“I suppose that there is no doubt about it this time?” Féodorovna asks in a tone of refined affliction, intended to contrast in the highest degree with her parent’s vulgar grief. “Once already he seems to have actually come back from the dead! But this time I suppose there is absolutely no——”
“Absolutely none.”
“Would you mind telling us exactly how it all happened?” inquires Mrs. Prince, with a sort of diffidence born of the recollection of how very much the rector’s wife had appeared to shrink from the narration of the original accident. “It seems a shame to trouble you; but really, trifling as the distance is from here to the Chestnuts, it is astonishing how things manage to get garbled in the mouths of the domestics.” Mrs. Prince always calls servants “domestics.”
“Yes, I will tell you,” replies Mrs. Darcy, dabbing her eyes hastily with a pocket-handkerchief, which at once returns to her pocket, nor remains en évidence like the other two. The sense of that former relation is strong on her memory also; but it is coupled with the feeling of how much less painful and difficult the present one is than its predecessor. Here there is nothing to wince at or glide over; no opening for implication or suspicion. “He had been talking to Lavinia while she gave him his tea; she had left him, thinking him a little tired, but quite naturally and healthily so after the unusual exertion of going out of doors for the first time; and about half an hour later he rang for the footman—you know that since the nurse went he has been waited on by the ordinary staff, and wonderfully little trouble he gave—and said he should like to go to bed. He undressed without any help, and was just going to get into bed when the servant, who had gone to the other side of the room to fetch something, heard him call out, ‘Quick! the brandy!’ He ran to him as fast as he could, but by the time he got to him he was——”
Mrs. Darcy bends her head, as if in reverence as well as acquiescence.
“A clot?”
“Yes.”
“And there was no one but the footman in the room? Which one was it? Oh, but I forget, since poor Bill went they only keep one!” After a moment’s pause, “I should not like to die with only a footman in the room.”
Mrs. Darcy is too profoundly sad to see the ludicrousness of the sentiment expressed; nor even to point out that, in the good gentlewoman’s case, such a contingency is not likely to occur. She goes to the open French window, and stands leaning her hot head against the jamb. Susan had always grumbled that mignonette would not grow with her; had rejoiced that this year the seed which she had imported from France had given her an abundance of that chancey fragrance; but now she feels in angry pain that the perfume from the bed at her foot is too violent in its sweetness. She will never get seed from Paris again.