, please do not,” he interrupted hastily. “I could never get along alone. You would not expect me to do the housekeeping. Who is to nurse my mother, and befriend Cuckoo, and look after the servants? If you will only stay for a short time, you will be doing us the greatest kindness. My mother is so fond of you. You said you were her eldest daughter, and I am sure you would not desert her now.”
And Betty remained. Pale-faced hysterical Cuckoo was her shadow, helpless but affectionate, following her in and out of the rooms, and in and out of the house, like a dog. Betty wrote, and sewed, and nursed, and personally interviewed anxious callers, undertook all arrangements about the luncheon after the funeral, hemmed black hat-bands, and made Cuckoo’s frock. At first it seemed strange to George, that he and Betty should be virtually the head of this large, disorderly house, sitting opposite to each other at meals, just as if they were the real master and mistress, and laying their heads together in many anxious consultations over grave matters. Betty was an invaluable nurse, so light-footed, cheerful and firm; she spent a good deal of her time in the invalid’s room, and George passed many weary hours in the study, endeavouring to evolve some order out of chaos. Each morning the post-bag was heavy with bills, large, clamouring, and alarming. There were bills to take up and renew, there were mortgages, there was every description of angry dun. Major Malone’s creditors had long passed from the obsequious to the formally polite, the polite to the freezingly-laconic, from the freezingly-laconic to the threatening stage.
George’s cheek burnt, as he glanced at some of these effusions, and his head ached, and his heart sank, as he went over them. Dozen after dozen. What were company’s accounts or mess accounts in comparison to these? At length he called in the aid of the family solicitor, and between them they endeavoured to reach the bottom of affairs. After groping for several days, among a perfect sea of debts, they came to the conclusion that Major Malone—who had never known any personal inconvenience from want of money, who had brow-beaten all his creditors, and who had the most imposing funeral that had been seen for years in those parts—had died as much a pauper as if he had breathed his last in the county workhouse. The place was gone from the Malones for ever. Also the farms, the stock, the silver, and the furniture. All that Mrs. Malone could claim or carry from her home was her own exceedingly shabby wardrobe. She and Cuckoo were literally penniless; her jointure had been disposed of, and gambled away; she had not a pound in the world; her very bed was the property of a money-lender; there was not a scrap of salvage out of the wreck. Loud-voiced angry men and women, some with hooked noses, pervaded the avenue and grounds, and the house was almost in a state of siege!
“What was to be done?” George asked himself, as with a burning head he walked up and down the long garden walk in the cool June evening, after hours spent in writing letters, and holding interviews. He must get his mother and Cuckoo away to some quiet suburb near Dublin, where Cuckoo could be sent to school, and where they could live cheaply. To ensure their existing at all, he must at once hand over almost the whole of his own private income; four hundred a year would be little enough for them to live upon, for his mother was a bad manager, and had caught her husband’s craze for running up bills. Yes, he saw nothing for it but to relinquish his own small fortune. This he could contemplate with equanimity; he could live without it.
But another duty was ten times more difficult. He must give up Betty. How could he relinquish Betty? How was he to live without her?
Betty had long ago made her peace, though she had never breathed a word of her mistake that evening in the meadow lane. Absence had not obliterated her image from his mind—quite the reverse. He saw her now in the fierce light that beats upon people with whom you live in hourly contact. He saw her devotion to his mother. Her unselfishness and energy, and cheerfulness, were all made known to him. She was not merely a very pretty acquaintance, with lovely grey eyes and a merry laugh, who sat a horse to perfection. She was something more in his eyes; she was the girl he loved.
He never cast a thought to Belle. Betty had swept her out of his mind, and, so to speak, closed the door. She came to Noone, almost daily, and looked into his face with a tender sisterly sympathetic gaze, and asked for his dear mother, and sighed, and “hoped that Betty was of some use! She was a good, willing child, and fond of nursing, though, perhaps, a little brusque and rough. Now I myself,” said Belle, “am so exquisitely sensitive, that I cannot bear to see grief or pain; it makes me ill, but I have felt for you acutely. I have thought so much of you, dear Mr. Holroyd, in all your trouble,” and tears actually trembled on her lashes—theatrical tears.
“Words are cheap,” thought George as he walked with her to the avenue gate, when she bade him a lingering good-bye. Give him deeds—one night of watching, against fifty pretty speeches. His eyes were opened widely now, and he appraised pretty, worldly, selfish, Belle at her true value.