‘Give me my drops. I must not, I must not, have another attack. The doctor says so. Artémise, don’t leave me, don’t leave me!’
‘I will, if you do not turn from this subject at once. Throw it away from you. What on earth is Emily Plowden, or Pakenham, or whatever her name is, to you? Cecile, I begin to think a woman like you never learns, and that you are no better than a fool.’
While she said these words, however, Mrs. Brown was busy with the most affectionate cares, soothing the excited woman, bathing her forehead, rubbing her hands, administering the specific, loosening the elaborate dress, which made the heaving of the shrunken figure, and the strain of the emaciated throat, so much the more dreadful. The passion calmed down by degrees, and then Julie was summoned, and the robes of state replaced by a quilted dressing-gown, scarcely less fine, but more appropriate. After this the conversation was resumed in a less exciting vein. Mrs. Swinford was perhaps a little ashamed to have betrayed the fury of her feelings even to so trustworthy a confidante.
‘It is fine to see a family like that,’ she said, ‘not carried away by passion, Artémise, like you and me. Love or revenge are not in their way, nor hatred; but money, money. To secure a few thousands, they will be my instruments, or any one’s, to punish a traitor. And what you are horrified to think I should want to do, for such good reason as you know, they will do for nothing at all—for money, as I say.’
‘Many people think money a much more sufficient reason than what you call passion,’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘And it will be well to keep your Lord —— whatever you call him, from knowledge of me, for I can spoil his little transaction.’
‘Ah, you—you were there!’
The two women looked at each other, and Mrs. Swinford, notwithstanding her age and her knowledge of the world, was sensible of a sudden heat rising to the edge of her hair; not the blush that comes to more innocent faces, but that burning colour of shame at a self-betrayal which she ought to have been too strong to fall into. Mrs. Brown nodded her head gravely. ‘You said you had no means of knowing, but you perceive that you have: and for me, I can make an end of any such pretension. He had better not come across my path.’
‘You would not balk me, Artémise?’
‘I would balk him, as soon as look at him, and the family, bless them; and I would not bring the innocent to shame, not even for you.’
‘Artémise! after all we know of each other, such a pretension——’