‘Ah?’ said Mr. Plowden, half alarmed.
‘Oh!’ said Lady William, sitting upright, bending forward to catch the new light. Mab did not say anything, but her eyes turned upon Florence with a certain illumination too. Florence, excited, exasperated, and worn out with the suspense which had been so little expected, was on the point of bursting into tears. Mr. Osborne took her hand, and pressed it so that she gave another little shriek of excitement and almost pain, as he followed the Rector out; and there was Florence left half sobbing, angry, full of the news which was so much greater than any of the others—even Mab’s fortune, which she did not in the least believe in—which nobody would take the trouble to understand.
‘Florry, dear child, what is this?’ cried Lady William, while the big steps of the gentlemen were heard, one following the other, from the door.
‘Oh, what does it matter?’ cried Florry, ‘you are all so full of your own affairs. We came to tell you, thinking you would be interested; but you would not let us speak; and to see papa standing there talking about the finest piece of news! “Mab, our little Mab, is an heiress,”’ cried the irreverent girl, getting up and looting round exactly as he had done, and with all his solemnity, ‘“Mab has come into a fortune.”’
‘Florry, Florry, spare your father!’ cried Lady William, with an irrepressible laugh.
And then Florry, who, notwithstanding her white frock, and her agitated heart, and her girl’s face, had been the Rev. James Plowden in person for one malicious, humorous, angry moment, dropped into her chair and fell a-crying in her own character and no other.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘to think that you should be so stupid, Aunt Emily, you that always see everything. When we came expressly to tell you! Good gracious, what are fortunes, or schoolmistresses, or Miss Greys, or anything, in comparison with it being all right, all right and everything settled between Edward and me?’
LI
Notwithstanding Miss Grey’s testimony and all that had happened to make her quite sure of her position, it cannot be denied that Lady William awaited the lawyers’ reply to her letter with some anxiety. How does an uninstructed woman know what lawyers may do? They may find the clearest evidence wanting in something, some formality which may invalidate the whole. Had she not heard a hundred times of the difference between moral certainty and legal evidence? They might allege something of this sort, and perhaps, for anything she could tell, insist upon a trial, and the public appearance of witnesses, and the discussion of her marriage in the papers, a possibility which made Lady William’s heart sick. I am not at all sure (but then I know little more about law than Lady William did) that had Messrs. Fox and Round been pettifogging lawyers, and their clients petty and unknown people, they might not have attempted something of the kind; but, as a matter of fact, they had never advised their clients to do anything in the matter, and Lord Portcullis, who remembered his sister-in-law very well, and all the circumstances of Lord William’s death, had never entertained a doubt on the subject.
‘Certificates?’ he said, ‘why, I have seen the woman!’ as if that was more than certificates; and Lord Portcullis was not a man who was ignorant of the evil that exists in the world, or who was at all in a general way an optimist about women. It had been the Marchioness, more hasty, and more disposed to think that by a bold coup anything could be done, who hoped to secure the whole of Lord John’s fortune in that way. When she found that this was impossible (though she always retained a secret conviction that Lady William was ‘just as much Lady William as my old housekeeper is!’) my Lady Portcullis thought of another way—a way, indeed, which had been one of the two things she had thought of in sending her son Will to see into the affair.