This was a disappointment to Mrs. Verstage. Reluctantly she admitted that her health was breaking down, and that, moreover, whilst Simon remained tough and unshaken. The long-expected and hoped for time when Iver should become a permanent inmate of the house, and she would spend her declining years in love and admiration, had vanished to the region of hopes impossible of fulfilment.
Simon Verstage took the decline of his wife's powers very philosophically. He had been so accustomed to her prognostications of evil, and harangues on her difficulties, that he was case-hardened, and did not realize that there was actual imminence of a separation by death.
"It's all her talk," he would say to a confidential friend; "she's eighteen years younger nor me, and so has eighteen to live after I'm gone. There ain't been much took out of her: she's not one as has had a large family. There was Iver, no more; and women are longer-lived than men. She talks, but it's all along of Polly that worrits her. Let Polly alone and she'll get into the ways of the house in time; but Sanna be always at her about this and about that, and it kinder bewilders the wench, and she don't know whether to think wi' her toes, and walk wi' her head."
In the Punch-Bowl the relations that subsisted between the Broom-Squire and his wife were not more cordial than before. They lived in separate worlds. He was greatly occupied with his solicitor in Godalming, to whom he was constantly driving over. He saw little of Mehetabel, save at his meals, and then conversation was limited on his part to recrimination and sarcastic remarks that cut as a razor. She made no reply, and spoke only of matters necessary. To his abusive remarks she had no answer, a deepening color, a clouding eye showed that she felt what he said. And it irritated the man that she bore his insolence meekly. He would have preferred that she should have retorted. As it was, so quiet was the house that Sally Rocliffe sneered at her brother for living in it with Mehetabel, "just like two turtle doves,—never heard in the Punch-Bowl of such a tender couple. Since that little visit to the Moor you've been doin' nothin' but billin and cooin'." Then she burst into a verse of an old folks song, singing in harsh tones—
"A woman that hath a bad husband, I find
By scolding won't make him the better.
So let him be easy, contented in mind,
Nor suffer his foibles to fret her.
Let every good woman her husband adore,
Then happy her lot, though t be humble and poor.
We live like two turtles, no sorrows we know,
And, fair girl! mind this when you marry."
"What happens, in my house is no concern of yours, Sally," Jonas would answer sharply. "If some folk would mind their own affairs they wouldn't be all to sixes and sevens. You look out that you don't get into trouble yet over that foolish affair of Thomas and the Countess. I don't fancy you've come to the end of that yet."
So the winter passed, and spring as well, and then came summer, and just before the scythe cut the green swath, for the hay harvest, Mehetabel became a mother.
The child that was born to her was small and delicate, it lacked the sturdiness of its father and of the mother. So frail, indeed, did the little life seem at first, that grave doubts were entertained whether the babe would live to be taken to church to be baptized.
Mehetabel did not have the comfort of the presence of Mrs. Verstage.
During the winter that good woman's malady advanced with rapid strides, and by summer she was confined to her room, and very generally to her bed.