“Ah! but that costs money. They would not have money, either of them. I have been trying to make inquiries quietly. But time is passing, and his poor mother! It would be better to consent to anything,” said Margaret, “than to have her die without seeing him; and perhaps if he were found, the pressure on the brain might relax. No, I don’t know if that is possible; I am no doctor. I only want to satisfy her. She is his mother! Whatever he is, he is more to her than any one else in the world.”
“She does not seem very kind to you, that you should think so much of that.”
“Who said she was not kind to me? You take a great deal upon yourself, Colonel Piercey, to be a distant cousin!”
“I am the next-of-kin,” he said. “I’d like to protect these poor old people—and it is my duty—from any plot there may be against them.”
“Plot—against them?” She stared at him for a moment with eyes that dilated with astonishment. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “If you will not help, I must do what I can by myself. And you are free on your side to inquire, and I hope will do it, and take such steps as may seem to you good. The thing now is to find Gervase for his mother. At another moment,” said Margaret, raising her head, “you will perhaps explain to me what you mean by this tone—towards me.”
She turned her back upon him without another word, and walked away, leaving Colonel Piercey not very comfortable. He asked himself uneasily what right he had to suspect her?—what he suspected her of?—as he stood and watched her crossing the hall. It was a sign of the agitation in the house, that all the doors seemed to stand open, the centre of the family existence having shifted somehow from the principal rooms downstairs to some unseen room above, where the mistress of the house lay. What did he suspect Meg Piercey of? What had he against her? When he asked himself this, it appeared that all he had against her was that she was a dependent, a widow, a middle-aged person—one of those wrecks which encumber the shores of life, which ought to have gone down, or to be broken up, not to strew the margins of existence with unnecessary and incapable things, making demands upon feeling and sympathy which might be much better expended elsewhere. Colonel Piercey was not a hard man by nature: he was, in fact, rather too open to the claims of charity, and had expended too much, not too little, upon widows and orphans in his day. But it had stirred up all the angry elements in his nature to see Meg Piercey in that condition which was not natural to her. She ought to have died long ago along with her husband, or she ought to have a position of her own: to see her here in that posture of dependence, in that black gown, with that child, living, as he said to himself harshly, upon charity, and accepting all the penalties, was more than he could bear. There is a great deal to be said for the Suttee, though a humanitarian government has put an end to it. It is so much more dignified for a woman. To a man of fine feelings, it is a painful thing to see how a person whose natural rôle is that of a princess, a dispenser of help to others, should come down herself into the rank of the beggar, because of the death of, probably, a very inferior being to whom she was married. It degraded her altogether in the scale of being. A princess has noble qualities, large aims, and stands above the crowd—a dependant does quite the reverse. Scheming and plotting are the natural breath of the latter; and that a woman should let herself come down to that wilfully, rather than die and be done with it, which would be so much more natural and dignified! Colonel Piercey was aware that his thoughts were very fantastic, and yet this is how they were—he could not help himself. He was angry with Margaret. It was not the place she was born to; a sort of Abigail about the backstairs, existing by the caprice of a disagreeable old woman. Oh, no! it was not a thing that a man could put up with. And, of course, she must have sunk to the level of her kind.
This was why he suspected her. The question remained, What did he suspect her of? And this was still more difficult to answer. Such a woman, of course, would live by sowing mischief in a family; by hurting in the most effectual way the superiors who kept her down, and were so little considerate of her. And their son was the way in which she could most effectively do this. Gerald Piercey had various thoughts rising in his mind about this young man, who probably was not at all fit to hold the family property and succeed Sir Giles in its honours. There was one point of view from which Colonel Piercey could not forget that he himself was the next-of-kin—that which made him, in his own eyes, the champion of Gervase—his determined defender against every assault. Perhaps the very strength of this feeling might push him beyond what was right and just; but it would be in the way of supporting and protecting his weak-minded cousin. That was a point upon which, naturally, he could have no doubt. If Meg Piercey was against him, it was Gerald Piercey’s part to defend him. But the means were a little doubtful. He was not clear whether Meg was helping Gervase to marry unsuitably, to spite his parents, or whether her intention was to prevent this marriage, in order to deprive him of his happiness and the natural protection which the support of a clever wife might afford to the half-witted young man. Thus, he had a difficult part to play; having first to find out what Margaret’s scope and meaning was, and then to set himself to defeat it. He had been but three days in the house, and what a tangled web he was involved in!—to be the Providence of all these people, old and young, whom he knew so little, yet was so closely connected with; and to defeat the evil genius, the enemy in the guise of a friend, whom he alone was clear-sighted enough to divine. But she puzzled him all the same. She had looks that were not those of a deceiver; and when she had raised her head and told him that at another moment she would demand an explanation of what his tone meant, something like a shade of alarm passed through the soldier’s mind. He would not have been alarmed, you may be sure, if Margaret had threatened him with a champion, as in the older days. Bois-Guilbert was not afraid of Ivanhoe. But, when it is the woman herself who asks an explanation, and his objections have to be stated in full words, to her alone, facing him for herself, that is a different matter. It may well make a man look pale.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The next morning after this, Gerald Piercey found himself in the front of the Seven Thorns. He had not known what it was: whether a hamlet, or a farm, or what he actually found it to be, a roadside inn. The aspect of the place was more attractive than usual. It was lying full in the morning sunshine; a great country waggon, with its white covering, and fine, heavily-built, but well-groomed horses, standing before the door, concentrating the light in its great hood. One of the horses was white, which made it a still more shining object in the midst of the red-brown road. The old thorns were full in the sunshine, which softened their shabby antiquity, and made the gnarled roots and twisted branches picturesque. The long, low fabric of the house was bathed in the same light, which pervaded the whole atmosphere with a purifying and embellishing touch. The west side, looking over the walled garden, which extended for some distance along the road, though in the shade, showed a row of open windows, at which white curtains fluttered, giving an air of inhabitation to that usually-closed-up portion of the place. The visitor felt, as he looked at it, that it was not a mere village public-house, that its decadence might have a story, and that it was possible that the daughter of such a house might not, after all, be a mere rustic coquette, or, perhaps, so bad a match for the half-witted Gervase. Colonel Piercey had never once thought of himself as the possible heir of Greyshott; he did not feel that he had any interest in keeping Gervase from marrying, and though it was intolerable that the heir of the Pierceys should marry a barmaid, his feelings softened as he looked at the old country inn, with its look of long-establishment. Probably there was a farm connected with it; perhaps there was a certain pride of family here, too, and the daughter of the house was kept apart from the drinking and the wayside guests. Meg Piercey might have divined that the young woman was really the best match that Gervase could hope for, and this might be the cause of her opposition. (He forgot that he had supposed it likely that Meg might be bringing the match about for her own private ends, one hypothesis being just as likely as another.) With this idea he approached slowly, and took his seat upon the bench that stood under the window of the parlour. The roads between Greyshott and the Seven Thorns were dry and dusty, and his boots were white enough to warrant the idea that he was a pedestrian reposing himself, naturally, at the place of refreshment on the roadside.