Mr. Furze roused himself and took a little brandy-and-water.
“Rubbish!”
“Rubbish! it’s all very well for you to say ‘rubbish’ when you’ve been snoring there!”
“Well, where is she? Make her come in; let us hear what she has to say.”
“She’s gone to bed. Now take my advice: don’t speak to her to-night, but wait till to-morrow; you know what she is, and you had better think a bit.”
Mrs. Furze, notwithstanding her excitement, dreaded somewhat attacking Catharine without preparation.
“There’s no mistake about it,” observed Mr. Furze, rousing himself, “that I have had my suspicions of Master Tom, but I never thought it would come to this; nor that Catharine would have anything to say to him. It was she, though, who said I could not do without him.”
“It was she,” added Mrs. Furze, “who always stuck out against our coming up here, and was rude to Mrs. Colston and her son. I do not blame her so much, though, as I do that wretch of a Catchpole. What he wants is plain enough: he’ll marry her and have the business, the son of a blind beggar who used to go on errands! Oh me! to think it has come to this, that my only child should be the wife of a pauper’s son, and we’ve struggled so hard! What will the Colstons say, and all the church folk, and all the town, for the matter of that!”
Here Mrs. Furze threw herself down in a chair and became hysterical. Poor woman! she really cared for Catharine, loved her in a way, and was horrified for her sake at the supposed engagement, but her desire for her daughter’s welfare was bound up with a desire for her own, a strand of one interlaced with a strand of the other, so that they could not be separated. It might be said that the union of the two impulses was even more intimate, that it was like a mixture of two liquids. There was no conflict in her. She was not selfish at one moment, and unselfishly anxious for her child the next; but she was both together at the same instant, the particular course on which she might determine satisfying both instincts.
Mr. Furze unfastened his wife’s gown and stay-laces, and gave her a stimulant. Presently, after directing him with a gasp to open the window, she recovered herself.