Mab lingered a little after the carriage arrived. She wanted to show her sympathy, though it was not quite easy to see how that was to be done. She remained silent for a minute or so, and then she said, “I haven’t liked to say anything, but I’ve been very, very sorry,” giving Ally a sudden kiss as she spoke.
The two girls looked at each other, as was their wont, and Anne, who was always the most prompt, asked, “Sorry for what?”
“Do you really, really not know where he is?” said Mab, without pausing to reply. “I think I could tell you where he is. He is in town with—some one—”
“Some one?” they both cried, with a sudden pang of excitement, as though they were on the verge of a discovery; for unless she knew something—though how could she know anything?—it seemed impossible that she could speak so.
“Oh, the one he went out every night to see. There must have been somebody. When they go out every night like that it is always to see—some one,” she said, nodding her head in the certainty of her superior knowledge of the world.
“Oh, how do you know? You are mistaken if you think that Walter—how can you know about such things?”
“Because I am little,” said Mab, “and not very old, that’s not to say that I haven’t been a great deal about: and I’ve heard people talking. They pretend they don’t talk before girls. I suppose they think they don’t. They stop themselves just enough to make you want to find out, and then they forget you are there, and say all sorts of things. That’s where he is, you may be sure: and he will come back by and by, especially if he wants money. You needn’t be afraid. That is what they all do. Oh, listen; they are calling us from down-stairs! I am so sorry I must go: I wish I could stay: I like this better than any place I ever stayed at, and you’ve all been so kind. Write to me and tell me, will you, all about it? I shall be anxious to know. But don’t make yourselves miserable, for he will come back when he has spent his money, or when—Yes, we are coming! We are coming! Ally, mind you write and tell me. I shall want so much to know.”
They tried to interrupt her again and again to tell her she was mistaken; that Walter had only gone to town; that they were not anxious, or ignorant where he was, or unhappy about him: with much more to the same effect; but Mab’s cheerful certainty that she was right overpowered their faltering affirmations, of which she took no notice. She kissed them both with enthusiasm in the midst of her little harangue, and ran on with expressions of her regret as they went down-stairs. “Oh, I wish Lady Penton would have me for good,” Mab said; “but you don’t care for me as I do for you.”
Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, Lady Penton was receiving her visitors with an eager cordiality that was scarcely consistent with her nature, and which was meant to show not only that she was entirely at her ease, but that her husband’s gloom, which he had tried to shake off, but not very successfully, did not mean anything. As a matter of fact, the Russell Pentons, knowing nothing of the circumstances of Walter’s disappearance, were quite unaware of any effort, or any reason why an effort should be made. They interpreted the husband’s half-resentful looks—for that was the natural aspect of distress with Edward Penton—and the excessive courtesy and desire to please, of his wife, as fully accounted for by the position toward each other in which the two families stood. Why should Edward Penton be resentful? He had got his rights, those rights upon which he had stood so strongly when his cousin Alicia had paid her previous visit. She was ready to put a private interpretation of her own on everything she saw. He had resisted then her proposals and overtures, although afterward he had been anxious to accede to them; and now he was disappointed and vexed that the bargain against which he had stood out at first had come to nothing, and that she would not relieve him from the burden of the expensive house which he had first refused to give up and then been so anxious to be quit of. How inconsistent! How feeble! And the wife endeavoring with her little fuss of politeness to make up, perhaps thinking that she might succeed where her husband had failed! This was how Mrs. Russell Penton interpreted the aspect of the poor people whose object was to conceal their unhappiness from all eyes, and that nobody might have a word to say against the boy who was racking their hearts.
“I have been sorry to leave Mab so long, to give you the trouble,” Mrs. Russell Penton said, with her stiff dignity. “Her uncle, in his consideration for me, did not think of your inconvenience, I fear.”