“Oh, ma’am, pray don’t take on so,” cried Mrs. Parrot, going up to her. “Things’ll come right, ma’am. You’ll be heasy an’ comfortable here.”
Holdsworth knelt on a chair beside her, holding the wine. Oh, it was hard that he could not take her to his heart and whisper the word that would change all her anguish into joy. But if ever the barrier that was raised between them had been felt, it was felt by him then. Her honour now, more than ever it had been, was become peculiarly his care. The sense of her being another’s, that his own claims were as naught in the presence of her belief that she was Conway’s wife, was never before so sharply felt. Her misery had given her in his eyes a sanctity that made his yearning love sacrilegious. Humility conquered emotion, and he crept away from her side, and stood looking at her from a distance, holding Nelly’s hand.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Parrot’s fingers were busy with Dolly’s hat strings and the shawl over her shoulders, and she murmured incessantly all manner of kindly sentences, of which their extreme triteness as consolatory axioms was greatly qualified by her motherly manner.
“There, my dear,” she exclaimed, laying the hat upon the table, “drink a little wine: you’ll be better presently. Life’s full o’ troubles, God knows! and there are husbands in this world as is enough to make a woman forget her sect and strike ’em. But a friend, ma’am, is as good as sunshine to a frost-bitten man, and I’m sure you’ve got a good and kind one in Mr. Hampden.”
“It’s my husband’s desertion,” cried Dolly, “that I think of. I don’t mind the loss of my home. But to think of his deserting me and my little one when he could not know that I had a friend—when I married him for Nelly’s sake, to get her bread. Yes, Mrs. Parrot, to save her from starving. And to feel that I defied my conscience only to be brought so low—so low!”
“God forbid, my dear, that iver I should set husband an’ wife agin’ each other,” replied Mrs. Parrot, glancing at Holdsworth, to see how he might relish her remark; “but I must say that, if Mr. Conway’s left yer, it’s a good thing, an’ the last thing on this airth as would trouble me if I was you. You’ve gone through a deal o’ sufferin’ for him, an’ if he’s desairted you, you can’t come to worse harm nor was he to have stood by his home like a man, which he niver was; and there’s not one o’ your neighbours as don’t know that you’ve had more trouble than any Christian woman i’ this world ought to have. And it may sound a hard sayin’, but if he’s gone,” she exclaimed, looking defiantly at Holdsworth, “I hope and pray it’s for good an’ all.”
It often happens in real life, as in books, that a closing remark will take a weird appropriateness by the sudden confrontment of the fact of which it is only the shadow. Mrs. Parrot had barely shut her mouth when the passage echoed with the clattering of the knocker on the house-door. Never was such a delirious knocking. Mrs. Parrot turned pale, persuaded that Mr. Conway had come home drunk, and had reeled across to her house to demand his wife and create a horrible “scene.”
Dolly raised her head, and it was plain that the same idea had occurred to her, by the indescribable expression of mingled hate, fear, and loathing that entered her face.