Lady Walham then fell to deplore Sir Brian’s condition, accounts of whose seizure of course had been despatched to the Kehl party, and to lament that a worldly man as he was should have such an affliction, so near the grave and so little prepared for it. Here honest Kew, however, held out. “Every man for himself, mother,” says he. “Sir Brian was bred up very strictly, perhaps too strictly as a young man. Don’t you know that that good Colonel, his elder brother, who seems to me about the most honest and good old gentleman I ever met in my life, was driven into rebellion and all sorts of wild courses by old Mrs. Newcome’s tyranny over him? As for Sir Brian, he goes to church every Sunday: has prayers in the family every day: I’m sure has led a hundred times better life than I have, poor old Sir Brian. I often have thought, mother, that though our side was wrong, you could not be altogether right, because I remember how my tutor, and Mr. Bonner, and Dr. Laud, when they used to come down to us at Kewbury, used to make themselves so unhappy about other people.” So the widow withdrew her unhappiness about Sir Brian; she was quite glad to hope for the best regarding that invalid.
With some fears yet regarding her son,—for many of the books with which the good lady travelled could not be got to interest him; at some he would laugh outright,—with fear mixed with the maternal joy that he was returned to her, and had quitted his old ways; with keen feminine triumph, perhaps, that she had won him back, and happiness at his daily mending health, all Lady Walham’s hours were passed in thankful and delighted occupation. George Barnes kept the Newcomes acquainted with the state of his brother’s health. The skilful surgeon from Strasbourg reported daily better and better of him, and the little family were living in great peace and contentment, with one subject of dread, however, hanging over the mother of the two young men, the arrival of Lady Kew, as she was foreboding, the fierce old mother-in-law who had worsted Lady Walham in many a previous battle.
It was what they call the summer of St. Martin, and the weather was luckily very fine; Kew could presently be wheeled into the garden of the hotel, whence he could see the broad turbid current of the swollen Rhine: the French bank fringed with alders, the vast yellow fields behind them, the great avenue of poplars stretching away to the Alsatian city, and its purple minster yonder. Good Lady Walham was for improving the shining hour by reading amusing extracts from her favourite volumes, gentle anecdotes of Chinese and Hottentot converts, and incidents from missionary travel. George Barnes, a wily young diplomatist, insinuated Galignani, and hinted that Kew might like a novel; and a profane work called Oliver Twist having appeared about this time, which George read out to his family with admirable emphasis, it is a fact that Lady Walham became so interested in the parish boy’s progress, that she took his history into her bedroom (where it was discovered, under Blatherwick’s Voice from Mesopotamia, by her ladyship’s maid), and that Kew laughed so immensely at Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, as to endanger the reopening of his wound.
While, one day, they were so harmlessly and pleasantly occupied, a great whacking of whips, blowing of horns, and whirring of wheels was heard in the street without. The wheels stopped at their hotel gate; Lady Walham started up; ran through the garden door, closing it behind her; and divined justly who had arrived. The landlord was bowing; the courier pushing about; waiters in attendance; one of them, coming up to pale-faced Lady Walham; said, “Her Excellency the Frau Gräfinn von Kew is even now absteiging.”
“Will you be good enough to walk into our salon, Lady Kew?” said the daughter-in-law, stepping forward and opening the door of that apartment. The Countess, leaning on her staff, entered that darkened chamber. She ran up towards an easy-chair, where she supposed Lord Kew was. “My dear Frank!” cries the old lady; “my dear boy, what a pretty fright you have given us all! They don’t keep you in this horrid noisy room facing that——Ho—what is this?” cries the Countess, closing her sentence abruptly.
“It is not Frank. It is only a bolster, Lady Kew, and I don’t keep him in a noisy room towards the street,” said Lady Walham.
“Ho! how do you do? This is the way to him, I suppose;” and she went to another door—it was a cupboard full of the relics of Frank’s illness, from which Lady Walham’s mother-in-law shrunk back aghast. “Will you please to see that I have a comfortable room, Maria; and one for my maid, next me? I will thank you to see yourself,” the Empress of Kew said, pointing with her stick, before which many a time the younger lady had trembled.
This time Lady Walham only rang the bell. “I don’t speak German; and have never been on any floor of the house but this. Your servant had better see to your room, Lady Kew. That next is mine; and I keep the door, which you are trying, locked on other side.”
“And I suppose Frank is locked up there!” cried the old lady, “with a basin of gruel and a book of Watts’s hymns.” A servant entered at this moment, answering Lady Walham’s summons. “Peacock, the Countess of Kew says that she proposes to stay here this evening. Please to ask the landlord to show her ladyship rooms,” said Lady Walham; and by this time she had thought of a reply to Lady Kew’s last kind speech.
“If my son were locked up in my room, madam, his mother is surely the best nurse for him. Why did you not come to him three weeks sooner, when there was nobody with him?”