“I imagine that she cannot help it; Mrs. Johnson is going far north, and was very good in staying with her at Southampton till she could move. Poor little thing! alone in a strange country! I’ll tell you what! One of you must run down by train, meet her, and either bring her home in a fly, or wait to be picked up by Raymond’s train. Take her Miles’s letter.”
The two young men glanced at one another in dismay, and the elder said, “Wouldn’t nurse do better?”
“No, no, Frank,” said the younger, catching a distressed look on their mother’s face, “I’ll look up Miles’s little African. I’ve rather a curiosity that way. Only don’t let them start the bells under the impression that we are a pair of the victims. If so, I shall bolt.”
“Julius must be the nearest bolting,” said Frank. “How he accomplished it passes my comprehension. I shall not believe in it till I see him. There, then, I’ll give orders. Barouche for the squire, van for the rector, and the rattling fly for the sailor’s wife. So wags the course of human life,” chanted Frank Charnock, as he strolled out of the room.
“Thanks, Charlie,” whispered his mother. “I am grieved for that poor young thing. I wish I could go myself. And, Charlie, would you cast an eye round, and see how things look in their rooms? You have always been my daughter.”
“Ah! my vocation is gone! Three in one day! I wonder which is the best of the lot. I bet upon Miles’s Cape Gooseberry.—Tired, mother darling? Shall I send in nurse? I must be off, if I am to catch the 12.30 train.”
He bent to kiss the face, which was too delicately shaped and tinted to look old enough to be in expectation of three daughters-in-law. No, prostrate as she was upon pillows, Mrs. Charnock Poynsett did not look as if she had attained fifty years. She was lady of Compton Poynsett in her own right; and had been so early married and widowed, as to have been the most efficient parental influence her five sons had ever known; and their beautiful young mother had been the object of their adoration from the nursery upwards, so that she laughed at people who talked of the trouble and anxiety of rearing sons.
They had all taken their cue from their senior, who had always been more to his mother than all the world besides. For several years, he being as old of his age as she was young, Mr. and Mrs. Charnock Poynsett, with scarcely eighteen years between their ages, had often been taken by strangers for husband and wife rather than son and mother. And though she knew she ought to wish for his marriage, she could not but be secretly relieved that there were no symptoms of any such went impending.
At last, during the first spring after Raymond Charnock Poynsett, Esquire, had been elected member for the little borough of Willansborough, his mother, while riding with her two youngest boys, met with an accident so severe, that in two years she had never quitted the morning-room, whither she had at first been carried. She was daily lifted to a couch, but she could endure no further motion, though her general health had become good, and her cheerfulness made her room pleasant to her sons when the rest of the house was very dreary to them.
Raymond, always the home son, would never have absented himself but for his parliamentary duties, and vibrated between London and home, until, when his mother had settled into a condition that seemed likely to be permanent, and his two youngest brothers were at home, reading each for his examination, the one for a Government clerkship, the other for the army, he yielded to the general recommendation, and set out for a journey on the Continent.