“What is all this to me?” said Mr. Brownlow. “Who is your widow woman? Do you want me to do any thing for her? has she a family? There are plenty of charities in Masterton if she belongs to the place. But it does not seem worth while to have brought me here for this.”
“You know better than that, John Brownlow,” said Mrs. Fennel, in a kind of frenzy. “If it was any poor woman, what would I have cared? Let ’em starve, the hussies, as brings it all on themselves. There’s but one woman as would trouble me, and you know who it is, John Brownlow; and that old witch there, she knows, and it’s time to put a stop to it all. It’s time to put a stop to it all, I say. She’s a-carrying on with that woman; and my Bessie’s children will be robbed before my very eyes; and I’m a poor old creature, and their own father as ought to take their part! I tell you, it’s that woman as she’s a-carrying on with; and they’ll be robbed and ruined, my pretty dears, my Bessie’s children! and she’ll have it all, that wretch! I’d kill her, I’d strangle her, I’d murder her, if it was me!”
Mrs. Fennell’s eyes were blood-shot, and rolled in their sockets wildly—her head shook with palsied rage—her voice stammered and staggered—and she lifted her poor old lean hands with wild, incoherent gestures. She was half-mad with passion and excitement. She, who was so terribly in earnest, so eager in her insane desire to save him, was in reality the traitor whom he had most to fear; and Mr. Brownlow had his senses sufficiently about him to perceive this. He exerted himself to calm her down and soothe her. “I will see after it—I will see after it,” he said. “I will speak to Nancy—don’t excite yourself.” As for Mrs. Fennell, not his persuasion, but her own passion wore her out presently, and reduced her to comparative calm; after awhile she sank into silence, and the half doze, half stupor of extreme age. When this re-action had come on, Mr. Brownlow left the room, making a sign to Nancy to follow him, which the old woman did with gradually-rising excitement, feeling that now indeed her turn had come. But he did not take her apart, as she had hoped and supposed, to have a desperate passage of arms. He turned round on the stair, though the landlady stood below within hearing ready to open the door, and spoke to her calmly and coldly. “Has she been long like this?” he said, and looked Nancy so steadily in the face that, for the first time, she was discomfited, and lost all clue to his meaning. She stood and stared at him for a minute, not knowing what to say.
“Has she been long like this?” Mr. Brownlow repeated a little sharply. “I must see after a doctor at once. How long has it lasted? I suppose no one can tell but you?”
“It’s lasted—but I don’t know, sir,” said Nancy, “I don’t know; I couldn’t say, as it was nothing the matter with her head. She thinks as there’s a foundation. It’s her notion as I’ve found out—”
“That will do,” said Mr. Brownlow; “I have no curiosity about your friends. It is your mistress’s health I am thinking of. I will call on Dr. Bayley as I go back; and you will see that she is kept quiet, and has every attention. I am grieved to see her in such an excited state. And, by the way, you will have the goodness not to leave her again. If your friends require your visits, let me know, and I will send a nurse. If it has been neglect that has brought this on, you may be sure it will tell on yourself afterward,” Mr. Brownlow added, as he went out. All this was said in the presence of the mistress of the house, who heard and enjoyed it. And he went away without another look at her, without another word, without praying for her silence, or pleading with her for her secret, as she had expected. Nancy was confounded, notwithstanding all her knowledge. She stood and stared after him with a sinking heart, wondering if there were circumstances she did not know, which held him harmless, and whether after all it had been wise of her to attach herself to the cause of his adversaries. She was disappointed with the effect she had produced—disappointed of the passage of arms she had expected, and the keen cross-examination which she had been prepared to baffle. She looked so blank that the landlady, looking on, felt that she too could venture on a passing arrow.
“You’ll take my word another time, Nancy,” she said. “I told you as it was shameful neglect to go and leave her all by herself, and her so old and weakly, poor soul! You don’t mind the likes of us, but you’ll have to mind what your master says.”
“He ain’t no master of mine,” said Nancy, fiercely, “nor you ain’t my mistress, Lord be praised. You mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine. It’s fine to be John Brownlow, with all his grandeur; but pride goes before a fall, is what I says,” the old woman muttered, as she went back to Mrs. Fennell’s room. She had said so at Brownlows, looking at the avenue which led to the great house, and at the cozy little lodge out of which she had already planned to turn old Betty. That vision rose before her at this trying moment, and comforted her a little. On the one side the comfortable lodge, and an easy life, and the prospect of unbounded tyranny over a new possessor, who should owe every thing to her; but, on the other side, dismissal from her present post, which was not unprofitable, an end of her good wages and all her consolations. Nancy drew her breath hard at the contrast; the risk seemed to her as great almost as the hope.
Mr. Brownlow left the door composed and serious, as a man does who has just been in the presence of severe perhaps fatal illness, and he went to Dr. Bayley, and told that gentleman that his mother-in-law’s brain was, he feared, giving way, and begged him to see her immediately; and then he went to the office, grave and silent, without a touch of apparent excitement. When he got there, he stopped in the outer office, and called Powys into his own room. “We have not seen you at Brownlows for a long time,” he said. “Jack has some young fellows with him shooting. You had better take a week’s holiday, and come up with me to-night. I shall make it all right with Wrinkell. You can go home and get your bag before the dog-cart comes.”
He said this quickly, without any pause for consideration, as if he had been giving instructions about some deed drawing out; and it was some time before Powys realized the prospect of paradise thus opening before him. “I, sir—do you mean me?” he cried, in his amazement. “To-night?” And Mr. Brownlow appeared to his clerk as if he had been an angel from heaven.