Mary listened, and heard enough to blame Sir Charles for his peevishness, and she began to throw out little expressions of dissatisfaction at him; but these were so promptly discouraged by the faithful wife that she drew in again and avoided that line. But one day, coming softly as a cat, she heard Sir Charles and Lady Bassett talking over their calamity. Sir Charles was saying that it was Heaven's curse; that all the poor people in the village had children; that Richard Bassett's weak, puny little wife had brought him an heir, and was about to make him a parent again; he alone was marked out and doomed to be the last of his race. “And yet,” said he, “if I had married any other woman, and you had married any other man, we should have had children by the dozen, I suppose.”
Upon the whole, though he said nothing palpably unjust, he had the tone of a man blaming his wife as the real cause of their joint calamity, under which she suffered a deeper, nobler, and more silent anguish than himself. This was hard to bear; and when Sir Charles went away, Mary Wells ran in, with an angry expression on the tip of her tongue.
She found Lady Bassett in a pitiable condition, lying rather than leaning on the table, with her hair loose about her, sobbing as if her heart would break.
All that was good in Mary Wells tugged at her heart-strings. She flung herself on her knees beside her, and seizing her mistress's hand, and drawing it to her bosom, fell to crying and sobbing along with her.
This canine devotion took Lady Bassett by surprise. She turned her tearful eyes upon her sympathizing servant, and said, “Oh, Mary!” and her soft hand pressed the girl's harder palm gratefully.
Mary spoke first. “Oh, my lady,” she sobbed, “it breaks my heart to see you so. And what a shame to blame you for what is no fault of yourn. If I was your husband the cradles would soon be full in this house; but these fine gentlemen, they be old before their time with smoking of tobacco; and then to come and lay the blame on we!”
“Mary, I value you very much—more than I ever did a servant in my life; but if you speak against your master we shall part.”
“La, my lady, I wouldn't for the world. Sir Charles is a perfect gentleman. Why, he gave me a sovereign only the other day for nursing of him; but he didn't ought to blame you for no fault of yourn, and to make you cry. It tears me inside out to see you cry; you that is so good to rich and poor. I wouldn't vex myself so for that: dear heart, 'twas always so; God sends meat to one house, and mouths to another.”
“I could be patient if poor Sir Charles was not so unhappy,” sighed Lady Bassett; “but if ever you are a wife, Mary, you will know how wretched it makes us to see a beloved husband unhappy.”
“Then I'd make him happy,” said Mary.