Children never failed to be attracted, whether by the winning beauty of his smile, or the sweetness of the voice in which he spoke to anything small or weak, and the little girl willingly came up to him, and put her hand into his. He stroked her thick, silky curls, and asked her name.
‘Marianne,’ she answered.
It was his mother’s name, and this little creature had more resemblance to his tenderly-cherished vision of his young mother than any description Dixon could have given. He drew her closer to him, took the other small, cold hand, and asked her how she liked St. Mildred’s.
‘Oh! much better than London. There are flowers!’ and she proudly exhibited a cup holding some ragged robins, dead nettles, and other common flowers which a country child would have held cheap. He admired and gained more of her confidence, so that she had begun to chatter away quite freely about ‘the high, high hills that reached up to the sky, and the pretty stones,’ till the door opened, and Mrs. Dixon and Bustle made their entrance.
Marianne was so much afraid of the dog, Guy so eager to console, and her mother to scold her, and protest that it should not be turned out, that there was nothing but confusion, until Guy had shown her that Bustle was no dangerous wild beast, induced her to accept his offered paw, and lay a timid finger on his smooth, black head, after which the transition was short to dog and child sitting lovingly together on the floor, Marianne stroking his ears, and admiring him with a sort of silent ecstasy.
Mrs. Dixon was a great, coarse, vulgar woman, and Guy perceived why his uncle had been so averse to taking him to his home, and how he must have felt the contrast between such a wife and his beautiful sister. She had a sort of broad sense, and absence of pretension, but her manner of talking was by no means pleasant, as she querulously accused her husband of being the cause of all their misfortunes, not even restrained by the presence of her child from entering into a full account of his offences.
Mrs. Dixon said she should not say a word, she should not care if it was not for the child, but she could not see her wronged by her own father, and not complain; poor little dear! she was the last, and she supposed she should not keep her long.
It then appeared that on her husband’s obtaining an engagement for a series of concerts at the chief county town, Mrs. Dixon had insisted on coming with him to St. Mildred’s in the hope that country air might benefit Marianne, who, in a confined lodging in London, was pining and dwindling as her brothers and sisters had done before her. Sebastian, who liked to escape from his wife’s grumbling and rigid supervision, and looked forward to amusement in his own way at the races, had grudgingly allowed her to come, and, as she described it, had been reluctant to go to even so slight an expense in the hope of saving his child’s life. She had watched him as closely as she could; but he had made his escape, and the consequences Guy already knew.
If anything could have made it worse, it was finding that after parting last night, he had returned, tried to retrieve his luck, had involved himself further, had been drinking more; and at the very hour when his nephew was getting up to see what could be done for him, had come home in a state, which made it by no means likely that he would be presentable, if his wife called him, as she offered to do.
Guy much preferred arranging with her what was to be done on the present emergency. She was disappointed at finding thirty pounds was all the help he could give; but she was an energetic woman, full of resources, and saw her way, with this assistance, through the present difficulty. The great point was to keep the gambling propensities out of sight of the creditors; and as long as this was done, she had hope. Dixon would go the next morning to the town where the musical meeting was to be held, and there he would be with his employers, where he had a character to preserve, so that she was in no fear of another outbreak.