"Alletha gave a great cry when she heard he was coming, and said it was Fate. I demanded what she meant by that, but she'd not open her lips further. Talk of Natal pigs, forsooth, she's worse. He took possession of the rooms within the week; and I say, Mr. Yorke, that, Fate or not Fate, he never had but one object in coming--the sifting of that past calamity. His poor mistaken mind is ever on the rack to bring some discovery to light. It's like that search one reads of, after the philosopher's stone."
Roland laughed. He was not very profound himself, but the philosopher's stone and Mrs. Jones seemed utterly at variance.
"It does," she said. "For there's no stone to be found in the one case, and no discovery to be made in the other, beyond what has been made. I don't say this to the parson, Mr. Yorke; I listen to him and humour him for the sake of his dead brother."
"Well, I shan't bother you about dead people, Mrs. J., so you let me the room."
The bargain was not difficult. Every suggestion made by Mrs. Jones, he acceded to before it had well left her lips. He had fallen into good hands. Whatever might be Mrs. Jones's faults of manner and temper, she was strictly just, regarding Roland's interests at least in an equal degree with her own.
"Do you know," said Roland, nursing his knee as the bargain concluded, "I have never felt so much at home since I left it, as I did just now by your fire, Mrs. J.? I'm uncommon glad I came here."
He was genuine in what he said: indeed Roland could but be genuine always, too much so sometimes. Mrs. J.--as he called her--brought back so vividly the old home life of his boyhood, now gone by for ever, that it was like being at Helstonleigh again.
"My eldest brother, George, is dead," said Roland. "Gerald is grand with his chambers and his club, and is married besides, but I've not seen him. Tod is in the army: do you remember him? an awful young scamp he was, his face all manner of colours from fighting, and his clothes torn to that degree that Lady Augusta used to threaten to send him to school without any. Where's your husband number two, Mrs. J.?"
"It is to be hoped he is where he will never come away from; he went sailing off three years ago from Liverpool," she answered sharply; for, of all sore subjects, this of her second marriage was the worst. "Anyway, I have made myself and my goods secure from him."
"Perhaps he's at Port Natal, driving pigs. He'll find out what they are if he is."