What, then, was to be done? The choice lay between two measures only, both deeply wounding to her pride. In the one case she must leave the old man to be arrested in his bed for the price of the food which for a few months longer perhaps he might still get on credit ... in the other she must undergo the humiliation of informing her husband that all the gay external appearances she and her mother had so laboriously presented to the public eye, were in reality but so much cheatery and delusion; and that, if he would not take compassion on her father's destitute condition, the poor old man must either die in the county prison or the parish workhouse.
The alternative offered more of doubt than of choice, and it might have been long ere she decided, had she not cleverly recollected that, if she decided upon leaving him to get on as he could for a few weeks longer, she must at last submit to her husband's knowing the real state of the case; she therefore resolutely determined that he should know it at once.
The time she chose to make the disclosure was the hour when men are generally supposed to be in the most amiable frame of mind possible, namely, when hunger, but not appetite, has been satisfied, and digestion not fully begun; that is to say, Mr. Barnaby was enjoying his walnuts and his wine.
"My dear Barnaby!..." she began, "I have some very disagreeable intelligence to communicate to you, which has reached me only to-day, and which has distressed me more than I can express."
"Good heaven!... What can you mean, my dear love?... For God's sake do not weep, my beautiful Martha, but tell me what it is, and trust to me for consolation."
"And that indeed I must do, dearest Barnaby!... for who else have I now to look to?... My poor father ... I had no idea of it till this morning ... my poor father is...."
"Dying, perhaps, my poor love!... Alas! Martha dearest, I have long known that his case was perfectly hopeless, and I had hoped that you had been aware of this also; but really, my love, his state of health is such as ought in a great degree to reconcile you to his loss.... I am sure he must suffer a great deal at times."
Mrs. Barnaby's first impulse was to reply that what she had to tell was a great deal worse than that; but this would have been the truth, and a sort of habitual, or it might indeed be called natural cautiousness, led her always to pause before she uttered anything that she had no motive for saying, excepting merely that it was true; and she generally found, upon reconsideration, that there was hardly anything which might not, according to her tactics, be improved by a leetle dressing up. So, in reply to this affectionate remonstrance from her husband, Mrs. Barnaby answered with a sob:—
"No, my dear Barnaby!... I have no reason to doubt but that Providence will spare my sole remaining parent for some short time longer, if only to prove to him that his happy daughter has the will as well as the means to supply to him the exemplary wife he has lost! But, alas! dear Barnaby, who in this world can we expect to find perfect? My poor dear mother, in her great anxiety to spare his age and weakness the suffering such intelligence must occasion, most unwisely concealed from him and from me the failure of the merchant in whose hands he had deposited the sum for which he sold his patrimonial estate.... His object in selling it was to increase his income, principally indeed for my poor mother's sake, and now the entire sum is lost to us for ever!"
"God bless me!... This is a sad stroke indeed, my dear! What is the name of this merchant?... I hope, at least, that we may get some dividend out of him."