“You are insufferable,” cried Miss Anna; “hold your tongue, for Heaven’s sake. Do you think the man died, whoever he was, only to give a warning to your son?”
“I think nothing of the kind, Anna. Poor Leonard, there never could be anybody more sorry: and his poor wife, I am sure my heart bleeds for her: but Geoff ought to take example by him, all the same.”
“His wife?” Miss Anna said; and she laughed; “the wife of the man who left England thirty years ago with a broken heart. It has been on my mind ever since that I might have been kinder to him. I thought at first I had killed him.” She laughed again. “I might have saved myself the trouble. He is dead now of a wet night—a great deal more deadly a thing than a love rejected; and here are you maundering about his poor wife. His poor wife! I have no doubt she’ll marry again before the year’s out. It’s the way of the world.”
“It is not the way of all the world, Anna,” said Mrs Underwood. She would not make a direct claim of superiority on account of her faithfulness, but she drew up her head a little and sighed, with a look of conscious merit; at which Miss Anna laughed the more.
“That is true,” she said, “you’ve never married, Mary, nor wished to, I believe. You are a superior creature. I ought to have made an exception for you.”
“Not so superior as you think, Anna,” said the simple woman; “there is many and many another like me, that would not, could not—oh, no, no, for nothing in the world! Yes; I thought too that he never would have got over it, he was so devoted to you; but he was young; if you will remember, he was two years younger than——”
“Have done with these absurd recollections, Mary,” said her sister angrily; “I want to hear no more of him. He’s safely out of the way now at last; and there’s his—there’s these girls to deal with. If I had only been by myself and had all my wits about me I should soon have settled these girls; but I never have it in my power to act for myself. There was Geoff standing by with those glaring eyes of his—not that I am afraid of his eyes. They don’t know a single thing, these girls. If I had taken my own way I should have asked them here, and made much of them.”
“Oh, Anna, dear! I always said you had such a good heart!”
Miss Anna paused to look at her sister with contemptuous toleration. “Was any one talking of my good heart?” she said. “But, never mind, I should have taken them in—in every sense of the word. I would have been Aunt Anna to them. I would have packed them off to their mother with my love and a little present. To have to do with fools blunts the sharpest intellect. That is what I ought to have done. And it was all they wanted. To find their English relations, to get up a little sentiment; that was all they wanted; they have money enough; and they did not know a thing, not a thing! To think I should have missed my opportunity like that! A bit of china that would have got smashed on the voyage out, and our love; they would have written us gushing letters and talked of our kindness all their lives.”
Mrs Underwood, good woman, was puzzled. She did not understand what this meant. “If they had known you, Anna, I am sure they would have—loved you,” she said, faltering a little. This was not always the result of more intimate knowledge in Miss Anna’s case, but her sister had a robust faith. Miss Anna cast a contemptuous glance upon her, but it was not worth her while to argue.