Markham paused, and looked at her with his keen little eyes. “Mother, why don’t you say at once you want to get me out of the way?”
“I do. I don’t deny it, Markham. But this too. We ought to have another opinion. Do, for any favour, what I ask you, dear; oh, do it! Oh yes, I would rather you sent him here, and did not come back with him. But come back, if you must; only, go, go now.”
“You think he will be—dead before I could get back? I will telegraph for Dr Howard, mother; but I will not go away.”
“You can do no good, Markham—except to make people talk. Oh, for mercy’s sake, whatever you may do afterwards, go now.”
“I will go and telegraph—with pleasure,” he said.
Lady Markham turned and took Frances’ arm, as he left them. “I think I must give in now altogether,” she cried. “All is going wrong with me. First Con, and then my boy. For now I see what will happen. And you don’t know, you can’t think what Markham has been to me. Oh, he has been everything to me! And now—I know what will happen now.”
“Mamma,” said Frances, trembling. She wanted to say that little as she herself was, she was one who would never forsake her mother. But she was so conscious that Lady Markham’s thoughts went over her head and took no note of her, that the words were stifled on her lips. “He said to me once that he could never—leave you,” she said, faltering, though it was not what she meant to say.
“He said to you once——? Then he has been thinking of it; he has been discussing the question?” Lady Markham said with bitterness. She leant heavily upon Frances’ arm, but not with any tender appreciation of the girl’s wistful desire to comfort her. “That means,” she said, “that I can never desert him. I must go now and get rid of all this excitement, and put on a composed face, and tell the people that they may go away if they like. It will be the right thing for them to go away. But I can’t stay here with death in the house, and take a motherly care of—of that girl, whom I never trusted—whom Markham—— And she will marry him within the year. I know it.”
Frances made a little outcry of horror, being greatly disturbed—“Oh no, no!” without any meaning, for she indeed knew nothing.
“No! How can you say No?—when you are quite in ignorance. I can’t tell you what Markham would wish—to be let alone, most likely, if they would let him alone. But she will do it. She always was headstrong; and now she will be rich. Oh, what a thing it is altogether—like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Who could have imagined, when we came down here so tranquilly, with nothing unusual—— If I thought of any change at all, it was perhaps that Claude—whom, by the way, you must not be rude to, Frances—that Claude might perhaps—— And now, here is everything unsettled, and my life turned upside down.”