“I thought you meant we could do something,” she said. “Oh, Aunt Jane, could not we go to the Chancellor, if that is the man. The parish? I don’t see why they should take the trouble. It will not hurt them. They will have a young, well-off man instead of an old, poor man. Couldn’t we go to the Lord Chancellor, Aunt Jane?”
Miss Maydew’s eyes lighted up for a moment. She seemed to see herself approaching that unknown potentate as lovely ladies went to kings in the days of romance, with a child in each hand. She felt how eloquent she could be, how convincing. She felt herself capable of going down on her knees and asking him whether the father of those two sweet girls was to starve in his old age? All this appeared before her like a dream. But alas! common sense soon resumed its sway; she shook her head. “I don’t know if that would do any good,” she said.
“And we could not get up a petition from the parish,” said Cicely; “whatever the people may do we cannot stir in it. Oh, Aunt Jane, how foolish, how wrong of us never to think of this! I have thought that papa was old and that we should have to maintain ourselves and the two babies if—anything happened; but I never remembered that it all hung upon some one else’s life. Oh, it does seem hard!” cried the girl, clasping her hands. “Papa has done all the work since ever I was born, but yet he has only been here on sufferance, ready to be turned out at a moment’s notice. Oh, it is wrong, it is wrong!”
“Not exactly at a moment’s notice,” said Miss Maydew; “there is six weeks or three months, or something, I forget how long.”
And then there was a painful pause. Mab cried a little, having her feelings most upon the surface, but Cicely sat quite silent and pale with her eyes fixed upon the white blinds which flapped against the open windows. All at once she got up and drew one of them up with a rapid impatient hand. “I want air, I want light,” she said in a stifled voice, and put herself full in the intrusive sunshine, which made Miss Maydew blink her old eyes.
“You will give yourself a headache, my dear, and that will not mend matters,” she said.
Cicely’s heart was very heavy. She drew down the blind again and walked up and down the room in her agitation. “Five of us to provide for now—and that is not the worst; what is papa to do? How can he live with everything taken from him? Oh, go to the Chancellor, or any one, if it will do any good! It is terrible for papa.”
It was while they were still in this agitated state that Betsy threw open the door again, and Mrs. Ascott, of the Heath, one of the greatest ladies in the parish, came in. She was not heated, like poor old Miss Maydew, with walking, but fresh and well dressed from her carriage, and tranquil as prosperity and comfort could make her. The girls made that sudden effort, which women so often have to make, to receive her as if nothing had happened, as if their minds were as easy and their circumstances as agreeable as her own. She inquired about their journey, about their school, about how they found their papa looking, about the “sad trials” he had gone through, all in a sweet even tone, with smiles or serious looks, as became her words, and hoped that now they had come back she should see them often at the Heath. “You are the musical one, Cicely,” she said; “I know Mab draws. It is always nice when sisters have each their distinction, that people can’t mistake. My husband always says girls are so like each other. What is your voice? contralto? oh, a good second is such a want here. We are all more or less musical, you know.”
“My voice is not much one way or the other,” said Cicely. “Mab sings better than I do, though she is the one who draws.”
“But I fear,” said Miss Maydew, clearing her throat and interfering, “unless something is done they will not be here long to be of use to any one. We have just had news——”