Those dreary weeks went on till it was nearly Easter, which came very early that year. After my cousins' return home the weather got very bad and added to the gloom of everything.
It was not so very cold, but it was so dull! Fog more or less, every day, and if not fog, sleety rain, which generally began by trying to be snow, and for my part I wished it had been—it would have made the streets look clean for a few hours.
There were lots of days on which I couldn't go out at all, and when I did go out, with Belinda as my companion, I did not enjoy it. She was a silly, selfish girl, though rather good-natured once she felt I was in some way dependent on her, but her ideas of amusing talk were not the same as mine. The only shop-windows she cared to look at were milliners' and drapers', and she couldn't understand my longing to read the names of the tempting volumes in the booksellers, and feeling so pleased if I saw any of my old friends among them.
Indoors, my life was really principally spent in my own room, where, however, I always had a good big fire, which was a comfort. There were many days on which I scarcely saw grandmamma, a few on which I actually did not see her at all. For all this time Cousin Agnes was really terribly ill—much worse than I knew—and Mr. Vandeleur was nearly out of his mind with grief and anxiety, and self-reproach for having brought her up to London, which he had done rather against the advice of her doctor in the country, who, he now thought, understood her better than the great doctor in London. And grandmamma, I believe, had nearly as much to do in comforting him and keeping him from growing quite morbid, as in taking care of Cousin Agnes. All the improvement in her health which they had been so pleased at during the first part of the winter had gone, and I now know that for a great part of those weeks there was very little hope of her living. I saw Cousin Cosmo sometimes at breakfast but never at any other hour of the day, unless I happened to pass him on the staircase, which I avoided as much as possible, you may be sure, for if he did speak to me it was as if I were about three years old, and he was sure to say something about being very quiet. I don't think I could have been expected to like him, but I'm afraid I almost hated him then. It would have been better—that is one of the things grandmamma now says—to have told me more of their great anxiety, and it certainly would have been better to send me to school, to some day-school even, for the time.
As it was, day by day I grew more miserable, for you see I had nothing to look forward to, no actual reason for hoping that my life would ever be happier again, for, not knowing but that poor Cousin Agnes might die any day, grandmamma did not like to speak of the future at all.
I never saw her—Cousin Agnes I mean—never except once, but I have not come to that yet. At last, things came to a crisis with me. One day, one morning, Belinda told me that I must not stay in my room as it was to be what she called 'turned out,' by which she meant that it was to undergo an extra thorough cleaning. She had forgotten to tell me this the night before, so that when I came up from breakfast, which I had had alone, intending to settle down comfortably with my books before the fire, I found there was no fire and everything in confusion.
'What am I to do?' I said.
'You must go down to the dining-room and do your lessons there,' said Belinda. 'There will be no one to disturb you, once the breakfast things are taken away.'
'Has Mr. Vandeleur had his breakfast?' I asked.
'I don't know,' said Belinda, shortly, for she had been told not to tell me that Cousin Agnes had been so ill in the night that the great doctor had been sent for, and they were now having a consultation about her in the library.