Miss Anna never appeared down-stairs till mid-day. She had enjoyed a great deal of bad health since she had ceased to be a young woman and queen of hearts. Latterly it had settled into rheumatism, which had made her a little lame, and justified a great deal of indulgence. Her attendants said that even this she could throw off when occasion required. But there could be little pleasure, one would imagine, in making-believe to be lame. Her general delicacy, however, gave rise to a hundred necessities which people in health manage to dispense with. Mrs Underwood and her son had eaten a troubled breakfast long before her dainty meal was carried into her daintier chamber, and she returned to wakeful life under the influence of fragrant coffee and delicate roll, and some elegant trifle of cooked eggs or other light and graceful food. We say cooked eggs with intention, for boiled eggs, or even poached eggs, were vulgarities which Miss Anna would not have tolerated. She ate her pretty breakfast while her sister went through her household duties with a heavy heart, and Geoffrey took his way to town, striding along through the muddy streets, for it had rained all night. A little before noon she sent for Mrs Underwood, who came up with a somewhat haggard countenance, ready to cry at a moment’s notice, and with a cap which, in sympathy with her condition of mind, had got awry, and had greatly tried the nerves of the cook, who had a strong sense of humour, and felt her inclination to laugh almost too much for her. This was the first thing Miss Anna remarked when her sister came into the room. She uttered a suppressed shriek of horror.
“Did you give poor Geoff his breakfast with a cap like that upon your head? Good gracious! and then you think it wonderful the poor boy should want to marry and have a trim, neat little wife of his own.”
“What is the matter with my cap?” cried Mrs Underwood in alarm, putting up her hands and naturally making bad worse. She almost wept with vexation when she saw herself in one of the many mirrors. “Why didn’t somebody tell me?” she said piteously, with dreadful thoughts of Geoff’s disgust, and of the comparison he must be making between that trim, neat little wife and a mother with her cap awry.
“Set it right now, and come and sit down here,” said Miss Anna.
There could not have been a greater contrast than between these two sisters. One of them seating herself, timid and anxious, by the bed, with no confidence either in her own judgment or in her powers of understanding, or capability of satisfying her imperious critic and companion—her anxious little mind on tip-toe of troubled solicitude to catch what Anna should mean, which was always somewhat difficult to her; while the other, with all her wits about her, seeing everything, noticing everything, lay amid her luxurious pillows and laughed at her sister’s agitation.
“I wish I could take things as easily as you do, Anna—oh, I wish I could take them as easy!” Mrs Underwood said.
“You were always a goose,” was Miss Anna’s remark; but she took the trouble to push aside her curtain and to draw close to the chair at her bedside on which the other sat, before she unfolded to her the plan she had formed—which Mrs Underwood received with great surprise and many holdings up of her hands and wondering exclamations.
“Why, it was just what I thought I ought to do,” she said. “It was all in my head, every word. I made it up in my mind to say to them, ‘Anna may be against you, but you will never find me against you; and as the house is mine, and I have a right to ask whom I like——’ ”
“Stick to that,” said Miss Anna with a laugh. “It was very impertinent and treacherous of you to think of saying it out of your own head; but now that we have settled it together, stick to that—it is the very thing to say.”
“I don’t see how you can call it impertinent, Anna: and treacherous!—me—to you! I have always been true to you. I can’t think how you can say so. But it is true: the house is mine, however you please to put it. It was left to me expressly by dear papa. Of course, he made sure you would marry; and me a widow with one dear child, it was so natural that he should leave it to me. It will be all we shall have,” she added with a sigh, “if this dreadful thing comes true.”