“I can’t take this sort of news so easily as you do,” said John, with his head upon his breast.
“So easily as I do! Oh, go away, go away, and don’t drive me mad with your folly,” cried his wife. “Do you think it can ever be half as much to you as it is to me? To see that Mary Hill in the place that should be mine, to kiss her and pretend to be friends when I could tear her in pieces with my hand, to see your old fool of a brother, who ought to have been dead and buried——”
“Letitia, not a word against Frogmore!”
“Oh, fiddlesticks about Frogmore! as if one could have any patience with an old—— He ought to have been dead and buried long ago. No man has a right to live on society, and keep other people out of their rights. And to marry at that age! It ought to be punished like murder. It’s as bad as murder and robbery and sacrilege and high treason all together. I can’t think but you can find a word to say for him, John Parke.”
“For one thing he’s not seventy—as you may see in any peerage——”
“Oh, don’t talk to me!” cried Letitia—and what answer could be made to that? Altogether Greenpark was on that evening a melancholy house.
Such questions cannot remain long in any doubt, and before the summer was at all advanced Mrs. Parke was compelled to give full evidence to the terrible truth. Needless to say that in the bottom of her heart she had been certain of it all along, though she held out so stoutly and would not acknowledge it to be true. But when it became known that Mrs. Hill and Agnes had arrived at the Park for a long visit, Mrs. John had a paroxysm of almost frenzy which for a day or two kept her to her bed, where she lay devouring her soul with imaginations of what was happening. Imaginations! Did she not know as well as if she had seen them what was going on? Mrs. Hill, oh with what beaming of pleasure on her face, bustling about, putting everybody right. Agnes, like another Mary, full of importance, too. The family from the vicarage altogether at the head of affairs, regulating everything, occupying the whole place, scarcely leaving room enough in his own house for poor old Frogmore, the old fool, the old ass, who had brought all this upon his family. Letitia raged within herself with internal wars and wails of wrath and anguish, like a wild beast, for three days; and then she got up and announced her intention of paying a visit to the Park.
“It’s only right that I should go and ask for her!” she said, with a curl of her lip over her teeth, which made this English lady look like a hyena.
“For goodness sake, Letitia, mind what you’re about. Don’t go and betray yourself,” said her husband in alarm.
“Oh, you may leave me to take care of that,” she said.