CHAPTER IX.
THE RETURN.
While Mr. Goresby was trotting back to the Manor, over the Yorkshire moors, Phemie and her companion were travelling southward as fast as a train which stopped at every station and kept time at none, could take them.
They had the compartment to themselves, and each five minutes Phemie looked at her watch, and said to herself, “Now in a quarter of an hour I shall have told him,” but when the quarter came and passed, Basil still thought his child was living.
He talked continuously about Harry and about his wife; he let the whole history of their wretched experience drop from his lips, sentence after sentence. He said it was Marshlands she had wanted, and Marshlands she had got; he declared she thwarted him in his every wish—that it was enough for him to express a desire, and straightway she opposed him.
“As for her children, she never cared for them—not in the least,” he went on; “she never cared for me either. Give her money and dress, and equipage and servants, and she would not fret if she never saw me more. She shall have her wish now; she may live in London or any place she likes, so as she leaves me and the children in peace at Marshlands. The children!” he broke off suddenly. “Oh! Phemie, do you think Harry will recover?”
“I am afraid there is no hope,” she answered, trying to steady her voice.
“She must not let me see her if anything happens to him,” he said, doggedly, and he went on to ask his companion whether she thought they would be in time, and then he broke into a rage about the slowness of the trains, about the folly of not telegraphing for him instead of coming, about the certainty that whatever Georgina planned was sure to be wrong, about his conviction that if Phemie had stayed at Marshlands more might have been done for the boy.
“Who would sit up with him last night?” he went on; “who would attend to everything that the doctor directed? The idea of leaving the place with only servants under the circumstances, and Georgina even not being able to see to things! I think she is mad, I really do.”
“I sent for my uncle,” remarked Phemie.
“That is what she never would have thought of,” was the husband’s comment. Phemie drew back in her corner, feeling she could not tell him the worst, that he was impracticable, that he was selfish beyond anything she could have conceived of, that his affection for his child was but another form of affection for himself.