She and Arthur were whole-heartedly on my side in this hideous separation between my wife and me. Naturally they did not say much to me in condemnation of Fay: I could neither have permitted nor endured it: but I knew they were feeling it in my presence and expressing it in each other's; and they put no curb upon their expressions of indignation against Frank.
My old nurse, however, thought differently. To my surprise—though by this time I ought not to have been surprised at any vagary of Ponty's—the person she blamed in the whole affair was myself: and, what is more, she did not hesitate to say so. I felt that she was unjust—cruelly unjust—and all the more so that she had been so indulgent to me all through my childhood: but what I thought of her had no effect upon Ponty, any more than it had when I was a little boy.
"You've yourself to thank for the whole terrible business, Master Reggie," she said to me after my restoration to what my friends and doctors described as "health." She was far too good a nurse to utter unwelcome words into ears that she did not consider strong enough to receive them. To the needs of a sick soul neither she, nor anybody else, paid any heed. "I knew there'd be trouble as soon as you began that 'Oranges and Lemons' nonsense of having Miss Annabel and Mr. Frank to live with you; and I said so, but you would have your own way, you having a spice of obstinacy in your character as well as Miss Annabel. You weren't your poor Papa's son for nothing."
"I don't call doing what you think will make other people happy exactly obstinacy, Ponty," I pleaded.
"Call it what you like, Master Reggie, but that's what it is. Folks always find pretty pet names for their own particular faults. There was a man at Poppenhall who prided himself upon what he called his firmness, and impulsiveness, and economy: those were the pet names he used: and yet all the village knew that he was nothing but an obstinate, ill-tempered old miser."
"But I thought I was doing right," I said. It was strange that Ponty was the only person against whom I had no feeling of bitterness, and in whose presence I felt less wretched than anywhere else. This might have been because she had been associated with peace and comfort as long as I could remember: but I think the real reason was that she was the only person who blamed me and not Fay.
"And your Papa thought he was doing right when he arranged your poor Mamma's whole time for her, and never let her have a will or a way of her own. She didn't run away: she hadn't the spirit for it, poor thing!—and besides wives didn't run away in those days as they do now. But I saw what she didn't think anybody saw; and I watched the life die out of her like it does out of a fire that's got the sun on it."
I started. So Ponty had consciously seen for herself what had only been subconsciously revealed to me.
"I don't mean that Sir John was unkind to her ladyship: far from it: but he just crushed the life out of her, like Miss Annabel does out of folks, without knowing what he was up to. They've always meant well, both Miss Annabel and her Papa: but their well-meaning has done more harm than other folk's ill-meaning, in my humble judgment. And when her ladyship died, Sir John was as cut up as anybody could wish to see, and never married again nor nothing of that kind. He called her ladyship's death a dispensation of Providence, and bore it most beautiful; and nobody knew but me as it was nothing but a judgment on him for forcing poor Lady Jane into his own mould, as you might say."
"But I never forced her ladyship into my mould, heaven knows!" I exclaimed.