Mr. Dancy, who was standing with his back to them, leaning for support against the little mantle-shelf, did not answer for a moment; and then he turned slowly round, and looked at her.
“Oh, Barby!” he said; “don’t you recollect me?” And then he held out his thin hands to her imploringly, and added “Dear old Barby! but you are not a bit changed.”
“Herbert—why, good heavens! Ah, just so—just so,” gasped the poor lady, rather feebly, as she sat down, feeling her limbs were deserting her, and every scrap of color left her face. Indeed, she looked so flabby and lifeless that Phillis was alarmed and flew to her assistance; only Mr. Cheyne waved her aside rather impatiently.
“Let her be; she is all right. She knows me, you see: so I cannot be so much altered. Barby,” he went on, in a coaxing voice, as he knelt beside her and chafed her hands, “you thought I was an impostor, and were coming to threaten me: were you not? But now you see Miss Challoner was in the right. Have you not got a word for me? Won’t you talk to me about Magdalene? We have got to prepare her, you know.”
Then, as he spoke his wife’s name, and she remembered her sacred charge, the faithful creature suddenly fell on his neck in piteous weeping.
“Oh, the bonnie face,” she wept, “that has grown so old, with the sorrow and the gray hair! My dear, this will just kill her with joy, after all her years of bitter widowhood.” 257 And then she cried again, and stroked his face as though he were a child, and then wrung her hands for pity at the changes she saw. “It is the same face, and yet not the same,” she said, by and by. “I knew the look of your eyes, my bonnie man, for all they were so piercing with sadness. But what have they done to you, Herbert?—for it might be your own ghost,—so thin; and yet you are brown, too; and your hair!” And she touched the gray locks over the temples with tender fluttering fingers.
“Magdalene never liked gray hairs,” he responded, with a sigh. “She is as beautiful as ever, I hear; but I have not caught a glimpse of her. Tell me, Barby,—for I have grown timorous with sorrow,—will she hate the sight of such a miserable scarecrow?”
“My dear! hate the sight of her own husband, who is given back to her from the dead? Ay, I have much to hear. Why did you never write to us, Herbert? But there! you have all that to explain to her by and by.”
“Yes; and you must tell me about the children,—my little Janie,” he returned, in a choked voice.
“Ah, the dear angels! But, Herbert, you must be careful. Nobody speaks of them to Magdalene, unless she does herself. You are impetuous, my dear; and Magdalene—well, she has not been herself since you left her. It is pining, grief, and the dead weight of loss that has ailed her being childless and widowed at once. There, there! just so. We must be tender of her, poor dear! and things will soon come right.”