“Mrs. Swayne, you must not speak like this to me,” said Mrs. Preston, feebly, from the sofa. “I have a bad headache, and I can’t argue with you; but you may be sure, though I don’t say much, I know how to take care of my own child. No, Pamela dear, don’t cry; and you’ll please not to say another word to me on this subject—not another word, or I shall have to go away.”
“To go away!” said Mrs. Swayne, crimson with indignation. But this sudden impulse of self-defense in so mild a creature struck her dumb. “Go away!—and welcome to!” she added; but her consternation was such that she could say no more. She stood in the middle of the little dark parlor, in a partial trance of astonishment. Public opinion itself had been defied in her person. “When it comes to what it’s sure to come to, then you’ll remember as I warned you,” she said, and rushed forth from the room, closing the door with a clang which made poor Mrs. Preston jump on her sofa. Her visit left a sense of trouble and dismay on both their minds, for they were not superior women, nor sufficiently strong-minded to laugh at such a monitor. Pamela threw herself down on her knees by her mother’s side and cried—not because of Mrs. Swayne, but because the fright and the novelty overwhelmed her, not to speak of the lively anger and disgust and impatience of her youth.
“Oh, mamma, if we had only some friends!” said Pamela; “everybody except us seems to have friends. Had I never any uncles nor any thing? It is hard to be left just you and me in the world.”
“You had brothers once,” said Mrs. Preston, with a sigh. Then there was a pause, for poor Pamela knew and could not help knowing that her brothers, had they been living, would not have improved her position now. She kept kneeling by her mother’s side, but though there was no change in her position, her heart went away from her involuntarily—went away to think that the time perhaps had come when she would never more want a friend—when somebody would always be at hand to advise her what to do, and when no such complications could arise. She kept the gravity, even sadness of her aspect, with the innocent hypocrisy which is possible at her age; but her little heart went out like a bird into the sunny world outside. A passing tremor might cross her, ghosts might glide for a moment across the way, but it was only for a moment, and she knew they were only ghosts. Her mother was in a very different case. Mrs. Preston had a headache, partly because of the shock of last night, partly because a headache was to her, as to so many women, a kind of little feminine chapel, into which she could retire to gain time when she had any thing on her mind. The course of individual history stops when those headaches come on, and the subject of them has a blessed moment to think. Nothing could be done, nothing could be said, till Mrs. Preston’s head was better. It was but a small matter had it been searched to its depths, but it was enough to arrest the wheels of fate.
“Pamela,” she said, after a while, “we must be doubly wise because we have no friends. I can’t ask any body’s advice, as Mrs. Swayne told me to do. I am not going to open up our private affairs to strangers: but we must be wise. I think we must go away.”
“Go away!” said Pamela, looking up with a face of despair—“away! Mamma, you don’t think of—of—him as she does? You know what he is. Go away! and perhaps never, never see him again. Oh, mamma!”
“I did not mean that,” said Mrs. Preston; “but we can’t stop here, and live at his father’s very door, and have him coming under their eyes to vex them. No, my darling; that would be cruel, and it would not be wise.”
“Do you think they will mind so very much?” said Pamela, looking wistfully in her mother’s face. “What should I do if they hated me? Miss Brownlow, you know—Sara—she always wanted me to call her Sara—she would never turn against me. I know her too well for that.”
“She has not been here for a long time,” said Mrs. Preston; “you have not noticed it, but I have, Pamela. She has never come since that day her father spoke to you. There is a great difference, my darling, between the sister’s little friend and the brother’s betrothed.”
“Mamma, you seem to know all about those wretched things,” cried Pamela, impulsively. “Why did you never tell me before? I never, never would have spoken to him—if I had known.”