“I am speaking to Lady Jenkins, madame,” returned old Tamlyn, severely: “be so kind as not to interfere. My dear lady, listen to me”—taking her hand; “I am come here with your life-long old friend, William Lawrence, to talk to you. We have reason to believe that you continually take, and have taken for some time past, small doses of brandy-and-water. Is it so?”
“Patty gives it me,” cried Lady Jenkins, looking first at them and then at Patty, in a helpless sort of manner.
“Just so: we know she does. But, are you aware that brandy-and-water, taken in this way, is so much poison?”
“Tell them, Patty, that you give it me for my good,” said the poor lady, in affectionate appeal.
“Yes, it is for your good, dear Lady Jenkins,” resentfully affirmed Madame St. Vincent, regarding the company with flashing eyes. “Does any one dare to suppose that I should give Lady Jenkins sufficient to hurt her? I may be allowed, I presume, as her ladyship’s close companion, constantly watching her, to be the best judge of what is proper for her to take.”
Well, a shindy ensued—as Tod called it—all of them talking altogether, except himself and poor Lady Jenkins: and madame defying every one and everything. They told her that she could no longer be trusted with Lady Jenkins; that she must leave the house that day; and when madame defied this with a double defiance, the magistrate intimated that he had come up to enforce the measure, if necessary, and he meant to stay there until she was gone.
She saw it was serious then, and the defiant tone changed. “What I have given Lady Jenkins has been for her good,” she said; “to do her good. But for being supported by a little brandy-and-water, the system could never have held out after that serious attack she had in Boulogne. I have prolonged her life.”
“No, madame, you have been doing your best to shorten her life,” corrected old Tamlyn. “A little brandy-and-water, as you term it, might have been good for her while she was recovering her strength, but you have gone beyond the little; you have made her life a constant lethargy; you would shortly have killed her. What your motive was, Heaven knows.”
“My motive was a kind one,” flashed madame. “Out of this house I will not go.”
So, upon that, they played their trump card, and informed Lady Jenkins, who was crying softly, that this lady was the sister of the impostor, Collinson. The very helplessness, the utter docility to which the treatment had reduced her, prevented her expressing (and most probably feeling) any dissent. She yielded passively to all, like a child, and told Patty that she must go, as her old friends said so.