Lady Kew said nothing, but glared and showed her teeth—those pearls set in gold.
“And my company may not amuse Lord Kew—”
“He-e-e!” grinned the elder, savagely.
“—But at least it is better than some to which you introduced my son,” continued Lady Kew’s daughter-in-law, gathering force and wrath as she spoke. “Your ladyship may think lightly of me, but you can hardly think so ill of me as of the Duchesse d’Ivry, I should suppose, to whom you sent my boy, to form him, you said; about whom, when I remonstrated—for though I live out of the world I hear of it sometimes—you were pleased to tell me that I was a prude and a fool. It is you I thank for separating my child from me—yes, you—for so many years of my life; and for bringing me to him when he was bleeding and almost a corpse, but that God preserved him to the widow’s prayers;—and you, you were by, and never came near him.”
“I—I did not come to see you—or—or—for this kind of scene, Lady Walham,” muttered the other. Lady Kew was accustomed to triumph, by attacking in masses, like Napoleon. Those who faced her routed her.
“No; you did not come for me, I know very well,” the daughter went on. “You loved me no better than you loved your son, whose life, as long as you meddled with it, you made wretched. You came here for my boy. Haven’t you done him evil enough? And now God has mercifully preserved him, you want to lead him back again into ruin and crime. It shall not be so, wicked woman! bad mother! cruel, heartless parent!—George!” (Here her younger son entered the room, and she ran towards him with fluttering robes and seized his hands.) “Here is your grandmother; here is the Countess of Kew, come from Baden at last; and she wants—she wants to take Frank from us, my dear, and to—give—him—back to the—Frenchwoman again. No, no! Oh, my God! Never! never!” And she flung herself into George Barnes’s arms, fainting with an hysteric burst of tears.
“You had best get a strait-waistcoat for your mother, George Barnes,” Lady Kew said, scorn and hatred in her face. (If she had been Iago’s daughter, with a strong likeness to her sire, Lord Steyne’s sister could not have looked more diabolical.) “Have you had advice for her? Has nursing poor Kew turned her head? I came to see him. Why have I been left alone for half an hour with this madwoman? You ought not to trust her to give Frank medicine. It is positively——”
“Excuse me,” said George, with a bow; “I don’t think the complaint has as yet exhibited itself in my mother’s branch of the family. (She always hated me,” thought George; “but if she had by chance left me a legacy, there it goes.) You would like, ma’am, to see the rooms upstairs? Here is the landlord to conduct your ladyship. Frank will be quite ready to receive you when you come down. I am sure I need not beg of your kindness that nothing may be said to agitate him. It is barely three weeks since M. de Castillonnes’s ball was extracted; and the doctors wish he should be kept as quiet as possible.”
Be sure that the landlord, the courier, and the persons engaged in showing the Countess of Kew the apartments above spent an agreeable time with Her Excellency the Frau Gräfinn von Kew. She must have had better luck in her encounter with these than in her previous passages with her grandson and his mother; for when she issued from her apartment in a new dress and fresh cap, Lady Kew’s face wore an expression of perfect serenity. Her attendant may have shook her fist behind her, and her man’s eyes and face looked Blitz and Donnerwetter; but their mistress’s features wore that pleased look which they assumed when she had been satisfactorily punishing somebody. Lord Kew had by this time got back from the garden to his own room, where he awaited grandmamma. If the mother and her two sons had in the interval of Lady Kew’s toilette tried to resume the history of Bumble the Beadle, I fear they could not have found it very comical.
“Bless me, my dear child! How well you look! Many a girl would give the world to have such a complexion. There is nothing like a mother for a nurse! Ah, no! Maria, you deserve to be the Mother Superior of a House of Sisters of Charity, you do. The landlord has given me a delightful apartment, thank you. He is an extortionate wretch; but I have no doubt I shall be very comfortable. The Dodsburys stopped here, I see by the travellers’ book-quite right, instead of sleeping at that odious buggy Strasbourg. We have had a sad, sad time, my dears, at Baden. Between anxiety about poor Sir Brian, and about you, you naughty boy, I am sure I wonder how I have got through it all. Doctor Finck would not let me come away to-day; would I but come.”