"Will you promise to make me one?" persisted Benja.
"Yes, I will. There!"
"When?"
"As soon as I can get the things together. Now come."
Benja reluctantly moved away; but his head and eyes were turned for the last glance, up to the moment when Honour pulled him through the low green-baize opening.
Meanwhile Mrs. Carleton St. John was sitting alone. She was of remarkably quiet habits by inclination, a great stay-at-home, rarely seeking society or amusement abroad; and the still recent death of her husband tended to keep the Hall pretty free from idle visitors. One sole passion seemed to absorb her whole life, to the exclusion of every other; it filled every crevice of her heart, it regulated her movements, it buried even her natural grief for her husband--and this was love for her child. The word love most inadequately expresses the feeling: it was a passion, threatening to consume every healthy impulse. She was quite aware of it: indeed, her conscience did not allow her to be otherwise.
One thought was ever present to her; it may be said that it had never left her mind since the day her husband died: that Benja was chief of Alnwick Hall, with all its wealth and dignity; that she, Charlotte St. John, so arrogant by nature, was there only on sufferance, a home accorded to her as his personal guardian; and that George was as nobody. They were as a sharp thorn, these reflections, ever piercing her. They ate into her ill-regulated heart and rankled there. And they went on to another thought, an unwholesome thought, which would have been a wicked thought but that it was not there of her own will: a thought that carried danger in its train. In the first waking of early morning, in the fevered dreams of midnight solitude, in the glare and bustle of noonday, it was ever thrusting itself forward--if Benja were to die, her child would be the inheritor.
Was she aware of its danger? No. And yet she was fond of tracing it back to its original source--the accident to Benja. When the boy was taken out of the water, drowned as was supposed, and a some one called out, the wild beating of Mrs. St. John's bosom--not with sorrow--called into life the thought that had certainly never existed there before, or else had lain dormant.
Her increasing dislike of Benja should have acted as a warning to her. It was generated by the false view she took of the existing state of things: that Benja was a sort of ogre, whose sole mission on earth was to stand in the light of her child and deprive him of what might have been his birthright. She strove against this dislike--it might be better to call it hatred, for it had grown into that--and she had to exercise a constant check upon herself in her behaviour towards him. None but she knew what it cost her to treat Benja with a semblance of love, or to make no very apparent difference between the children. She did strive against it--let us do her justice!--not from any suspicion of danger, but from her own sense of equity. That very morning, in taking Benja's part and kissing him, she had acted from an impulse of good principle, an endeavour to do right. But no sooner were the children out of her sight, than the old bad feelings got the better of her, and she sat indulging all sorts of foolish dreams and visions of what she would do were Alnwick George's instead of Benja's. Will you believe that she had fallen into the habit of repeating their Christian names to herself, with the prospective title before them? "Sir Benjamin St. John," "Sir George St. John;" and she thought the one (you need not ask which of the two) sounded a thousand times more charming than the other.
Though very conscious of all this, she yet detected no danger in it. The night of her husband's death, she made a resolve to do her duty by her little stepson; and when the codicil to the will was read, giving Mr. St. John of Castle Wafer the power to remove him from her, she resented it bitterly as a mark of want of confidence in her shown by her husband. No woman could have been more willing in intention to do right by a stepson than Charlotte St. John. If only her strength of will did not fail her, she might succeed. One result of the desire to carry out her resolve, was retaining Honour in her service. She very much disliked the girl, for her strong attachment to Benja in contradistinction to George, and her always taking his part against that rather capricious younger gentleman; but she would not discharge her. To this desire to do her duty, rather than because her husband in dying had expressed a wish that Honour should be retained about Benja, the girl owed the fact that she was still in her place. Honour alone of the servants, save and except perhaps Prance, had detected all along the second Mrs. St. John's dislike to her little charge. She was aware, as surely as though she had seen it recorded, that her mistress regarded George as he who ought to be the heir, Benja as a usurper; and it aroused within her a feeling of indignation, which sometimes peeped out in her manner. Not sufficiently so for Mrs. St. John openly to find fault with; and she only thought the girl quick in temper. And now I think I have said as much as I can say about the state of mind of Mrs. Carleton St. John. She deliberately intended to do right: but passion and prejudice are strong; unusually strong were they in her; and her mind was undisciplined and ill-regulated.