“Oh, Bee,” cried Mrs. Kingsward, holding out her hot, feverish hands, “I am not fit for it! I am not fit for it! If I am to travel to-morrow—ask Moulsey—I ought to stop in bed and be quiet all day.”
“I don’t see that it matters,” said Bee, sternly, “whether we travel to-morrow or in a week. To go home will be no pleasure to me.”
“If we were there, then papa could manage it all himself; he is the proper person. On a journey is not the time to settle things so important. I will write and tell him I have put it all off, and have not said anything, till he could do it himself.”
“But that will not be true,” cried the young Rhadamanthus, inexorable, with her blazing eyes.
“O Bee! you are dreadfully, dreadfully hard upon me!” the poor young mother said. This is the drawback of being so young a mother, just as young as your grown-up children. It is very delightful, when all is sunny and bright, but in a great emergency like this it is trying for all parties when a girl’s mother is only, so to speak, a girl like herself. Bee lifted up her absolute young head, and gave forth her ultimatum unmoved.
“Well, mamma, it must be as you choose. If you think my happiness is of less consequence than the chance of a headache to yourself, I have naturally nothing more to say.”
A headache! That was all she knew.
Mrs. Kingsward was ready by twelve o’clock, much against Moulsey’s will, who dressed her mistress under protest. “I ain’t one to interfere with what’s going on in a family,” said Moulsey, as she combed out the long locks, tangled with the restlessness of a troubled night, which were as silky and as smooth as Bee’s. “I’m only a servant, and I knows my place; but you’re not fit to struggle among them young ones. The nursery children, it’s all very well; if they’re naughty you whip them, or you put them in a corner, and there’s a good cry and all right again. But when it comes to a business with a young lady and a gentlemen, the Colonel ought to have come himself, or he ought to have put it off till we all got home.”
“Oh, I wish, I wish he had!” Mrs. Kingsward said, sighing. “I am not in the least what I used to be, Moulsey; don’t you think I am very different from what I used to be? I have not half the strength.”
“There often is,” said Moulsey, “a time when a lady isn’t so strong, after all these children and everything. It takes a deal out of you, it do. And I don’t hold much with them foreign cures. I’m one that stands for home. And there’s where you ought to be, ma’am, whatever anyone may say.”