Thomas G.o.dolphin proceeded to the room where she had been shown. She was not sitting, but pacing it to and fro; and she turned sharply round and met him as he entered, her face flushed with excitement.

"You were once to have been my son-in-law," she said abruptly.

Thomas, astonished at the address, invited her to a seat, but made no immediate reply. She would not take the chair.

"I cannot sit," she said. "Mr. G.o.dolphin, you were to have been my son-in-law: you would have been so now had Ethel lived. Do you consider Ethel to be any link between us still?"

He was quite at a loss what to answer. He did not understand what she meant. Lady Sarah continued.

"If you do; if you retain any fond remembrance of Ethel; you will prove it now. I had seven hundred pounds in your Bank. I have been sc.r.a.ping and saving out of my poor yearly income nearly ever since Ethel went; and I had placed it there. Can you deny it?"

"Dear Lady Sarah, what is the matter?" he asked; for her excitement was something frightful. "I know you had it there. Why should I deny it?"

"Oh, that's right. People have been saying the Bank was going to repudiate all claims. I want you to give it me. Now: privately."

"It is impossible for me to do so, Lady Sarah----"

"I cannot lose it; I have been saving it up for my poor child," she interrupted, in a most excited tone. "She will not have much when I am dead. Would you be so cruel as to rob the widow and the orphan?"

"Not willingly. Never willingly," he answered in his pain. "I had thought, Lady Sarah, that though all the world misjudged me, you would not."

"Could you not, you who were to have married Ethel, have given me a private hint of it when you found the Bank was going wrong? Others may afford to lose their money, but I cannot."

"I did not know it was going wrong," he said. "The blow has fallen upon me as unexpectedly as it has upon others."

Lady Sarah Grame, giving vent to one of the fits of pa.s.sionate excitement to which she had all her life been subject, suddenly flung herself upon her knees before Thomas G.o.dolphin. She implored him to return the money, to avert "ruin" from Sarah Anne; she reproached him with selfishness, with dishonesty, all in a breath. Can you imagine what it was for Thomas G.o.dolphin to meet this? Upright, gifted with lively conscientiousness, tenderly considerate in rendering strict justice to others, as he had been all his life, these unmerited reproaches were as iron entering his soul.

Which was the more to be pitied, himself or Maria? Thomas had called the calamity by its right name--a fiery trial. It was indeed such: to him and to her. You, who read, cannot picture it. How he got rid of Lady Sarah, he could scarcely tell: he believed it was by her pa.s.sion spending itself out. She was completely beside herself that night, almost as one who verges on insanity, and Thomas found a moment to ask himself whether that uncontrolled woman could be the mother of gentle Ethel. Her loud voice and its reproaches penetrated to the household--an additional drop of bitterness in the cup of the master of Ashlydyat.

But we must go back to Maria, for it is with her this evening that we have most to do. Between seven and eight o'clock Miss Meta arrived, attended by Charlotte Pain. Meta was in the height of glee. She was laden with toys and sweetmeats; she carried a doll as big as herself: she had been out in the carriage; she had had a ride on Mrs. Pain's brown horse, held on by that lady; she had swung "above the tops of the trees;" and, more than all, a message had come from the keeper of the dogs in the pit-hole, to say that they were never, never coming out again.

Charlotte had been generously kind to the child; that was evident; and Maria thanked her with her eyes and heart. As to saying much in words, that was beyond Maria to-night.

"Where's Margery?" asked Meta, in a hurry to show off her treasures.

Margery had not returned. And there was no other train now from the direction in which she had gone. It was supposed that she had missed it, and would be home in the morning. Meta drew a long face; she wanted Margery to admire the doll.

"You can go and show it to Harriet, dear," said Maria. "She is in the nursery." And Meta flew away, with the doll and as many other enc.u.mbrances as she could carry.

"Have those bankruptcy men been here?" asked Charlotte, glancing round the room.

"No. I have seen nothing of them."

"Well now, there's time yet, and do for goodness' sake let me save some few trifles for you; and don't fret yourself into fiddle-strings,"

heartily returned Charlotte. "I am quite sure you must have some treasures that it would be grief to part with. I have been thinking all day long how foolishly scrupulous you are."

Maria was silent for a minute. "They look into everything, you say?" she asked.

"_Look_ into everything!" echoed Charlotte. "I should think they do!

That would be little. They take everything."

Maria left the room and came back with a parcel in her hand. It was a very small trunk--dolls' trunks they are sometimes called--covered with red morocco leather, with a miniature lock.

"I would save this," she said in a whisper, "if you would be so kind as to take care of it for me. I should not like them to look into it. It cannot be any fraud," she added, in a sort of apology for what she was doing. "The things inside would not sell for sixpence, so I do not think even Mr. G.o.dolphin would be angry with me."

Charlotte nodded, took up her dress, and contrived to thrust the trunk into a huge pocket under her crinoline. There was another on the other side. "I put them on on purpose," she said, alluding to the pockets. "I thought you might think better of it by this evening. But this is nothing, Mrs. George G.o.dolphin. You may as well give me something else.

They'll be in to-morrow morning for certain."

Maria replied that she had nothing else to give, and Charlotte rose, saying she should come or send for Meta again on the morrow. As she went out, and proceeded up Crosse Street on her way home, she tossed her head with a laugh.

"I thought she'd come to! As if she wouldn't like to save her jewels, as other people do! She's only rather more sly over it--saying what she has given me would not fetch sixpence! You may tell that to the geese, Mrs.

George G.o.dolphin! I should like to see what's inside. I think I will."

And Charlotte put her wish into action. Upon reaching Lady G.o.dolphin's Folly, she flung off her bonnet and mantle, gathered together all the small keys in the house, and had little difficulty in opening the simple lock. The contents were exposed to view. A lock of hair of each of her children who had died, wrapped in separate pieces of paper, with the age of the child and the date of its death written respectively outside. A golden lock of Meta's; a fair curl of George's; half a dozen of his letters to her, written in the short time that intervened between their engagement and their marriage, and a sort of memorandum of their engagement. "I was this day engaged to George G.o.dolphin. I pray G.o.d to render me worthy of him! to be to him a loving and dutiful wife."

Charlotte's eyes opened to their utmost width, but there was nothing else to see; nothing except the printed paper with which the trunk was lined. "_Is_ she a fool, that Maria G.o.dolphin?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Charlotte.

Certainly that was not the cla.s.s of things Mrs. Pain would have saved from bankruptcy. And she solaced her feelings by reading Mr. George's love-letters.

No, Maria was not a fool. Better that she had come under that denomination just now, for she would have felt her position less keenly.

Charlotte perhaps might have found it difficult to believe that Maria G.o.dolphin was one of those who are sensitively intellectual, to a degree that Mistress Charlotte herself could form little notion of.

It is upon these highly-endowed natures that sorrow tells. And the sorrow must be borne in silence. In the midst of her great misery, so great as to be almost irrepressible, Maria contrived to maintain a calm exterior to the world, even to Charlotte and her outspoken sympathy. The first tears that had been wrung from her she shed that night over Meta.

When the child came to her for her good-night kiss, and to say her prayers, Maria was utterly unhinged. She clasped the little thing to her heart and burst into a storm of sobs.

Meta was frightened.

Mamma! mamma! What was the matter with mamma?

Maria was unable to answer. The sobs were choking her. Was the child's inheritance to be that of shame? Maria had grieved bitterly when her other children died: she was now feeling that it might have been a mercy had this dear one also been taken. She covered the little face with kisses as she held it against her beating heart. Presently she grew calm enough to speak.

"Mamma's not well this evening, darling."

Once more, as on the previous nights, Maria had to drag herself up to her weary bed. As she fell upon her knees by the bedside, she seemed to pray almost against faith and hope. "Father! all things are possible to Thee. Be with me in Thy mercy this night, and help me to pa.s.s through it!"

She saw not how she could pa.s.s through it. "Oh! when will the night be gone?" broke incessantly from her bruised heart. Bitterly cold, as before, was she; a chilly, trembling sensation was in every limb; but her head and brain seemed burning, her lips were dry, and that painful nervous affection, the result of excessive anguish, was attacking her throat. Maria had never yet experienced that, and thought she was about to be visited by some strange malady. It was a dreadful night of pain, of apprehension, of _cold_; inwardly and outwardly she trembled as she lay through it. One terrible word kept beating its sound on the room's stillness--_transportation_. Was her husband in danger of it? Just before daylight she dropped asleep, and for half an hour slept heavily; but with the full dawn of day she was awake again. Not for the first minute was she conscious of reality; but, the next, the full tide of recollection had burst upon her. With a low cry of despair, she leaped from her bed, and began pacing the carpet, all but unable to support the surging waves of mental anguish which rose up one by one and threatened to overmaster her reason. Insanity, had it come on, might have been then more of a relief than a calamity to Maria G.o.dolphin.

"How shall I live through the day? how shall I live through the day?"

were the words that broke from her lips. And she fell down by the bedside, and lifted her hands and her heart on high, and wailed out a cry to G.o.d to help her to get through it. Of her own strength, she truly believed that she could not.

She would certainly have need of some help, if she were to bear it patiently. At seven o'clock, a peal of m.u.f.fled bells burst over the town, deafening her ears. Some _mauvais sujets_, discontented sufferers, had gone to the belfry of St. Mark's Church, and set them ringing for the calamity which had overtaken Prior's Ash, in the stoppage of the House of G.o.dolphin.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"AS FINE AS A QUEEN!"