“What do you think?” cried Marjory, raising her face to him.
She had forgotten it was Fanshawe. He was the first human creature at hand—the only one to whom she could turn in her distress.
“It is a silly letter; making the worst of everything. It is not, I am sure it cannot be, so bad as she says.”
“She does not make the worst of Charlie’s illness,” said Marjory. “Oh, my poor Charlie! She says next to nothing about him. It is not her I am thinking of. My brother—my poor brother, must be dying! Oh God! and what shall we do?”
“She does not say so,” said Fanshawe, kneeling down beside her. “Dear Miss Heriot, don’t be too easily alarmed. You are weak with the sorrow you have had already. You think everything must end badly—”
“I know it,” she said, with a moan; “I know it! We have had nothing happen to us for so long—so long. And it is all coming together now!”
CHAPTER XIII.
The letter of Mrs. Charles aroused a great consternation in the house of Pitcomlie; they did not venture to tell Mr. Heriot of it. Fanshawe went and called Mr. Charles out of his room in the tower, and they all gathered in the bow-window in the drawing-room, and read it sentence by sentence, and talked it over. Marjory was the only one who took no comfort by this meeting. Mr. Charles was very much cast down for the first moment, but it did not last. “She’s a very silly woman, a very silly woman,” he said over and over. “I’m not meaning to vex you, May; but nothing except a woman could be so silly and so heartless; she is thinking only of herself. However, on the other hand, if Charlie had been so bad as you think, she would have been frightened. There’s something in a book I once read about having that fever thrice; the third time is the—God bless me! I cannot remember what my book said.”
The fact was, Mr. Charles remembered only too well, and was appalled; he was struck dumb for the moment in his voluble consolations. When he spoke again, he was a great deal less assured in his tone. “Depend upon it,” he said, “she is making the worst of everything. I suppose it is her way. She’s evidently a silly woman, a very silly woman, and I would say a very selfish one. But she would not run on like that about herself and the baby, if Charlie was as ill as you think.”
“Charlie might be very ill, and she might not know it,” said Marjory, “they might not tell her—they might think it would be too much for her in her circumstances. Her baby not six weeks old, and her husband coming home to—”