During the next three days she was kept busy by the mechanical preparations for her departure. There was not much she had to do, for the contents of the General's house belonged to the army, and beyond her own and her father's personal possessions there was little to pack up, yet the black boy was always beside her, with a helping hand but a lagging lip and many plaintive lamentations.
"Lady not want Mosie any more now—no?"
On the Thursday he came running into Helena's room to say that Lady Nuneham, with her Egyptian maid, had come to call on her.
Helena met Gordon's mother at the door, the sweet old soul with her pale, spiritual face, suffering visibly, but bearing herself bravely as she stepped out of her closely curtained carriage and crossed the garden path, under the white heat of the noonday sun, with one arm through Fatimah's, and a trembling hand on the ebony handle of a walking-stick.
As soon as she reached the hall the old lady lifted her veil and stretched out her arms to Helena and kissed her, and then patted her shoulder with her mittened hand as if Helena had been a child and she had come to comfort her.
"My poor Helena! It's hard for you, I know, but if God sends the cross He sends the strength to carry it. I've always found it so, my dear," she said, and when she was seated on the sofa with Helena beside her, she began to talk of her own father, how they had been everything to each other, and when he had died she had thought she could not live without him, but God had been good—He had sent her her husband and then——
But that was a blind alley down which she could walk no further, for there was one name that was trembling on the lips of both women and neither of them could yet bring herself to speak it.
"When my mother died, too—I was married then and living here in Cairo, but mother couldn't leave the old home in Massachusetts where I was brought up as a child ... Poor mother, she used to play Blind-man's-buff in the hall with me, I remember, for we were far away from other people and I had no little playmates ... when she died I thought I should have died too, but God was good to me again—He sent me my own child, my boy, my——"
It was just as if all roads converged to one centre, and to escape from it the old lady began to talk of little things, asking simple questions and giving motherly advice, while Helena held down her head and drew the hem of her handkerchief through her fingers.
"You are sailing on Saturday, are you not?"