“If you had died far from home and friends as he did, should I not be sorry for you too?”
She put up her face and kissed him as she spoke these words. The Phemie of old was dead—the vain, fanciful, exacting Phemie; but for my part, I love better the Phemie who sat back in the carriage all the way down to Disley than the Phemie who had looked out over the flat Cambridgeshire fields five years before.
It was over—with her as with him; she had earned her wages, and they were being paid to her as the months rolled by. Death—he was dead! What had life to offer her in the future? what could the years bring to her worse than this?
At Disley, the carriage was waiting for her, and something in the footman’s face as he stood aside while she entered it, made her pause and ask—
“How is your master?”
“He has been worse since morning, ma’am; the doctor was with him when we left Marshlands.”
“Drive fast, Sewel,” she said to the coachman; “do not spare your horses.” And accordingly Sewel took his favourite pair of bays back to Marshlands (to the intense astonishment of society) at a gallop.
CHAPTER II.
WIDOWED.
Phemie was not in the house two minutes before she knew her husband had had a paralytic stroke. The doctor was still with him; but in such a case, what can a doctor do? When the Almighty strikes—when the blow falls, which no skill is able to avert—of what use are God’s instruments?
From that day Phemie’s work was laid out for her. To nurse him, to tend him, to take the man who had raised her from poverty to wealth, hither and thither as the medical men advised, or as his own fancy dictated; that was the employment of Mrs. Stondon’s life.