He rose, stretching to his full height to shake the indolence from his body.
“I’ve even got an architect to work. But I dare say you’re right and we can’t think about it yet. I certainly can’t drag Jennie through a radical change like that, and I haven’t even told her for fear it would fret her. But the moment she’s better—You don’t say whether you would really like it or not, Mathilda.”
“Certainly I shall like it, dear boy.”
He went off humming to his wife’s room, before going out. He was, Mathilda thought, more attentive to her than many an enamoured husband, and she admired him for it.
The idea of moving to the country at first frightened Ellen, with that pitiful fear which all dependents have of impending change. What will become of them, they ask themselves, in the general forgetfulness?—and a hundred misgivings and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the part of their masters throng their minds.
But had she felt secure it would have pleased her. The old house was too formal, too heavy with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of a past day. She could never quite grow to like the eternal quiet. A hearty clattering now and then would have relieved her pent-up vitality. She would have liked, just once in a long, long while to listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or hear Bennet shouting in the back yard.
VIII
But Mrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor worse and they remained at Trezevant Place. And when Moira was a year and a half old a fresh sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and unforeseen were the steps by which it came that Ellen scarcely realized what was happening.
To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new marvels of goodness and beauty every day, but she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that made her think so. She was not the sort who would boast of the deeds of her offspring.
Then she grew aware that others shared her interest. More and more, in particular, she found the child, when she came to look for her, in the company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s arms, most happily at home and warmly welcome.