“Yes, of course, I know: but I never saw you look so tired before.” He cast a reproachful look round upon the young people, who were all ready to stand on the defensive. “You must have bothered your mother to death,” he said. “I am sorry I did not come out for her myself—undoing all the effect of her cure.”
“Oh, you will see, I shall be all right when I get home,” Mrs. Kingsward said, cheerfully. “As for the children, Edward, they have all been as good as gold.”
“You had better see to the luggage and bring your sisters home in a cab. I can’t let mamma hang about here,” said the Colonel, in his peremptory way. “Moulsey will come with us. I suppose you three have brains enough to manage by yourselves?”
Thus insulting his grown-up children, among whom a flame of indignation lighted up, partially burning away their difficulties between themselves, Colonel Kingsward half carried his wife to the carriage. “I thought at first I should have waited at Kingswarden till you came back. I am glad I changed my mind and came back to Harley Street,” he said.
“Oh, is it to Harley Street we are going?” said Mrs. Kingsward, faintly. “I had rather hoped for the country, Edward.”
“You don’t look much like another twenty miles of a journey,” said her husband.
“Well, perhaps not. I own I shall be glad to be quiet,” the poor lady said. What he wished had always turned out after a moment to be just what his wife wished for all the years of their union. She even meekly accepted the fact that the children—the nursery children, as they were called—the little ones, who were no trouble but only a refreshment and delight, would have been too much for her that first night. Secretly, she had been looking forward to the touch and sight of her placid smiling baby as the one thing that would do her good—and all those large wet kisses of Johnny and Tommy and Lucy and little Margaret, and the burst of delighted voices at the sight of mamma. “Yes, I believe it would have been too much for me,” she said, with a look aside at Moulsey, who, as on many a previous occasion, would dearly have loved to box her master’s ears. “And I do believe it would have been too much for me,” Mrs. Kingsward added, when that confidential attendant put her to bed.
“Perhaps it would, ma’am,” Moulsey said. “They would have made a noise, bless them—and baby will not go to anyone when he sees me—and altogether I shall be more fit for them, Moulsey, after a good night’s rest——”
“If you get that, you poor dear,” said Moulsey, under her breath. But her mistress did not hear that remark any more than many others which Moulsey made in her own mind, always addressed to that mistress whom she loved. “If he said dying would be good for you, you would say you were sure of it, and that was what you wanted most,” the maid said within herself.
It must not, however, be supposed from this that Colonel Kingsward was not a good husband. He had always been like a lover, though a somewhat peremptory one, to his wife. And without him her young, gay, pleasure-loving ways, her love of life and amusement might have made her a much less successful personage, and not the example of every virtue that she was. Had Mrs. Kingsward had the upper hand, the family would have been a very different family, and its career probably a very broken, tumultuous, happy-go-lucky career. It was that strong hand which had controlled and guided her, which had been, as people say, the making of Mrs. Kingsward; and though she feared his severity in the present crisis, she yet felt the most unspeakable relief from the baffled, helpless condition in which she had looked at her children, feeling herself all unable to cope with them in the presence of papa.