“You will understand everything very soon,” said Nurse, feeling that the time had come for her to try to make some impression on the children, and thus help their mother a little in her painful task. “Your Mamma is going to tell you herself, and I can only beg you, my poor dears, to think of her before yourselves and to be of comfort to her.”
There was no reply to this, beyond a murmur. Leila and Christabel felt overawed and vaguely frightened and yet excited. They found it difficult to swallow anything, but a sort of pride made them unwilling to show this, so the meal passed in unusual silence, Nurse’s voice coaxing Jasper to eat, being almost the only one heard.
Leila’s imagination, filled with the quantities of stories she had read, was hard at work on all sorts of extraordinary things that might have happened or were going to happen; Christabel was simply choking down a lump that would keep rising in her throat, and trying not to cry, while she repeated to herself, “Any way, it can’t be as bad as if Dads or Mummy had been killed on the railway, or died like old Uncle Percy.”
Roland generally came home about half-past five, but he had tea downstairs with his mother, or, if she were out or away, by himself, in his father’s study. It was less interrupting for him, as he usually had a good deal of work to do at home, than with the others in the nursery. So when a summons came for the little girls to go to Mrs Fortescue in her own room, they were not surprised to find their elder brother already there. His face, however, was not reassuring. Never had they seen him so grave—Leila even fancied he looked white. He was sitting beside his mother holding her hand.
She tried to smile cheerfully as Leila and Christabel came in, followed—very noiselessly—by Jasper, who had slipped out of the nursery behind them, being terribly afraid of being left out of the family conclave!
“Why, Jasper,” exclaimed his mother, when she caught sight of him, “I didn’t send for you—”
“No, Mumsey, darlin’,” he replied, “but I’se come,” and he wriggled himself on to a corner of her sofa, where he evidently meant to stay. The others could not help laughing at him, half nervously, I daresay, but still it somewhat broke the strain which they were all feeling.
“We’re going to talk of very serious things, my boy,” Mrs Fortescue said, persisting a little, “and you are only seven, you see. You could scarcely understand. Don’t you think you had better run upstairs again? Nurse will give you something to amuse you.”
“No fank you. Please let me stay. I’m not so very little since my birfday, and if you’ll explain, I fink I’ll understand.”