“Good Lord!” cried the old woman; and then a wild light got up in her eyes and she looked at him fiercely. “Came to you?—and you let her come, and let her go, and owned her, you coward! Tell me next you have given her up the children’s money—my Bessie’s children? That’s what you call a man! Oh, good Lord—good Lord! You owned her, and you tell it to my very face!”
Then there was a little pause. The two old women looked at him, one with impotent fury, the other with suppressed exultation. “I always said so!” said Nancy. His simple words had produced effect enough, if that was what he wanted. He looked at them both, and a faint smile came over his face, a smile in which there was no mirth and which lasted but a moment. He felt ashamed of himself next minute that he could have been tempted to smile.
“John Brownlow,” said Mrs. Fennell, rising in her exasperation, “I’m an old poor failing woman, and you’re a fine strong man, but I’d have fought different for my Bessie’s children. Didn’t I tell you she came to me, that you might be on your guard. And you a lawyer? Oh, good Lord—good Lord! I’d have kept it safer for them if it had been me. I’d have turned her out of my door for an impostor and a vagabond! I’d have hunted her to death first if it had been me. And you to tell me her name clean out as quiet as a judge and look me in the face! Oh you coward! you poor creature! Never, if she had torn me with wild horses, would she have got it out of me.”
“He could not have acted different,” said Nancy, with suppressed excitement. “Sit down, mistress, or you’ll do yourself a harm. The best lawyer in the world couldn’t turn a woman away as knowed her rights.”
Mr. Brownlow held up his hand to prevent the angry exclamation that was on Mrs. Fennell’s lips. “Hush,” he said, “my story is not done. It is a very sad story. Poor soul, she will never get much good of the money. Phœbe Thomson is dead.”
They both turned on him with a look which all his life he never forgot. Would they themselves have been capable of such a deed? Was it the natural suggestion of the crisis? The look made him sick and faint. He turned so as to confront both the old women. “I don’t know who her counselor was,” he said, with unconscious solemnity, “but it must have been some one who believed me a knave and a liar. Had she come to me and proved to me who she was, she might have been living now. Poor soul, she did not do that. She was sent to London instead to find out for herself about her mother’s will, and she came down in haste, finding there was not a moment to lose. And she was driven mad with fright and suspicion and fatigue; an old woman too—she could not bear it. And now, instead of enjoying what was hers, she is dead. This is what comes of evil counsel. She might have lived and had some comfort of her life had she been honest and straightforward and come to me.”
Mr. Brownlow said this with the conviction and fervor of an upright man. All the evil thoughts he had himself entertained, all his schemes to baffle his unknown adversary, had faded from his mind. It was not a fictitious but a real forgetfulness. He spoke in the superiority of high principle and of a character above reproach. He did not remember that he had tacitly conspired with Mrs. Fennell, or that he had willfully rejected the opportunity of finding Phœbe Thomson out after her visit to his mother-in-law. Perhaps his excuse to himself was that, at the moment, his suspicions were all directed to a wrong point. But I don’t think he felt any occasion to excuse himself—he simply forgot. If she had lived she should have had all, every penny, though it cost him his ruin; and now she was dead by the visitation of God, and every thing was changed. It is strange and yet it was true. He looked at them both with a superiority which was not assumed, and he believed what he said.
As for his hearers, they were both stunned by this solemn address. Mrs. Fennell dropped into her chair, and in her surprise and relief and consternation began to cry. As for Nancy, she was completely cowed and broken down for some minutes. It was she who had done all this, and every word told upon her. She was overwhelmed by Mr. Brownlow’s rectitude, by his honor and truth, which owing to her had been thus fatally distrusted. And she was struck at the same time by a cruel disappointment which gave force to every word. She stood and looked at Mr. Brownlow, quailing before him. Then a faint gleam of returning courage came over her. She drew a deep breath to give herself the power of speech. “There is her child still,” she said, with a gasp, and faced him with a certain bravado again.
“Ah, I see you know!” he said; “that is the strangest part of all. For a long time past, before we knew who they were, and much against my will, her child had taken Jack’s fancy; he was determined to marry her, though I told him he should have nothing from me; now in the strange arrangements of Providence—” said Mr. Brownlow. But there he stopped; something seemed to stifle him; he could not go on speaking about the dispensations of Providence; he got up when he had reached this point, with a sudden sense that after all he had no right to speak as if God and himself—or Providence, as he preferred to say—were in partnership; his hands were not clean enough for that. He stopped, and asked after Mrs. Fennell, if she had all the comforts she wanted, and then he made what haste he could away. He even felt half ashamed of himself as he went down stairs. His mother-in-law, excited as she had been by the first piece of news he told her, had but half understood the second. He left her sobbing weakly over her Bessie’s children who were being robbed and ruined. Nancy went to the door with him in a servile despair. She understood it all well enough. There was no more hope for her, no more dazzling expectations of such a retirement as Betty’s lodge and its ease and independence. To serve old Mrs. Fennell’s whims all the rest of her days; to be pensioned on some pittance, or turned out upon the world for her misdeeds in her old age when Mrs. Fennell should die—this was all that she had before her now.
When Mr. Brownlow went back after having fulfilled this duty, he went up stairs into the house instead of going to the office, and with a caprice which he himself scarcely understood, called Powys, who was standing at the door, to follow him. It seemed to him as if, it was so long ago, Powys too must have recovered from his heart-break. He took the young man with him over the silent, empty, echoing house. “This is where I began my married life,” he said, stopping on the cold hearth in the drawing-room, and looking round him. It was a pretty old-fashioned room, running all the breadth of the house, with windows at each end, and a perpetual cross-light, pale at one side, rosy and full of sunshine at the other. It was not a lofty room, like the drawing-room at Brownlows, nor was it rich with gold and dainty colors; but yet there was something in the subdued tone of the old curtains, the old Turkey carpet, the japanned screens and little tables, the old-world look of every thing, which was neither ungraceful nor unrefined. “I am coming back to live here,” he said after an interval, with a sigh. He could not tell why he made this confidential communication to the young man, who grew pale, and gazed at him eagerly, and could not find a word to say in reply. Mr. Brownlow was not thinking of Powys’s looks, nor of his feelings; he was occupied with himself, as was natural enough; he took the young fellow into his confidence, if that could be called confidence, because he liked him, and had seen more of him than any body else near. What the intelligence might be to Powys Mr. Brownlow did not stop to think; but he went over the house in his company, consulting him about the alterations to be made. Somehow he had returned to his first feeling toward Powys—and he wanted to be kind to him, to make up to him for not being Phœbe Thomson’s son; they were fellow-sufferers so far as that was concerned—at least such was the feeling in Mr. Brownlow’s mind, though he could not well have explained how.