She passed by them, and walked towards her uncle. “Is the carriage ready?” she asked; adding, in an undertone, “For God’s sake let us get away from here at once!”
And still Phemie kept moving forward, and next moment caught sight of Basil’s child.
The nurse was surrounded by a group of excited domestics, who, standing in the centre of the hall, were criticising and admiring the heir, a fine boy, who neither cried nor shrieked, but kept essaying to talk, and crowing mightily.
There are limits to all things, and there were limits even to Phemie’s self-command. From that group she turned aside and fled, up the wide staircase, along the corridor, to the room that had been hers, but which, like all the rest, must now be abandoned to strangers. She sent away her maid, she put on her bonnet, she threw her shawl around her, she took one last look out over the park, and then hurried away from the familiar apartment as though a plague were in it.
The carriage was at the door, her maid on the box beside the coachman; Georgina stood at the hall door, and Basil came out and assisted Phemie into her brougham. As he did so he whispered—
“I wanted to come down alone, but she would not let me.”
Then Mr. Aggland took his seat beside his niece, and Phemie, leaning forward, bowed a farewell to Basil and his wife; and the horses sprang forward down the long avenue and through the gates, and were soon dashing along the level road leading to Disley, leaving Marshlands far behind.
So long as they were under the shadow of the pines and the elm-trees, uncle and niece never exchanged a sentence; but once they were outside the domain, Mr. Aggland laid his hand gently on the poor thin fingers which were knotted and twisted together in a kind of convulsive agony, and said, “Phemie!”
No other word—but at the sound of that she flung herself on his breast and cried with such a frenzy of grief that he answered her inarticulate appeal for comfort with broken words of consolation and sympathy.
“Don’t!” she cried—“don’t! I deserve it all. Let me bear it. Oh, uncle, do you understand what has been the misery of my life at last?”