Then Nan, who had worn all along an expression of admiring confidence in Phillis’s resources, originated an idea of her own.
“The mother might write to Uncle Francis, perhaps;” but at this proposition Mrs. Challoner sat upright and looked almost offended.
“My dear Nan, what a preposterous idea! Your uncle Francis!”
“Well, mammy, he is our uncle; and I am sure he would be sorry if his only brother’s children were to starve.”
“You are too young to know any better,” returned Mrs. Challoner, relapsing into alarmed feebleness; “you are not able to judge. But I never liked my brother-in-law,—never; he was not a good man. He was not a person whom one could trust,” continued the poor lady, trying to soften down certain facts to her innocent young daughters.
Sir Francis Challoner had been a black sheep,—a very black sheep indeed: one who had dyed himself certainly to a most sable hue; and though, for such prodigals, there may be a late repentance and much killing of fatted calves, still Mrs. Challoner was right in refusing to intrust herself and her children to the uncertain mercies of such a sinner.
Now, Nan knew nothing about the sin; but she did think that an uncle who was a baronet threw a certain reflected glory or brightness over them. Sir Francis might be that very suspicious character, a black sheep; he might be landless, with the exception of that ruined tenement in the North; nevertheless, Nan loved to know that he was of their kith and kin. It seemed to settle their claims to respectability, and held Mr. Mayne in some degree of awe; and he knew that his own progenitors had not the faintest trace of blue blood, and numbered more aldermen than baronets.
It would have surprised and grieved Nan, especially just now, if she had known that no such glory remained to her,—that Sir 51 Francis Challoner had long filled the cup of his iniquities, and lay in his wife’s tomb in some distant cemetery, leaving a certain red-headed Sir Harry to reign in his stead.
“I don’t think we had better talk anymore,” observed Phillis, somewhat brusquely: and then she exchanged meaning looks with Nan. The two girls were somewhat dismayed at their mother’s wan looks; her feebleness and uncertainty of speech, the very vagueness of her lamentations, filled them with sad forebodings for the future. How were they to leave her, when they commenced that little fight with the world? She had leaned on them so long that her helplessness had become a matter of habit.
Nan understood her sister’s warning glance, and she made no further allusion to Sir Francis; she only rose with assumed briskness, and took her mother in charge.