“Perhaps it is not very benevolent, so far as he is concerned; but I hope he’ll linger a long time,” said Sir Thomas.
“Oh, so do I! These imbroglios may go on for a long time and do nobody any harm. But when a horrible crisis comes, and one feels that they must be cleared up!” It was evident that in this Lady Markham was not specially considering the sufferings of poor Mr Winterbourn.
“What does Markham say?” Sir Thomas asked.
“Say! He does not say anything. He shuffles—you know the way he has. He never could stand still upon both of his feet.”
“And you can’t guess what he means to do?”
“I think—— But who can tell? even with one whom I know so intimately as Markham. I don’t say even in my son, for that does not tell for very much.”
“Nothing at all,” said the social philosopher.
“Oh, a little, sometimes. I believe to a certain extent in a kind of magnetic sympathy. You don’t, I know. I think, then, so far as I can make out, that Markham would rather do nothing at all. He likes the status quo well enough. But then he is only one; and the other—one cannot tell how she might feel.”
“Nelly is the unknown quantity,” said Sir Thomas; and then Lady Markham sent away, by the hands of the footman, her anxious affectionate little billet “to inquire.”
Meanwhile young Gaunt sat down by Frances. On the table near them there was a glorious show of crimson—the great dazzling red anemones, the last of the season, which Mrs Gaunt had sent. It had been very difficult to find them so late on, he told her; they had hunted into the coolest corners where the spring flowers lingered the longest, his mother quite anxious about it, climbing into the little valleys among the hills. “For you know what you are to my mother,” he said, with a smile, and then a sigh. Mrs Gaunt had often made disparaging comparisons—comparisons how utterly out of the question! He allowed to himself that this candid countenance, so open and simple, and so full of sympathy, had a charm—more than he could have believed; but yet to make a comparison between this sister and the other! Nevertheless it was very consolatory, after the effort he had made at dinner, to lay himself back in the soft low chair, with his long limbs stretched out, and talk or be talked to, no longer with any effort, with a softening tenderness towards the mother who loved Frances, but with whom he had had many scenes before he left her, in frantic defence of the woman who had broken his heart.