“Your mother!” she repeated.
But Mr Greville’s worldly wisdom prevented his losing his head at the news.
“After Mr Brooke’s son, you say,” he observed. “But that makes all the difference. Lots of people are next heir but one to a fortune without ever coming any nearer it. What’s to prevent this Mr Anselm marrying and having half a dozen sons and daughters of his own?”
“That is the thing,” said Lilias, “that—Anselm, I mean, is, of course, what the whole depends upon. Had he been strong and well we should probably never have heard or known of our—of mamma’s position. But—it seems so horrid to talk about it so coolly—Anselm will never grow up and marry, Mr Greville—he is only sixteen now—for he is dying.”
“Dear me, dear me,” said Mr Greville, “how very, very sad!”
But underneath his not altogether conventional expression of sympathy, Lilias could plainly detect the reflection—“That very decidedly alters the state of the case.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “it is terribly sad.”
“And under these circumstances—for you speak of this son as an only child, and he has probably long been delicate,” pursued Mr Greville—“how is it, may I ask, that these Brookes have never before looked up your mother? Their meeting with you now is purely accidental, and more Mrs Brabazon’s doing than Mr Brooke’s, it seems to me.”
“She explained all that,” said Lilias. “It is only very lately that Anselm has been an only child. There was quite a large family of them, and five, I think, lived to grow up. But one by one they have dropped off—all died of consumption like their mother. Basil, the second son, and apparently the strongest, lived to be six-and-twenty, and only died last year, having caught cold at some races—regimental races, I mean; he was in the Dragoons,” her colour rising unaccountably as she mentioned the regiment. “Before his death, Mrs Brabazon says, he was very anxious to look us up, for he never expected that Anselm would live long. But his father has been in such a broken-down state that Mrs Brabazon could never get him to take any interest in the matter. She does; it is wonderful how she can do so, I think, when one remembers how she has seen her own nephews and nieces die one by one.”
“There is no chance, I suppose, of old Mr Brooke’s marrying again,” said Mr Greville, consideringly.