‘Don’t ask me, dear Charlie, don’t think of it—not just yet at least! Let us wait until—until—it is all over, and then decide what is best to be done!’
Before it was all over; matters were decided for us.
It was the day before the funeral. I had just gone through the mournful ceremony of seeing my father’s coffin soldered down, and, sad and dispirited, had retired to my own room for a little rest, when I heard the sound of carriage wheels up on the gravel drive. I peered over the window blind curiously, for I had never heard of my father’s relations, and had been unable in consequence to communicate with any of them. A lumbering hired fly, laden with luggage, stopped before the door, and from it descended, to my astonishment, the same woman with the fiery red face whom I had discovered in my mother’s company two years before. I decided at once that, whatever the claims of this stranger might be, she could not be suffered to disturb the widow in the first agony of her crushing grief, and, quick, as thought, I ran down into the hall and confronted her before she had entered the house.
‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ I commenced, ‘but Mrs Vere is unable to see anyone at present. There has been a great calamity in the family, and—’
‘I know all about your calamity,’ she interrupted me rudely ‘if it were not for that I shouldn’t be here.’
‘But you cannot see Mrs Vere!’ I repeated.
‘And pray who is Mrs Vere?’ said the woman.
‘My mother,’ I replied proudly, ‘and I will not allow her to be annoyed or disturbed.’
‘Oh! indeed, young man. It strikes me you take a great deal of authority upon yourself; but as I mean to be mistress in my own house, the sooner you stop that sort of thing the better! Here! some of you women!’ she continued, addressing the servants who had come up from the kitchen to learn the cause of the unusual disturbance. ‘Just help the flyman up with my boxes, will you—and look sharp about it.’
I was thunderstruck at her audacity.