She put up her hand and pressed her fingers upon her eyes, as if the picture was there, and she was trying to get rid of it. Markham had turned away again, and was examining, or seeming to examine, the flowers in a jardinière. Now and then he made a movement, as if he would have stopped the narrative. Frances, trembling and crying with natural horror and distress, had loosened her mother’s cloak and taken off her bonnet while she went on speaking. Lady Markham’s hair, though always covered with a cap, was as brown and smooth as her daughter’s. Frances put her hand upon it timidly, and smoothed the satin braid. It was all she could do to show the emotion, the sympathy in her heart; and she was as much startled in mind as physically, when Lady Markham suddenly threw one arm round her and rested her head upon her shoulder. “Thank God,” the mother cried, “that here is one, whatever may happen, that will never, never——! Frances, my love, don’t mind what I say. I am worn out, and good for nothing. Go and get me a little wine, for I have no strength left in me.”
Markham turned to her with his chuckle more marked than ever, as Frances left the room. “I am glad to see that you have strength to remember what you’re about, mammy, in spite of that little break-down. It wouldn’t do, would it?—to let Frances believe that a match like Winterbourn was a thing she would never—never——! though it wasn’t amiss for poor Nelly, in her day.”
“Markham, you are very hard upon me. The child did not understand either one thing or the other. And I was not to blame about Nelly; you cannot say I was to blame. If I had been, I think to-night might make up: that ghastly face, and Nelly’s close to it, with her eyes staring in horror, the poor little mouth——”
Markham’s exclamation was short and sharp like a pistol-shot. It was a monosyllable, but not one to be put into print. “Stop that!” he said. “It can do no good going over it. Who’s with her now?”
“I could not stay, Markham; besides, it would have been out of place. She has her maid, who is very kind to her; and I made them give her a sleeping-draught—to make her forget her trouble. Sarah Winterbourn laughed out when I asked for it. The doctor was shocked. It was so natural that poor little Nelly, who never saw anything so ghastly, never was in the house with death; never saw, much less touched——”
“I can understand Sarah,” he said, with a grim smile.
Frances came back with the wine, and her mother paused to kiss her as she took it from her hand. “I am sure you have had a wearing, miserable evening. You look quite pale, my dear. I ought not to speak of such horrid things before you at your age. But you see, Markham, she saw Nelly, and heard her wild talk. It was all excitement and misery and overstrain; for in reality she had nothing to reproach herself with—nothing, Frances. He proved that by sending for her, as I tell you. He knew, and everybody knows, that poor Nelly had done her duty by him.”
Frances paid little attention to this strange defence. She was, as her mother knew, yet could scarcely believe, totally incapable of comprehending the grounds on which Nelly was so strongly asserted to have done her duty, or of understanding that not to have wronged her husband in one unpardonable way, gave her a claim upon the applause of her fellows. Fortunately, indeed, Frances was defended against all questions on this subject by the possession of that unsuspected trouble of her own, of which she felt that for the night at least it was futile to say anything. Nelly was the only subject upon which her mother could speak, or for which Markham had any ears. They did not say anything, either after Frances left them or in her presence, of the future, of which, no doubt, their minds were full—of which Nelly’s mind had been so full when she burst into Lady Markham’s room in her finery, on that very day; of what was to happen after, what “the widow”—that name against which she so rebelled, but which was already fixed upon her in all the clubs and drawing-rooms—was to do? that was a question which was not openly put to each other by the two persons chiefly concerned.
When Markham appeared in his usual haunts that night, he was aware of being regarded with many significant looks; but these he was of course prepared for, and met with a countenance in which it would have puzzled the wisest to find any special expression.
Lady Markham went to bed as soon as her son left her. She had said she could receive no one, being much fatigued. “My lady have been with Mrs Winterbourn,” was the answer made to Sir Thomas when he came to the door late, after a tedious debate in the House of Commons. Sir Thomas, like everybody, was full of speculations on this point, though he regarded it from a point of view different from the popular one. The world was occupied with the question whether Nelly would marry Markham, now that she was rich and free. But what occupied Sir Thomas, who had no doubt on this subject, was the—afterwards? What would Lady Markham do? Was it not now at last the moment for Waring to come home?