“Not at all. Don’t you want them to love you?”
Mrs Aldworth burst into tears.
“What a dreadful creature you are,” she said. “As though my own sweet children did not love me. Why, they’re madly devoted to me. If my little finger aches they’re in such a state—you never knew anything like it. I have seen my poor Molly obliged to rush from the room when I have been having a bad attack of my neuralgia, just because her own precious nerves could not stand the agony. Not love me? How dare you insinuate such a thing?”
“Mother, we evidently have different ideas with regard to love. My idea is this—that you ought to sacrifice yourself for the one you love. Now, if I came here and took the complete charge of you away from your own daughters; if I gave them nothing whatever to do for you, and if they were to spend their entire time amusing themselves, and not once considering you, I should do them a cruel wrong; I should injure their characters, and I should make them, what they are already inclined to be—most terribly selfish. That, God helping me, I will not do. I will share the charge of you with them, or I will return to Frankfort to Mrs Silchester, whom I love; to the life that I delight in; to the friends I have made. I will not budge an inch; I will nurse you with the girls, or not at all.”
Mrs Aldworth looked up. After all, with a captious, fretful, irritable invalid, a woman with so vacillating a nature as Mrs Aldworth’s, there was nothing so effective as firmness. She succumbed. In a minute she had flung her arms round Marcia’s neck.
“My darling,” she said, “I do see what you mean. And you are right; you will train them, you will be, in my absence, a mother to them.”
“Not a mother, for I, like them, am young; but I will be to them an elder sister, and I will teach them—not in words, but by precept and by sympathy and by love, what I should like them to learn. They want a great deal of looking after; and, first of all, they want a complete change in their method of living.”
“I am afraid even for them, and for you, I cannot quite ignore my pain, my constant suffering, my weary nights, my long, long, fatiguing days.”
“Of course you cannot, and I have said enough for the present. Now, let us have a jolly time. See, I am going to have a particularly nice tea for you this afternoon. I have told Susan to bring it up when it is ready. We’ll have it on that balcony.”
“Oh, but I shall catch cold.”