“How are you, mother, this morning?” she enquired languidly.
“A little better, darling; and how are you?”
“Oh, I’m as usual! wishing I was dead,” walking over and staring out of the window, down which the rain was streaming in a most depressing manner—out on the big trees, that looked dim through the mist, out on the gravel drive, with its little pools of water.
“Belle, my dearest, you must not say that.”
“Why not, when it is true?” enquired Belle with a fierceness engendered of temper and toothache. “Mother,” she continued, now walking to the foot of the bed, and clutching the rail in her hands, and speaking through her set teeth, “can’t you see that this life is killing me by inches? It’s all very well for Betty, who has never known any other; she likes the country, and dogs, and horses, and long walks—she even likes the common people and the rain! She has never had an admirer. She is not like me—you know what I have been accustomed to, what my life was, and what this is. If I only had the courage, I would drown myself in the canal—I swear I would.”
“Belle!” expostulated her mother.
“Could you not give up Noone, and let it, in spite of that brute, old Brian, and go away and take lodgings for the winter at Brighton or Southsea; at least, we should see something out of our windows, instead of this eternal grass and fir-trees? We could live on very little; we might get a hamper from here every week. Betty could stay with old Sally.”
Mrs. Redmond shook her head sadly; she knew that she was very ill, that it was more than doubtful if she would ever pass the gates of Noone again—save in her coffin.
“If we don’t get away from this hateful hole,” continued Belle, looking fixedly at her mother, with a white face and gleaming eyes, “I shall do something desperate—I know I shall, and I warn you that I shall.”
So saying she snatched the Irish Times off the bed, and swept out of the room.