“What, before he was ill? Nothing more likely.”
“No, since,” the mourner with the batiste mask gasped out; “not before; that is, I don’t think so—that is, I——”
“Only since; and you have—yes, I understand. I suppose when he was too ill to read his own correspondence, you took charge of it, did you?”
“I am the most unhappy mother in the world,” cried out the unfortunate Helen.
“The most unhappy mother in the world, because your son is a man and not a hermit! Have a care, my dear sister. If you have suppressed any letters to him, you may have done yourself a great injury; and, if I know anything of Arthur’s spirit, may cause a difference between him and you, which you’ll rue all your life—a difference that’s a dev’lish deal more important, my good madam, than the little—little—trumpery cause which originated it.”
“There was only one letter,” broke out Helen,—“only a very little one—only a few words. Here it is—Oh—how can you, how can you speak so?”
When the good soul said “only a very little one,” the Major could not speak at all, so inclined was he to laugh, in spite of the agonies of the poor soul before him, and for whom he had a hearty pity and liking too. But each was looking at the matter with his or her peculiar eyes and views of morals, and the Major’s morals, as the reader knows, were not those of an ascetic.
“I recommend you,” he gravely continued, “if you can, to seal it up—those letters ain’t unfrequently sealed with wafers—and to put it amongst Pen’s other letters, and let him have them when he calls for them. Or if we can’t seal it, we mistook it for a bill.”
“I can’t tell my son a lie,” said the widow. It had been put silently into the letter-box two days previous to their departure from the Temple, and had been brought to Mrs. Pendennis by Martha. She had never seen Fanny’s handwriting, of course; but when the letter was put into her hands she knew the author at once. She had been on the watch for that letter every day since Pen had been ill. She had opened some of his other letters because she wanted to get at that one. She had the horrid paper poisoning her bag at that moment. She took it out and offered it to her brother-in-law.
“Arther Pendennis, Esq.,” he read in a timid little sprawling handwriting, and with a sneer on his face. “No, my dear, I won’t read any more. But you who have read it may tell me what the letter contains—only prayers for his health in bad spelling, you say—and a desire to see him? Well—there’s no harm in that. And as you ask me—” Here the Major began to look a little queer for his own part, and put on his demure look—“as you ask me, my dear, for information, why, I don’t mind telling you that—ah—that—Morgan, my man, has made some inquiries regarding this affair, and that—my friend Doctor Goodenough also looked into it—and it appears that this person was greatly smitten with Arthur; that he paid for her and took her to Vauxhall Gardens, as Morgan heard from an old acquaintance of Pen’s and ours, an Irish gentleman, who was very nearly once having the honour of being the—from an Irishman, in fact;—that the girl’s father, a violent man of intoxicated habits, has beaten her mother, who persists in declaring her daughter’s entire innocence to her husband on the one hand, while on the other she told Goodenough, that Arthur has acted like a brute to her child. And so you see the story remains in a mystery. Will you have it cleared up? I have but to ask Pen, and he will tell me at once—he is as honourable a man as ever lived.”