“She has not come back,” said Frances, divining from his look that it was unnecessary to say more.
Markham sat down abruptly on a sofa near. He did not make any reply to her, but put up the handle of his cane to his mouth with a curious mixture of the comic and the tragic, which struck her in spite of herself. He did not require to put any question; he knew very well where his mother was, and all that was happening. The sense of the great crisis which had arrived took from him all power of speech, paralysing him with mingled awe and dismay. But yet the odd little figure on the sofa sucking his cane, his hat in his other hand, his features all fallen into bewilderment and helplessness, was absurd. Out of the depths of Frances’ trouble came a hysterical titter against her will. This roused him also. He looked at her with a faint evanescent smile.
“Laughing at me, Fan? Well, I don’t wonder. I am a nice fellow to have to do with a tragedy. Screaming farce is more like my style.”
“I did not laugh, Markham; I have not any heart for laughing,” she said.
“Oh, didn’t you? But it sounded like it. Fan, tell me, has the mother been long away, and did any one see that unfortunate girl when she was here?”
“No, Markham—unless it were Mr Ramsay; he saw her drive away with mamma.”
“The worst of old gossips,” he said, desperately sucking his cane, with a gloomy brow. “I don’t know an old woman so bad. No quarter there—that is the word. Fan, the mother is a trump. Nothing is so bad when she is mixed up in it. Was Nelly much cut up, or was she in one of her wild fits? Poor girl! You must not think badly of Nelly. She has had hard lines. She never had a chance: an old brute, used up, that no woman could take to. But she has done her duty by him, Fan.”
“She does not think so, Markham.”
“Oh, by Jove, she was giving you that, was she? Fan, I sometimes think poor Nelly’s off her head a little. Poor Nelly, poor girl! I don’t want to set her up for an example; but she has done her duty by him. Remember this, whatever you may hear. I—am rather a good one to know.”
He gave a curious little chuckle as he said this—a sort of strangled laugh, of which he was ashamed, and stifled it in its birth.