Here they were interrupted by Maura’s stealing timidly in with the message that poor mamma had heard that Sir Jasper was here, and would he be so very good as to come up for one minute and speak to her.
‘It is asking a great deal,’ said Kalliope, ‘but it would be very kind, and it might ease her mind.’
He was taken to the poor little bedroom full of oppressive atmosphere, though the window was open to relieve the labouring breath. It seemed absolutely filled with the enormous figure of the poor dropsical woman with white ghastly face, sitting pillowed up, incapable of lying down.
‘Oh, so good! so angelic!’ she gasped.
‘I am sorry to see you so ill, Mrs. White.’
‘Ah! ‘tis dying I am, Colonel Merrifield—begging your pardon, but the sight of you brings back the times when my poor captain was living, and I was the happy woman. ‘Tis the thought of my poor orphans that is vexing me, leaving them as I am in a strange land where their own flesh and blood is unnatural to them,’ she cried, trying to clasp her swollen hands, in the excitement that brought out the Irish substructure of her nature. ‘Ah, Colonel dear, you’ll bear in mind their father that would have died for you, and be good to them.’
‘Indeed, I hope to do what I can for them.’
‘They are good children, Sir Jasper, all of them, even the poor boy that is in trouble out of the very warmth of his heart; but ‘tis Richard who would be the credit to you, if you would lend him the helping hand. Where is the boy, Kally?’
‘He is gone to call on Mr. White.’
‘Ah! and you’ll say a good word for him with his cousin,’ she pleaded, ‘and say how ‘tis no discredit to him if things are laid on his poor brother that he never did.’