Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?—Ben Jonson
At the end of a week Mervyn made his appearance in a vehement hurry. Cecily’s next sister, an officer’s wife, was coming home with two little children, for a farewell visit before going to the Cape, and Maria and Bertha must make way for her. So he wanted to take Phœbe home that afternoon to get the Underwood ready for them.
‘Mervyn, how can I go? I am not nearly ready.’
‘What can you have been doing then?’ he exclaimed, with something of his old temper.
‘This house has been in such a state.’
‘Well, you were not wanted to nurse the sick man, were you? I thought you were one that was to be trusted. What more is there to do?’
Phœbe looked at her list of commissions, and found herself convicted. Those patterns ought to have been sent back two days since. What had she been about? Listening to Mr. Randolf’s explanations of the Hiawatha scenery! Why had she not written a note about that hideous hearth-rug? Because Mr. Randolf was looking over Stowe’s Survey of London. Methodical Phœbe felt herself in disgrace, and yet, somehow, she could not be sorry enough; she wanted a reprieve from exile at Hiltonbury,
alone and away from all that was going on. At least she should hear whether Macbeth, at the Princess’s Theatre, fulfilled Mr. Randolf’s conceptions of it; and if Mr. Currie approved his grand map of the Newcastle district, with the little trees that she had taught him to draw.
Perhaps it was the first time that Mervyn had been justly angry with her; but he was so much less savage than in his injustice that she was very much ashamed and touched; and finally, deeply grateful for the grace of this one day in which to repair her negligence, provided she would be ready to start by seven o’clock next morning. Hard and diligently she worked, and very late she came home. As she was on her way up-stairs she met Robert coming out of Owen’s room.
‘Phœbe,’ he said, turning with her into her room, ‘what is the matter with Lucy?’