‘Of course I can’t prevent you from saying what you like, but I think it would be very wrong to start a rumour of this kind.’
There was less resolve in this utterance. Amy mused, and looked wretched.
‘Come up to the drawing-room, dear,’ said her mother, for they had held their conversation in the room nearest to the house-door. ‘What a state your mind must be in! Oh dear! Oh dear!’
She was a slender, well-proportioned woman, still pretty in face, and dressed in a way that emphasised her abiding charms. Her voice had something of plaintiveness, and altogether she was of frailer type than her daughter.
‘Is my room ready?’ Amy inquired on the stairs.
‘I’m sorry to say it isn’t, dear, as I didn’t expect you till tomorrow. But it shall be seen to immediately.’
This addition to the household was destined to cause grave difficulties with the domestic slaves. But Mrs Yule would prove equal to the occasion. On Amy’s behalf she would have worked her servants till they perished of exhaustion before her eyes.
‘Use my room for the present,’ she added. ‘I think the girl has finished up there. But wait here; I’ll just go and see to things.’
‘Things’ were not quite satisfactory, as it proved. You should have heard the change that came in that sweetly plaintive voice when it addressed the luckless housemaid. It was not brutal; not at all. But so sharp, hard, unrelenting—the voice of the goddess Poverty herself perhaps sounds like that.
Mad? Was he to be spoken of in a low voice, and with finger pointing to the forehead? There was something ridiculous, as well as repugnant, in such a thought; but it kept possession of Amy’s mind. She was brooding upon it when her mother came into the drawing-room.