‘Bless them, mother,’ said Robert, bending over her, and she evidently accepted this as what she wanted; but ‘How—what?’ she added; and taking the uncertain hand, he guided it to the head of each of his three sisters, and prompted the words of blessing from the failing tongue. Then as Bertha rose, he sank on his knees in her place, ‘Bless me, bless me, too, mother; bless me, and pardon my many acts of self-will.’
‘You are good—you—you are a clergyman,’ she hesitated, bewildered.
‘The more reason, mamma; it will comfort him.’ And it was Phœbe who won for her brother the blessing needed as balm to a bleeding heart.
‘The others are away,’ said the dying woman; ‘maybe, if I had made them good when they were little, they would not have left me now.’
While striving to join in prayer for them, she slumbered, and in the course of the night she slept herself tranquilly away from the world where even prosperity had been but a troubled maze to her.
Augusta arrived, weeping profusely, but with all her wits about her, so as to assume the command, and to provide for her own, and her Admiral’s comfort. Phœbe was left to the mournful repose of having no one to whom to attend, since Miss Fennimore provided for the younger ones; and in the lassitude of bodily fatigue and sorrow, she shrank from Maria’s babyish questions and Bertha’s levity and curiosity, spending her time chiefly alone. Even Robert could not often be with her, since Mervyn’s absence and silence threw much on him and Mr. Crabbe, the executor and guardian; and the Bannermans were both exacting and self-important. The Actons, having been pursued by their letters from place to place in the Highlands, at length arrived, and Mervyn last of all, only just in time for the funeral.
Phœbe did not see him till the evening after it, when, having spent the day nearly alone, she descended to the late dinner, and after the quietness in which she had lately lived, and with all the tenderness from fresh suffering, it seemed to her that she was entering on a distracting turmoil of voices. Mervyn, however, came forward at once to meet her, threw his arm
round her, and kissed her rather demonstratively, saying, ‘My little Phœbe, I wondered where you were;’ then putting her into a chair, and bending over her, ‘We are in for the funeral games. Stand up for yourself!’
She did not know in the least what he could mean, but she was too sick at heart to ask; she only thought he looked unwell, jaded, and fagged, and with a heated complexion.
He handed Lady Acton into the dining-room; Augusta, following with Sir Bevil, was going to the head of the table, when he called out, ‘That’s Phœbe’s place!’