“You must go and see him,” said Herbert.
Jenny looked wistful and undecided; but Julius entered to say that she must come at once, for Archie must go back to London by the ten o’clock train to an appointment, and could not return for two days.
Herbert smiled her away, for he was still in a state where it was not possible to bear any engrossing of his head-nurse, and the lover’s absence was, even to his unselfishness, good news.
Rosamond could not refrain from the pleasure of peeping down the little dark stair as Archie and his Jenny met in the doorway, and she walked demurely in their rear, wondering whether other eyes saw as much as she did in the manner in which Jenny hung on his arm. She left them to their dewy walk in the Rectory garden to the last minute at which breakfast could be swallowed, and told Jenny that she was to drive him in the pony-carriage to Hazlett’s Gate; she would take care of Herbert.
“You ought to be asleep, you know,” said Jenny.
“My dear, I couldn’t sleep! There’s a great deal better than sleep! Is not Herbert going to get well? and aren’t you jolly again and Archie back again? Sleep!—why I want to have wings and clap them—and more than all, is not Mr. Charnock off and away to-morrow? Sleep indeed!—I should like to see myself so stupid.”
“Mr. Charnock?” interrogatively said Archie.
“The head of the family—the original Charnock of Dunstone,” said Rosamond, who was in wild spirits, coming on a worn-out body and mind, and therefore perfectly unguarded. “Don’t shake your head at me, Jenny, Archie is one of the family, and that makes you so, and I must tell you of his last performance. You know he is absolutely certain that his dear daughter is more infallible than all the Popes, even since the Council, or than anybody but himself, and that whatever goes wrong here is the consequence of Julius’s faith in Dr. Easterby. So, when poor Cecil, uneasy in her mind, began asking about the illness at Wil’sbro’, he enlivened her with a prose about misjudging, through well-intentioned efforts of clerical philanthropy to interfere with the sanitary condition of the town—so that wells grew tainted, &c., all from ignorant interference. Poor man he heard a little sob, and looked round, and there was Cecil in a dead faint. He set all the bells ringing, and sent an express for me.”
“But wasn’t he furious with Anne for mentioning drains at all?”
“My dear Joan, don’t you know how many old women there are of both sorts, who won’t let other people look over the wall at what they gloat on in private? However, he had his punishment, for he really thought that the subject had been too much for her delicacy, and simply upset her nerves.”