‘Lost! little Mary?’ I cried.
And then all his courage gave way; he sat down speechless, with his lips quivering, and bitter tears in his worn old eyes. Then he got up restless and shaking. ‘Come to my wife,’ he said. There was not another word exchanged between us. I put on my cloak with the hood over my head, and went with him on the moment. As we crossed the Green a sort of procession arrived, two or three great vans packed with people, with music and flags, which proceeded to discharge their contents at the ‘Barley-Mow’ under the soaking rain. They had come for a day’s pleasure, poor creatures, and this was the sort of day they got. The sight of them is so associated in my mind with that miserable moment, that I don’t think I could forget it were I to live a hundred years. It seemed to join on somehow to the tragical breaking-up of the party on the day before. There was nothing wrong now but in the elements; yet it chimed in with its little sermon on the vanity of all things. My lady was in her own room when I entered the Lodge. The shock had struck her down, but she was not calm enough, or weak enough to go to bed. She lay on a sofa in her dressing-gown; she was utterly pale, not a touch of her sweet colour left, and her hands shook as she held them out to me. She held them out, and looked up in my face with appealing eyes, which put me in mind of little Mary’s. And then, when I stooped down over her in the impulse of the moment to kiss her, she pressed my hands so in hers, that frail and thin as her fingers were, I almost cried out with pain. Mrs. Florentine, her old maid, stood close by the head of her mistress’s sofa. She stood looking on very grave and steady, without any surprise, as if she knew it all.
For a few minutes Lady Denzil could not speak. And when she did, her words came out with a burst, all at once. ‘Did he tell you?’ she said. ‘I thought you would help me. You have nobody to keep you back; neither husband nor—— I said I was sure of you.’
‘Dear Lady Denzil,’ I said, ‘if I can do anything—to the utmost of my strength——’
She held my hand fast, and looked at me as if she would look me through and through. ‘That was what I said—that was what I said!’ she cried; ‘you can do what your heart says; you can bring her back to me; my child, my little child! I never had but a little child—never that I knew!’
‘I will do whatever you tell me,’ I said, trying to soothe her; ‘but oh! don’t wear yourself out. You will be ill if you give way.’
I said this, I suppose, because everybody says it when any one is in trouble. I don’t know any better reason. ‘That’s what I’m always telling my lady, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Florentine; ‘but she pays no heed to me.’
Lady Denzil gave us both a faint little smile. She knew too much not to know how entirely a matter of conventional routine it was that we should say this to her. She made a pause, and then she took my hand once more.
‘I ought to tell you,’ she said—‘it is all true—every word. Florentine knows everything, from the first to the last. I was a poor soldier’s widow, and I was destitute. I was too young to know what I was doing, and I was pretty, they said, and there were men that would have taken advantage of my simplicity. But Sir Thomas was never like that. I married him to buy a livelihood for my child; and he was very good to me. When he married me, I was a forlorn young creature, with nothing to give my helpless baby. I gave up my child, Florentine knows; and yet every day, every year of his life, I’ve followed him in my heart. If he had been living in my sight, I could not have known more of him. What I say is every word true, Florentine will tell you. I want you,’ grasping my hand tightly, ‘to tell everything to him.’
‘To him!’ said I, with a gasp of astonishment, not knowing what she meant.