“A fearful journey,” was the reply, and Mrs. Stondon shivered.
“Could no person have come but you, ma’am,” was the next question.
“His mother thought not,” answered Phemie.
“You are the gentleman’s sister, I suppose,” suggested Mrs. Urkirs, after a pause, devoted to considering how she could possibly get at the bottom of the mystery.
“No,” Phemie said; “I am only a very distant relative of Mr. Stondon,” and she rose as she spoke and leaned her head against the stone mantelshelf, and thought how she could best stop the woman’s questions.
“Mrs. Stondon had a very special reason for wishing me to carry the message instead of entrusting it to a servant,” she began at last. “I will tell you what that reason was before I go, but I cannot do so until after I have spoken to Mr. Stondon.”
From that moment the two got on admirably. They talked about farming, about Yorkshire, about children, about London, about Norfolk, about Marshlands, about every conceivable topic, including the health of Mr. Urkirs and his “one fault,” as his wife styled it, namely a disinclination to leave a “drain of spirits in a bottle.”
Phemie had gone in a little for model farming at Roundwood, and was able to discourse gravely concerning stock and milch cows, soils and rotations.
The lessons she had learned among the hills were applied practically to the lands in Sussex, and Mrs. Urkirs told her husband subsequently that, to be a lady, Mrs. Stondon knew more about cropping than any woman she had ever met with.
Mrs. Stondon, on her part, was thinking all the time they conversed, of Basil’s child and the Hill Farm. Could she really ever have lived in a farm-house? Was it true that Basil’s boy was dead? In a vague kind of way she began to wonder whether, when he and she returned to Marshlands, they might not find it was all a mistake—that the doctor had done something—that Harry would yet be restored. Mercifully, death, when we are away from it, is hard to realise; till the first force of the blow is almost expended we never seem quite to lose hope; and thus it was that Phemie had to rouse herself occasionally in order to remember that the life was gone past recovery—that Basil could never hear Harry’s voice again—that it was to his dead not to his sick she had come to summon him.