“Oh!” said Mrs. Hill, breathing out fire and fury in the word, “what has Mrs. John Parke to do with my child—or with my grandchild, Mr. Blotting? We have no object but their good. We want nothing but their good. If anything were to happen to little Mar it would be my death. Oh, can’t you see, can’t you see the difference? I don’t say she would poison him or throw him out of a window,” cried the old lady, flushed and trembling with her vehemence. “But it would be for her good that the child should die. Do you hear me, oh do you hear me! It would be to her advantage that the child should die, the dear child, the apple of our eyes. It would give her husband the title—and herself which is more:—it would make her boy the heir. And you will put him in her hands, our little delicate boy, our little darling, poor Frogmore’s little Mar! Oh vicar, speak to him. Oh Agnes, say something—don’t let them throw little Mar’s life away!”
“I can only say,” said the vicar, shuffling about with his large feet, “that we’re Lady Frogmore’s parents, and the child’s guardians by—by nature. I can’t see what there’s more to say.”
“It’s clear that I can hear no more,” said the lawyer, “it’s painful to see such animosity. Still we know what ladies are. Had anything been necessary to show how impossible—— But there never could have been any question of such a thing,” he continued sharply. “Mr. Hill, you ought to be enough a man of the world to see that the mother’s parents have nothing to do with the matter. Why, it’s ridiculous. The mother herself is no more than a sort of accident. What I’ve got to think of is the Parkes, the family. It is astonishing you don’t understand.”
“Mr. Blotting,” said Agnes, “my mother perhaps went too far. We don’t want to show prejudice. Still the child is a delicate child—and he’s been used to us all his life—to me, at least—I’ve been the same as his mother,” she said, with the tears in his eyes. “I know all he requires—their treatment might be dangerous for him. Don’t take him from us until he’s older and stronger. I don’t ask anything unreasonable. Mrs. Parke, I don’t doubt, would be—very kind: but she’s used to robust children—and little Mar is so delicate.”
“She is pleading as if it was a favor,” cried Mrs. Hill, “as if we had no right——”
“You had better both of you leave it to me—leave it to me,” said the vicar. “I’ll talk it over with this gentleman, as a man of the world. My dear, you can go and look after Mary. That’s your business. Leave me to talk it over, like a man of the world.” The vicar was pleased with that appeal to his superior wisdom. He wanted nothing so much as to get rid of the ladies and bring Mr. Blotting to a due sense of the situation, man to man.
“Sir——,” Mrs. Hill began; but Agnes, too, was against her. She caught her mother by the arm.
“Oh, father is right,” she said. “Let us go to Mary. I never know what she may be doing when we leave her too long alone. It is not good for her to be long alone.”
The house through which these two ladies made their way upstairs had changed in the strangest way. It was not neglected or out of order, nor had it the deserted appearance, as if life had altogether ebbed away from the forsaken sitting-rooms, which often shows the presence of death, throned in a remote chamber, and making an end even of family meetings. Mr. Upjames at the head of affairs took care of that, and as John Parke and his wife were expected in the afternoon, there were fires in all the rooms, and everything ready for the visitors, who were felt by all the household instinctively to have so much risen in importance. The decorous silence, which was proper to a house “in trouble,” reigned, however, up and down. The servants glided about like mutes, stealing noiselessly out of sight, or flattening themselves against the wall when by chance they encountered “one of the family;” and the discipline was such that not a voice or a laugh betrayed from behind the swing doors the existence of a number of young servants, who, however impressed by the circumstances, could not be overcome with grief. The feeling in the house, it must be allowed, was in favor of the visitors who were expected rather than those who had arrived. The Hills were “the other side” to the retainers of the Parke faction. They saw through the vicar’s bulk and solemnity, and they were aware by instinct that the old lady would be hard upon servants and keep an inquisitive eye upon their shortcomings. They were, therefore, though perfectly civil, not anxious in their service to my lady’s people. My lady, herself, poor thing, the servants were half afraid of, half sorry for. They thought she might have another attack at any moment. The women shrank back upon each other when they attended to her rooms or answered her bell. The maid whom she had brought with her was even more alarming than herself, a mad nurse who knew all about the things that were done to lunatics, though she put on the aspect of an ordinary lady’s maid. Thus poor Mary, who had been so kind to them all, who was so gentle and so soft-voiced, sympathetic with everybody, was a sort of bug-bear in the house from which she had been banished so long, to which she had returned so strangely. And all through this great silent house there was a thrill of uncertainty,—nobody knowing what was to be done, or what the new régime would be. The little lord in the nursery, poor little delicate boy who would never be “rared” as all the country people said, who was a child of old age, with madness on one side of the house, whose father was dead and whose mother denied his existence: and the poor lady shut up in her rooms, in her grief and widowhood, with the maid who was nurse, and the mad-doctor hanging about, ever watchful, not leaving her long out of his sight—the troubled group who hung about her, and about the child, yet had no real right there, and might be put to the door by the executors any day—made up a miserable family—a disturbed, uncertain, uncomfortable, little community—not knowing what was to happen. The only one in the house who was calm, who feared nothing, was Mary herself in her retirement, half cured of her madness, full of gentle sorrow without anguish, and ignoring altogether in a strange bewilderment of nature all the dangers and miseries amid which, the most innocent of unconscious sufferers, she was about to take up without protection or support the strange story of her life.