"She spends very little time, they tell me, with the child yonder, although it is her brother's own. The child sits in one room and her aunt in another; one draws pictures of every mortal thing, and some things not mortal, and the other looks out of window and rarely speaks. 'Tis a sad sight, they say, that members of one family are thus as far removed in feeling and ways of talking as—as——" the speaker paused in perplexity, vainly searching for a suitable and sufficiently strong simile.
"What can ye expect, ma'am?" said Enderby loftily, with his habitual consideration for the aristocracy. "Miss Clairville has been cruelly treated. Her brother to marry, to marry, look you, ma'am, with one of a menial family—'twas hard on one by nature so genteel, and the manner of her long sickness was not to be wondered at; had she only gone through the form of marriage with the one her heart was interested in and then lost him the next moment; I think I may say, without fear of exaggeration, she would then have had something to live for; she could have claimed his money. But no marriage, no man, no money—and in place of it all, sickness and poverty and the care of the unwelcome child—why, I've never known a harder thing!"
Crabbe's expectations had often been referred to among the villagers and had grown to astonishing dimensions in the minds of the simple, but the idea of Miss Clairville's share in them was new and afforded plenty of material for conjecture.
"Though what a lone thing like her would have done with all that money, I cannot think!" said Mrs. Enderby, who in company with Mrs. Abercorn had always harboured a suspicious and jealous dislike of the handsome and dashing Pauline.
"Cannot think!" echoed her husband. "Why, them's the ones to know what to do with any power of money coming to them. I'll warrant she has had plans enough, to keep the old place up, maybe, to dress herself and travel to foreign lands and never act no more. That would all take money, bless ye! Before I settled here, as some of ye know, I kept butcher shop in Blandville, a bigger place far, than this, all English and all so pleasant too, so—so equalizing like, that when parties did run into debt (and some were pretty deep in my books) you could almost forgive it to them, they were so plausible and polite about it. Eighty dollars a month was what one family took out in the best meats procurable and 'ow could you refuse it, knowing they were not going to run away owing it! 'Some day, Mr. Enderby,' they would say, 'you shall have it. You shall 'ave it, sir, some day.'"
"And did you ever get it?" said a thin woman, the Hawthorne milliner, edging to the front of the group in some anxiety. "Did you?"
"I did, ma'am. They owned considerable property round about there, and when they wanted anything they would sell off a little, piece by piece. Just as they needed things they sold it, and by and by they came to me and my little account was paid off—honourable."
"All at once?" said the anxious woman, and Enderby nodded.
"What a state of things though!" remarked his wife. "I remember it quite distinctly. When they wanted to give a party they would sell off a piece of land, or when they needed a new carpet. 'Twould make me so nervous like."
"So it would me," said the milliner, "so it would me."