Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

MRS. WOOLPER IS ANXIOUS.

Since the beginning of her illness, Charlotte Halliday had been the object and subject of many anxious thoughts in the minds of several people. That her stepfather had his anxieties about her—anxieties which he tried to hide—was obvious to the one person in the Bayswater villa who noted his looks, and tried to read the thoughts they indicated.

Mrs. Sheldon's alarm, once fairly awakened, was not to be lulled to rest. And in Valentine Hawkehurst's heart there was an aching pain—a dull dead load of care, which had never been lightened from the hour when he first perceived the change in his dear one's face.

There was one other person, an inhabitant of the Bayswater villa, who watched Charlotte Halliday at this time with a care as unresting as the care of mother or stepfather, bosom friend or plighted lover. This person was Ann Woolper. Mrs. Woolper had come to the villa prepared to find in Miss Halliday a frivolous self-satisfied young person, between whom and an old broken-down woman like herself there could be no sympathy. She had expected to be contemptuously—or, at the best, indifferently—entreated by the prosperous well-placed young lady, whom Mr. Sheldon had spoken of as a good girl, as girls go; a vague species of commendation, which, to the mind of Mrs. Woolper, promised very little.

As clearly as Philip Sheldon dared express his wishes with regard to Charlotte Halliday, he had expressed them to Ann Woolper. What he would fain have said, was, "Watch my stepdaughter, and keep me well acquainted with every step she takes." Thus much he dared not say; but by insinuating that Tom Halliday's daughter was frivolous and reckless, and that her lover was not to be trusted, he had contrived to put Mrs. Woolper on the qui vive.

"Mr. Philip's afraid she may go and marry this young man on the sly, before he's got the means to support a wife," she said to herself, as she meditated upon the meaning of her master's injunctions; "and well he may be. There's no knowing what young women are up to nowadays; and the more innocent and inexperienced a young woman is, the more she wants looking after. And Miss Georgy Craddock always was a poor fondy, up to naught but dressing herself fine, and streaming up and down Barlingford High Street with her old schoolfellows. Such as she ain't fit to be trusted with a daughter; and Mr. Philip knows that. He always was a deep one. But I'm glad he looks after Missy: there's many men, having got fast hold of th' father's brass, would let th' daughter marry Old Scratch, for the sake of gettin' rid of her."

This is how Mrs. Woolper argued the matter. She came of a prudent race; and anything like prudence seemed to her a commendable virtue. She wished to think well of her master; for her he had been a Providence in the hour of calamity and old age. Where else could she look, if not to him? And to suspect him, or think ill of him, was to reject the one refuge offered to her distress. A magnanimous independence of spirit is not an easy virtue for the old and friendless and poor. The drowning wretch will scarcely question the soundness of the plank that sustains him upon the storm-tossed billows; nor was Mrs. Woolper inclined to question the motives of the man to whom she now owed her daily bread.

It is possible that before invoking Mrs. Woolper from the ashes of the past to take her seat by the hearthstone of the present, Mr. Sheldon may have contemplated the question of her return in all its bearings, and may have assured himself that she was his own, by a tie not easily broken—his bond-slave, fettered hand and foot by the bondage of necessity.

"What choice can she have, except the choice between my house and the workhouse?" he may naturally have asked himself; "and is it likely she will quarrel with her bread-and-butter in order to fall back upon dry bread?" Mr. Sheldon, contemplating this and all other questions from his one unchanging standpoint, may reasonably have concluded that Mrs. Woolper would do nothing opposed to her own interests; and that so long as it suited her interest to remain at the Lawn, and to serve him, she would there remain, his docile and unquestioning slave.

The influence of affection, the force of generous impulse, were qualities that did not come into Mr. Sheldon's calculations upon this subject. His addition and subtraction, division and multiplication, were all based on one system.