And Phemie, as she concluded this pleasant sentence, reared up her head with a certain haughty defiance, and looked down on Georgina, who, remembering at the moment all this disdainful woman might still be able to do for her, stretched out her hand and tried to draw Mrs. Stondon back into her former position.
Mrs. Stondon’s temper was up, however; and she therefore disengaged her dress, and moved a little farther away from her visitor—who said, deprecating,
“I always liked you for yourself;—that may explain much which has seemed to you inexplicable. When you did not come between me and Basil, I was as fond of you as I ever was of any one, except him; but it is not easy—no wife ever does find it easy—to endure a stranger’s interference.”
“Did I want to interfere?” Phemie retorted. “Whose doing was it that I ever had the misfortune to meddle in your affairs at all? Did I kill your child? Did I wish to go running about the country after your husband? Do you think it was any pleasure to me travelling by night, and walking over those horrid moors, and begging at strange houses for help, horses and messengers, from the hands of strangers, in order that I might find, and bring him to you speedily? Would any woman on earth have started on such an errand of her own inclination? Do you imagine I enjoyed that return journey with him? Can you not conceive that it was torture—absolute torture—telling him about his son’s death?—that the task you set me was a very difficult one, and proved by no means easy of accomplishment?”
“If you could only imagine what he has been like since!” observed Georgina.
“Why, he told me he had never spoken a cross word to you from that day to this;—that he had given you no ground, not the slightest, for——”
“I know what you mean—the letter. He spoke truly—and yet—and yet—is there not a worse unkindness than harshness? I would rather have quarrelled with him fifty times a day, than live with him as we have lived together lately. He never has said a cross word. He told me he had promised you he would not. He only grew perfectly indifferent. I never, in fact, saw him from morning until night,—and then all at once I thought I would see if nothing could move him—if I could not work him up into a fury, if I could not wring one word of affection from him. I grew sick of seeing him and Fairy,—he so fond of her—she so fond of him. If he had only given me a little love, I should not have minded—I should not, indeed, so much.”
She turned her eyes, as she finished this sentence—not on Phemie, but out upon the lawn; and Mrs. Stondon could not avoid seeing the pained worn look there was in her once bright countenance—the pinched expression I have mentioned before, about her cheeks and mouth.
“All my life long,” she began again, and the tears came trickling slowly down her face, “I never loved anything but him—never. Whom had I to love?—neither brother nor sister nor mother: perhaps I should not have cared for them, had I possessed them all; but I was never tried. There was no one in the world to care for me excepting my father, and he lived in India; and if he had been in England, you know what he was. Often and often I wonder what you would have been like, had you been brought up like me;—what I should have been like, had I been born and lived my life among those Agglands. I think I might have been different. I am confident you would.”
“It is not impossible,” said Phemie, coldly.