To which Mr. David Preen nodded an emphatic assent.
The Squire gave in at last. Not to my pleading—he accused me of having lost my head only to think of it—but to Featherston. And when the following week was wearing away, the exigencies of Featherston’s patients not releasing him sooner, we started for Sainteville; he, I, and David Preen. Getting in at ten at night after a boisterous passage, Featherston took up his quarters at Monsieur Carimon’s, we ours at the Hôtel des Princes.
She looked very ill. Ill and changed. I had seen Ann Preen at Buttermead when she lived there, but the Ann Preen (or Fennel) I saw now was not much like her. The once bright face was drawn and fallen in, and very nearly as long and grey as Featherston’s. Apart from that, a timid, shrinking look sat upon it, as though she feared some terror lay very near to her.
The sick have to be studied, especially when suffering from whims and fancies. So they invented a little fable to Mrs. Fennel—that Featherston and David Preen were taking an excursion together for their recreation, and the doctor had extended it as far as Sainteville to see his sister Mary; never allowing her to think that it was to see her. I was with them, but I went for nobody—and in truth that’s all I was in the matter.
It was the forenoon of the day after we arrived. David Preen had gone in first, her kinsman and distant cousin, to the Petite Maison Rouge, paving the way, as it were, for Featherston. We went in presently. Mrs. Fennel sat in a large armchair by the salon fire, wrapped in a grey shawl; she was always cold now, she told us; David Preen sat on the sofa opposite, talking pleasantly of home news. Featherston joined him on the sofa, and I sat down near the table.
Oh, she was glad to see us! Glad to see us all. Ours were home faces, you see. She held my hands in hers, and the tears ran down her face, betraying her state of weakness.
“You have not been very well of late, Mary tells me,” Featherston said to her in a break of the conversation. “What has been the matter?”
“I—it came on from a bad cold I caught,” she answered with some hesitation. “And there was all the trouble about Lavinia’s death. I could not get over the grief.”
“Well, I must say you don’t look very robust,” returned Featherston, in a half-joking tone. “I think I had better take you in hand whilst I am here, and set you up.”
“I do not think you can set me up; I do not suppose any one can,” she replied, shaking back her curls, which fell on each side of her face in ringlets, as of old.