The great tears brimmed up in Jack’s eyes, but he would not cry; he looked at her with a fixed reproachful, indignant look, very like Brancepeth.
The governess and the nurses all pleaded for him; everyone in the household loved Jack as they hated Boo. But it was in vain; his mother was in that kind of mood when every woman must have a victim, and he was all that offered to her. He was taken upstairs to be locked in his chamber by a sympathetic under-nurse, who whispered consolation. Boo, half vexed, half pleased, called after him with much self-righteousness: “I telled you never to sing those naughty songs. Didn’t I tell you, Jack?”
Jack did not reply or look round; he went manfully onward and upward to his doom. His mother retired to her own repose, whilst Boo, with the two other little boys, descended down to the entrance-hall. She was glad to think of Jack shut up in solitude and fretting his heart out this fine clear rainless afternoon in May.
The governess and the head nurse whispered together in the landau as to the duchess’s strange unkindness to her eldest son. Boo, who never lost a word of their whispering, when she sat between them, turned up her pretty nose: “Mammy don’t like Jack ’cos he’s got everything; she’s got to give him her jewels.”
For Boo, unseen and forgotten, had been sitting in the next room, playing with her big doll which talked, whilst the scene concerning the jewels had taken place between her mother and her uncle. Boo enjoyed anything which bothered Mammy. Only Boo was of opinion that the jewels ought to be her own, not Jack’s.
Meantime poor Jack, crying his heart out on his bed, thought, “Whatever good is it being a duke? Two of ’em have had to die one after the other, and I’ve got to be shut up here. And how mean it was of Boo to crow over me. Boo’s so like mammy. I wish there were no women and no girls.”
At that moment the sympathetic under-nurse brought him two peaches and a raspberry ice, which she had begged for from the kitchen, and Jack kissed her and thought better of her sex.
“I wish all women were dead ’cept you, Harriet,” he said tenderly.
“Oh, your Grace, don’t say that,” said Harriet. “But it was to be sure cruel unkind of your mamma.”
“I hate mammy,” said Jack with a deep drawn breath. “She took away my Punch, and she’s sent away Harry.”