‘Ah! do you feel that too? It is wicked, James; how dare you think such things? Take me back home; yes, home. I am tired of this place. It is all very well when it is fine, but winter is coming. To-morrow let us go home.’
He took her to the shore with a few long sweeps of the oars, glad in his heart of that decision. He, too, was very tired of the place; more tired of the eternal shining than of the storm, and it was getting late in the year for the Alps. Nevertheless it was by the Alps that this capricious woman insisted upon returning, and they had something very near an accident in the snows which roused and pleased her mightily. After the excitement, however, nothing would satisfy her but to rush to London with the utmost speed. She objected to stay even a single night in Paris. She had been seized with a passion of longing for the humdrum Square.
Miss Cherry brought Cara up from Sunninghill to be at home to receive her mother. But the pair of travellers had stolen a march upon the household, and instead of waiting to be received in a proper manner in the evening, with dinner ready and everything comfortable, had arrived at an absurd hour in the morning, before the maids were out of bed, and when there was nothing prepared in the house. Cook herself came, much aggrieved, to tell Miss Cherry this, while Cara ran upstairs to her mother’s room. ‘I don’t make no doubt as folks get very fanciful when they’re ill; but still, Miss, there’s reason in all things. At six o’clock in the morning, and we not up, as why should we be, not thinking of nothing of the sort, and not a thing in the house?’
‘It was hard, cook,’ said the sympathetic Miss Cherry; ‘but then you know my brother had a right to come to his own house when he pleased. Coming home is not like going anywhere else. But I hope Mrs. Beresford is looking better?’
‘Better!’ said cook, spreading out her hands; and Sarah, the housemaid, shook her head and put her apron to her eyes.
‘Dear, dear!’ said kind Miss Cherry, appalled by their tears; ‘but travelling all night makes any one look ill. I shall not go up until she has had a good look at her child. Miss Cara is like a little rose.’
‘So she is, Miss, bless her!’ assented the maids; and Cherry had to wait for a long time in the library before even her brother came to her. One thing which struck her with great surprise was, that there were no boxes about half emptied, in which precious fragilities had been packed in straw and wicker cases. The Buen Retiro cup was the only thing they had bought, and that was among Mrs. Beresford’s things—smashed; and they had both forgotten its very existence. No more wonderful sign could have been of the changed times.
When Miss Cherry in her turn was introduced into the bedroom in which Mrs. Beresford still lay, resting herself, she all but cried out with sudden panic. She only just stopped herself in time; her mouth was open; her tongue in the very act of forming the ‘Oh!’ when her brother’s look stopped her. Not that he saw what she was going to say, or all the effect his wife’s changed looks had upon her. He himself had got used to them. He asked her, half aside, ‘How do you think she is looking?’ with an eager look in his eyes.
‘She is looking—tired,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘Most people do after travelling all night. I could not have lifted my head from the pillow; but Annie had always so much spirit.’
‘Yes; she has no end of spirit,’ said poor James Beresford, looking admiringly at his wife. He flattered himself, poor fellow! that Cherry had not remarked the thinness of the worn face, beside which her own faintly-coloured old maid’s countenance almost looked fresh and round and blooming. He had been alarmed at the thought of what ‘they’ would think of her looks; but now his spirits rose. Cherry did not seem to have remarked it; and what a hypocrite poor Cherry felt, sitting there smiling, with her heart sinking more and more every moment! ‘What will he do without his wife?’ she was asking herself. And, alas! that wife’s worn looks; her fretful little outbursts of impatience; all her caprices and restlessness betrayed a progress of evil more rapid than any one had even feared.