“I will not give it you, Lucy. I know what you mean to do; to put it in the fire that I may forget it, and think it is not half so bad.”
“No, mamma; but why should you dwell upon it? She wrote it hastily. See, there is haste in every line; but we will read it at leisure, and go over it again and again. She is so uninstructed, so inexperienced; and there is a kind of savage justice in it, if you will but think, mamma.”
“How dare you say so?” cried Lady Curtis, in whose mind the immediate pain and hurt received were too violent to be thus smoothed away, and who was as little able for the moment to inquire into the absolute justice of the matter as Nancy herself. The tears began to glisten in her eyes, tears of genuine suffering. “This is what our children bring us,” she said; “they for whom we are ready to make any sacrifice—insult, the flaunting in our face of some poor creature, surely, surely not worth as much as his mother was to him, Lucy; not worth you—you, my child; of that I may be sure at least; and his home, and all that was worth having in life—”
And some scalding drops fell on her hands in a hot and sudden shower. Tears do not last at Lady Curtis’ age; they cost too much; only a sharp stab like this could bring them, hasty and unwilling, from her eyes.
“I know it is hard, very hard; but, mamma—”
Lucy was interrupted by the sound of her father’s heavy step approaching the room. He threw the door open and came in hastily. He, too, had a letter in his hand, and held it out to his wife as he came forward.
“He has written at last,” he said. “It is a fine thing to have waited so long for. Look, Elizabeth, if you can read it, what your boy says.”
Lady Curtis took the letter, looking anxiously at her husband’s face to read its effect. And then Lucy and she read it as they had read the other, the girl over her mother’s shoulder. The very sight of Arthur’s handwriting moved them. He had written a few words to Lucy to thank her for the money and the blessing conveyed to him on his wedding day; but except these few warm words they had not heard from him since that painful violent letter which Lady Curtis had received after the visit of Mr. Rolt, the family lawyer, to Underhayes. And that had given the ladies so much pain that the very sight of the dear and familiar handwriting brought it back. Sir John went to the fire as was his way, and set himself up against the mantel-piece, turning towards them the dullness of his long melancholy countenance, which showed little change of expression one way or another. His heavy repose, not unclouded with trouble, contrasted sharply with the eager and anxious looks of his wife and daughter already disturbed and excited. They read, breathless with anxiety and haste, flying over the paper, taking in its meaning almost at a glance in a way which was wonderful to him. He shook his head slightly as he saw this rapid process; it was impossible they could understand it, he said to himself; even Arthur’s letter! skimmed over with feminine want of thoroughness in anything, as if it had been a book.
Arthur’s letter, so far as external forms went, was dutiful enough.
“My dear father,