She stood in the portico in the early summer morning, watching Mr. Jardine's phaeton dwindle to a speck in the distance of the avenue, and then she went slowly back to the house, feeling as if she were quite alone in her misery. It was not that Fanny Palliser was wanting in kindness or sympathy, but she was wanting in comprehension of Ida's feelings, and the stronger nature could not lean upon the weaker; and then the mother would be absorbed in her grief at the loss of her boy, who had become doubly precious since his illness. No, Ida felt that now John Jardine was gone she must bear her burden alone. Help for her, strength outside her own courageous nature, there was none.
She longed on this exquisite morning to be roaming about the park and woods, or riding far afield; but she had made up her mind that, so long as her husband remained in his present critical condition, it was her duty to stay close at hand, within call, lest at any moment there might be a return to reason, and she might again have power to soothe and support him, as she had done many a time in the long down-hill progress of his malady.
With this idea she spent the greater part of her day in the bedroom which Bessie had made so bright and so comfortable. Here she was within easy reach of the nurse in the rooms below, and could be summoned to her husband without a minute's delay. Here she had her favourite books, and the view of park and woods in all their summer glory. She could sit out in her balcony, reading, or looking idly at the wide expanse of hill and valley, brooding sadly over days that were gone, full of fear for the immediate present, and not daring to face the dreaded future.
'Don't think me unsociable,' she said to Lady Palliser, before going back to her room after a hasty breakfast; 'but I am too completely miserable to put on the faintest show of cheerfulness, and I should only make you wretched if I were with you. Go out for a drive, and pay a few visits, mamma. You have had a trying time, and you must want a little change of scene.'
'I believe I do, Ida,' replied Lady Palliser, gravely. 'I feel that I am below par, and that I really want sea air. What should you think of our going to Bournemouth directly after the funeral?'
'The funeral!' murmured Ida, pale as death.
'Yes, dear. Mr. Fosbroke has quite given up all hope, I know; and after the funeral you will want a change as badly as I do. I thought it would be as well to write to the Bournemouth agent to secure nice apartments, for I shouldn't care about staying at an hotel.'
'Oh, mamma, don't make your plans so much beforehand! Wait till he is dead,' said Ida, bitterly.
There seemed to her something ghoulish and stony-hearted in this prevision of coming doom, this arrangement for making the best of life and being comfortable when the sufferer upstairs should have ceased from the struggle with man's last foe.
Lady Palliser contrived to get on without her step-daughter's society. She had Jane Dyson, who was a person of considerable conversational powers, and who had an inexhaustible well-spring of interesting discourse in her recollections of the Archbishop's wife's lingering illness. The mistress and maid spent the morning not unpleasantly in conversation of the charnel house order, and in looking over Lady Palliser's wardrobe, with a view to discovering what new mourning she would require in the event of Brian's death. She had liked him, and had been kind to him in life, and she was not going to stint him in death by any false economy in crape or bugles.