“Have you thought any more of Lord Cheriton’s earnest desire to improve your position? Have you learnt to take pity upon him, to think more kindly of him, on account of all he has suffered?”
“I am very sorry for him—but I can never accept any favour at his hands. I can never forget what my mother’s life has been like, and who made her what she is.”
“And is your own life to be always the same—a monotony of toil?”
“I am used to such a life—but I have some thought of a change in my employment. I had a long talk with your friend Mr. Ramsay last night at Miss Newton’s, and through his help I hope to learn to be a sick-nurse. I should be of more use to my fellow-creatures in that capacity than in stitching at fine needlework for rich people’s children.”
“It would be a hard life, Mercy.”
“I am content to live a hard life. I had my span of a soft life—a life of idleness on a summer sea, amidst the loveliest spots upon earth—a life that would have been like a glimpse of Heaven itself, if it had not been for the consciousness of sin and disgrace. Do you think I forget those days on the Mediterranean, or forget that I have to atone for them? The man I loved is dead—all that belonged to that life has vanished like a dream.”
They parted at the railway station, she to go to her place in a dusty third-class carriage, he to a smoking carriage to smoke the meditative pipe, and think sadly of those two blighted lives which had been ground beneath the wheels of Lord Cheriton’s triumphal car.
Cheriton Chase was deserted, the blinds down, the servants on board wages, the flower-beds empty and raked over for the winter; but at Milbrook Priory all was life and movement. The sisters and their husbands were again established in their favourite rooms. Lady Jane was again at hand to assist her daughter-in-law to bear the burden of a family party, and all was much as it had been in the previous winter, except that Juanita had a new interest in life, and was able to take pleasure in many things that had been an oppression to her spirits last year.
Most of all were her feelings altered towards Mrs. Grenville and her nursery. She was now warmly interested in the history of Johnnie’s measles, and deeply sympathetic about that constitutional tendency towards swollen tonsils which was dear little Lucy’s “weak point.” For must not her Godfrey inevitably face the ordeal of measles, and might not his tonsils show a like weakness at the growing age? All those discussions about nursery dinners—the children who fed well and the children who fed badly—those who liked milk puddings and those who could not be induced to touch them—the advisability of a basin of cornflour or bread-and-milk at bedtime, the murderous influence of buns and pastry, and the lurking dangers of innocent-seeming jam—all these things, to hear of which last year bored her almost to exasperation, were now vital and spirit-moving questions.