“Good-bye, grannie. I’ve told my auntylopes about my lamb and about my dog and about all my fings, and they wagged their tails and would like to meet them very much they saided.”
On the way to the station Miss Young talked about nothing else except Mrs. Fuller’s wonderful charm and personality.
“Really, I can hardly express what she’s done for me. I first came to her when she was no longer able to read to herself. I happened to know a little French, and since I’ve been with her I’ve learnt Italian. She has been so kind and patient, teaching me. I used to come in every afternoon at first, but for the last two years I’ve stayed with her all the time. I’m afraid Mr. Fuller resents my presence. He always tries to make out that I’m her nurse, which annoys the old lady dreadfully. She’s been so kind to my little brother too. He comes in two or three times a week, and sometimes he brings a friend. She declares she likes the company of schoolboys better than any. She has talked to me a lot about your husband, Mrs. Fuller. I thought that she would die herself when she heard he had been killed like that. And the terrible thing was that she heard the news from Mr. Fuller, whom, you know, she doesn’t really like at all. He very seldom comes up to her room, but I happened to be out getting her something she wanted in Brigham, and I came in just as he had told her and she was sitting up in bed, shaking her left fist at him, and cursing him for being alive himself to tell her the news. She was calling him a miser and a hypocrite and a liar, and I really don’t know what she didn’t call him. She is a most extraordinary woman. There doesn’t seem to be anything she does not know. And yet she has often told me that she taught herself everything. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? And her room! Of course, it’s very unusual, but, do you know, I like it tremendously now. It seems to me to be a live room. Every other room I go into now seems to me quite dead.”
And that was what Nancy was thinking when the dismal train steamed out of Brigham to take Letizia and herself back to London, that melancholy March night.
CHAPTER XV
THE TUNNEL
The only other occupant of the railway-carriage was a nun who sat in the farther corner reading her breviary or some pious book. Letizia soon fell fast asleep, her head pillowed on her mother’s lap, while Nancy, watching the flaring chimneys in the darkness without, was thinking of that old lady who had flared like them in the murk of Lebanon House. After two hours of monotonous progress Letizia woke up.
“Muvver,” she said, “I fink I’ve got a funny feeling in my tummy.”
“I expect you’re hungry, pet. You didn’t eat a very good tea.”
“It was such a crumby cake; and when I blowed some of the crumbs out of my mouf, one of those aunts made a noise like you make to a gee-gee, and I said, ‘Yes, but I’m not a gee-gee,’ and then the plate what I was eating went out of the room on a tray.”