“I was there in two minutes, as you may suppose; and there was madam, tearing up and down the front walk, with her black silk cloak on that makes her look so tall, and her face—oh, you should have seen the colour of it, and the flashing of her eyes, and the waving of her arms. ‘I insist upon knowing. I insist upon going in. Am I going to be locked out of my own house? To-morrow, indeed! Don’t talk to me of to-morrow. How dare you prevent me from entering my own door? I’ll find out your disgraceful tricks, and expose you. You are not fit to marry a respectable girl. I’ll send for a policeman, and have the door forced.’
“‘You won’t do anything of the kind,’ her son Mr. Downy made answer quietly, although I could see that he was awful pale, and he sat on a kitchen chair in front of the door, with his broad shoulders set against it. ‘I tell you it is for your sake that I will not allow it. You may walk about all night, but you won’t walk in here.’
“Ladies, and gents, she kept pacing up and down, like a Beelzebub more than a mortal woman, raving and ranting to such a degree, that a crowd of people came and looked over the gate, and they began to cry, ‘Bravo, Rous!’ ‘Go it, old lady!’ ‘Hit him hard, he ain’t got no friends’—and all that stuff; you know how free and easy a London crowd is. Then she marched up to the gate, and looked at them, and they fell away ashamed, and she walked into the house. But have her way she will, before the sun goes down. She has sworn it, and she never breaks her oath.”
“It is no concern of ours,” said my uncle very sensibly; “what have we to do with such family quarrels? What made you come to us, Mrs. Wilcox?”
“Two things, sir; in the first place, you know more of the law than any gentleman I know. You remember how you told me that last winter, and every word you said came true as gospel. And what is more than that, poor Miss Jerry, and Miss Frizzy backed her up in that same, she says to me—‘Oh, Mrs. Wilcox, do try to get that nice young man from Sunbury, that married poor Kitty Fairthorn. He has more power over mother than any one on earth. She is afraid of him, that’s the truth, though she’d box my ears if she heard me say so. ‘There might be time enough,’ she says, ‘if you’d set off directly, and I’ll pay all expenses.’ Well, I thought it must come from Heaven that I should be thinking of the uncle, and she of the nephew; and so come, both gents, I beg of you; there’ll be murder between them, if you don’t; for the police can’t interfere, you know.”
“Kit, let us go,” said my Uncle Corny, as some new idea struck him; “we cannot interfere of course, but we can see the end of it.”
Kitty was very much against my going, and I would not have left her, unless Miss Parslow had promised to stay with her, until our return, although it would compel her to send back the fly, and beg a bed for the night from her old friend Sally.
My uncle took a big stick, and so did I; and in a quarter of an hour we started in the tax-cart, with Mrs. Wilcox on the cushion. I was the driver, and my uncle sat behind, for there was no room for three of us, all rather broad, in front. And certainly I was the calmest of the three, for the good lady was in a dreadful fright and fret; and my uncle sat heavily, with his chin upon his stick, taking no notice of the roads or streets, but dwelling on the distance of bygone sorrow. The wrong he had suffered was greater than mine in one way, and less in another; greater, because it was incurable; lighter, because less cold-blooded and crafty, and not inflicted on him through his own wife. But I, with my Kitty recovered, and still in the new delight of that recovery, had triumphed already in the more important part, and was occupied rather with contempt than hatred. And it seemed to me too an extraordinary thing, and the last I should ever have predicted, that I should be entreated by the daughters of that most naughty and headstrong woman, to come and exert for her own good my imaginary power over her.
We put up our cart at the Bricklayer’s Arms, where Ted had been pot-boy—or potman he called himself—and then we all hurried towards Bulwrag Park. The midsummer sun had just gone down; and as the red light glanced along the broad stately roads, I thought of the words of that violent lady—“before the sun goes down, I will have my way.”
We passed between some posts into the open space, coveted vainly by builders, where the old Scotch firs (which had been my Kitty’s landmark) still waved their black pillows against the western sky. Then a number of people came rushing by us, driven by that electric impulse, which flashes through the human heart that human life is passing. With the contagion of haste we began to run.