What a curious office to be thus imposed upon her! To give countenance and support, or to take care of, as little Geoff said, this young woman whom she scarcely knew, who had not in the depth of trouble made any claim upon her sympathy. Mrs. Warrender looked forward with anything but satisfaction to the task. But when she told her tale it was received with a sort of enthusiasm. “Oh, how nice of her!” cried Minnie and Chatty; and their mother saw, with half amusement, that they thought all the more of her because her companionship had been sought for by Lady Markland. And in Warrender’s eyes a fire lighted up. He turned away his head, and after a moment said, “You will be very tender to her, mother.” Mrs. Warrender was too much confused and bewildered to make any reply.
When the next day came she went, with reluctance and a sense of self-abnegation, which was not gratifying, but painful, to fulfil this office. “She does not want me, I know,” Mrs. Warrender said to her son, who accompanied her, to form part of the cortège, in the little brougham which had been to Markland but once or twice in so many years, and this last week had traversed the road from one house to another almost every day. “I think you are mistaken, mother; but even so, if you can do her any good,” said Theo, with unusual enthusiasm. His mother thought it strange that he should show so much feeling on the subject; and she went through the great hall and up the stairs, through the depths of the vast silent house, to Lady Markland’s room, with anticipations as little agreeable as any with which woman ever went to an office of kindness. Lady Markland’s room was on the other side of the house, looking upon a landscape totally different from that through which her visitor had come. The window was open, the light unshaded, and Lady Markland sat at a writing-table covered with papers, as little like a brokenhearted widow as could be supposed. She was dressed, indeed, in the official dress of heavy crape, and wore (for once) the cap which to Geoff had been so overpowering a symbol of sorrow; but, save for these signs, and perhaps a little additional paleness in her never high complexion, was precisely as Mrs. Warrender had seen her since she had risen from her girlish bloom into the self-possession of a wife, matured and stilled by premature experience. She came forward, holding out her hand, when her visitor, with a reluctance and diffidence quite unsuitable to her superior age, slowly advanced.
“Thank you,” she said at once, “for coming. I know without a word how disagreeable it is to you, how little you wished it. You have come against your will, and you think against my will, Mrs. Warrender; but indeed it is not so. It is a comfort and help to me to have you.”
“If that is so, Lady Markland—”
“That is why you have come,” she said. “It is so. I know you have come unwillingly. You heard—they have taken the boy from me.”
“But only for this day.”
“Only for the hour, I hope. It is supposed to be too much for me to go.” Here she smiled, with a nervous movement of her face. “Nothing is too much for me. You know a little about it, but not all. Do you remember him when we were married, Mrs. Warrender? I recollect you were one of the first people I saw.”
This sudden plunge into the subject for which she was least prepared—for all her ideas of condolence had been driven out of her mind by the young woman’s demeanour, the open window, the cheerful and commonplace air of the room—confused Mrs. Warrender greatly. “I remember Lord Markland almost all his life,” she said.
“Here is the miniature of him that was done for me before we were married,” said Lady Markland, rising hurriedly, and bringing it from the table. “Look at it; did you ever see a more hopeful face? He was so fresh; he was so full of spirits. Who could have thought there was any canker in that face?”
“There was not then,” said the elder woman, looking through a mist of natural tears—the tears of that profound regret for a life lost which are more bitter, almost, than personal sorrow—at the miniature. She remembered him so well, and how everybody thought all would come right with the poor young fellow when he was so happily married and had a home.
“Ah, but there was!—nobody told me; though if all the world had told me it would not have made any difference. Mrs. Warrender, he is like that now. Everything else is gone. He looks as he did at twenty, as good and as pure. What do you think it means? Does it mean anything? Or is there only some physical interpretation of it, as these horrible men say?”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Warrender, quite subdued, “they say it means that all is pardoned, and that they have entered into peace.”
“Peace,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to say rest; and he who had never laboured wanted no rest. Peace—where the wicked cease from troubling, is that what you mean? He had no time to repent.”
“My dear—oh, I am not clear, I can’t tell you; but who can tell what was in his mind between the time he saw his danger and the blow that stunned him?
