At this point a flood of tears happily relieved poor Georgy"s excited feelings, and then common sense and Diana Paget came to the rescue.
"My dear Mrs. Sheldon," she said, with a quiet cheerful tone that went far to rea.s.sure the excited lady, "in the first place we must, above all things, refrain from any appearance of alarm. Her illness may, after all, be only an affair of the nerves; and there is certainly no cause for immediate fear."
Georgy was tranquillised, and agreed to take matters quietly. She promised to arrange Charlotte"s departure for Newhall, with Mr. Sheldon, that evening.
"Of course, you know, my dear, I like to consult him about everything,"
she said, apologetically. "It is a duty which one owes one"s husband, you know, and a duty which, as a young woman about to marry, I cannot too much impress upon you; but in this case it is quite a matter of form: Mr.
Sheldon never has objected to Charlotte"s going to Newhall, and he is not likely to object now."
The event proved Mrs. Sheldon mistaken as to this matter. Georgy proposed the visit to Newhall that evening, while the two girls were strolling listlessly in the dusky garden, and Mr. Sheldon most decidedly rejected the proposition.
"If she wants change of air--and Dr. Doddleson recommended nothing of the kind--Newhall is not the place for her."
"Why not, dear?"
"It is too cold. Northerly aspect--no shelter--three hundred feet above York minster."
"But Dorothy Mercer is such a kind motherly creature; she"d delight in nursing Lotta."
"Yes," answered Mr. Sheldon, with a laugh, "and in quacking her. I know what those good motherly creatures are when they get an excuse for dosing some unhappy victim with their quack nostrums. If Charlotte went to Newhall, Mrs. Mercer would poi--would make her ten times worse than she is with old woman"s remedies. Besides, as I said before, the place is too cold. That is a conclusive argument, I suppose?"
He said this with some impatience of tone and manner. There was a haggard look in his face, a hurried hara.s.sed manner pervading him this evening, which had been growing upon him of late. Georgy was too slow of perception to remark this; but Diana Paget had remarked it, and had attributed the change in the stockbroker"s manner to a blending of two anxieties.
"He is anxious about money matters," she had said to herself, "and he is anxious about Charlotte"s health. His lips, moving in whispered calculations, as he sits brooding by the fire, tell me of the first anxiety; his eyes, wandering furtively to his step-daughter"s face every now and then, tell me of the second."
This furtive anxiety of Mr. Sheldon"s increased Diana Paget"s anxiety.
This man, who had a certain amount of medical knowledge, could no doubt read the diagnostics of that strange insidious illness, which had, as yet, no name, Diana, furtively watching his furtive looks, told herself that he read of danger.
"If Charlotte wants change of air, let her go to Hastings," he said; "that is the kind of place for an invalid. I want rest myself; and there"s such utter stagnation in the City nowadays that I can very well afford to give myself a holiday. We"ll run down to Hastings, or the immediate neighbourhood of Hastings, for a week or two."
"O Philip, how kind and considerate you are! I am sure, as I was observing to Miss Paget only today, you--"
"Ah, by the bye, there"s Miss Paget. Is it absolutely necessary that Miss Paget should go to Hastings with us?"
"Well, dear, you see she has so kindly desired to remain with me for the quarter, so as to give me time to turn round, you know, with regard to caps and summer things, and so on--for, really, she has such taste, and does strike out such excellent ideas about turning, and dipping, and dyeing, that I don"t know what will become of me when she leaves us; and it would look so pointed to--"
"Yes; she had better go with us. But why all this fuss about Charlotte?
Who put it into your head that she wants change of air?"
Mr. Sheldon evidently considered it an established fact that any idea in his wife"s head must needs have been put there by someone or other.
"Well, you see, Diana and I were talking of Lotta this afternoon, and Diana quite alarmed me."
"How so?" asked Mr. Sheldon, with a quick frown.
"Why, she said it was evident, by the fact of poor dear Tom"s dying of a fever, that his const.i.tution must have been originally weak. And she said that perhaps Charlotte had inherited Tom"s weak const.i.tution--and frightened me dreadfully."
"There is no occasion for you to be frightened; Charlotte will get on very well, I dare say, with care. But Miss Paget is a very sensible young woman, and is right in what she says. Charlotte"s const.i.tution is not strong."
"O Philip!" said Georgy, in a faint wailing voice.
"I dare say she will live to follow you and me to our graves," said Mr.
Sheldon, with a hard laugh. "Ah, here she is!"
Here she was, coming towards the open window near which her stepfather sat. Here she was, pale and tired, with her sauntering walk, dressed in white, and spectral in the gloaming. To the sad eyes of her mother she looked like a ghost. To the eyes of Philip Sheldon, a man not p.r.o.ne to poetic fancies, she looked even more ghostlike.
CHAPTER III.
MRS. WOOLPER IS ANXIOUS.
Since the beginning of her illness, Charlotte Halliday had been the object and subject of many anxious thoughts in the minds of several people. That her stepfather had his anxieties about her--anxieties which he tried to hide--was obvious to the one person in the Bayswater villa who noted his looks, and tried to read the thoughts they indicated.
Mrs. Sheldon"s alarm, once fairly awakened, was not to be lulled to rest.
And in Valentine Hawkehurst"s heart there was an aching pain--a dull dead load of care, which had never been lightened from the hour when he first perceived the change in his dear one"s face.
There was one other person, an inhabitant of the Bayswater villa, who watched Charlotte Halliday at this time with a care as unresting as the care of mother or stepfather, bosom friend or plighted lover. This person was Ann Woolper. Mrs. Woolper had come to the villa prepared to find in Miss Halliday a frivolous self-satisfied young person, between whom and an old broken-down woman like herself there could be no sympathy. She had expected to be contemptuously--or, at the best, indifferently--entreated by the prosperous well-placed young lady, whom Mr. Sheldon had spoken of as a good girl, as girls go; a vague species of commendation, which, to the mind of Mrs. Woolper, promised very little.
As clearly as Philip Sheldon dared express his wishes with regard to Charlotte Halliday, he had expressed them to Ann Woolper. What he would fain have said, was, "Watch my stepdaughter, and keep me well acquainted with every step she takes." Thus much he dared not say; but by insinuating that Tom Halliday"s daughter was frivolous and reckless, and that her lover was not to be trusted, he had contrived to put Mrs.
Woolper on the _qui vive_.
"Mr. Philip"s afraid she may go and marry this young man on the sly, before he"s got the means to support a wife," she said to herself, as she meditated upon the meaning of her master"s injunctions; "and well he may be. There"s no knowing what young women are up to nowadays; and the more innocent and inexperienced a young woman is, the more she wants looking after. And Miss Georgy Craddock always was a poor fondy, up to naught but dressing herself fine, and streaming up and down Barlingford High Street with her old schoolfellows. Such as she ain"t fit to be trusted with a daughter; and Mr. Philip knows that. He always was a deep one. But I"m glad he looks after Missy: there"s many men, having got fast hold of th"
father"s bra.s.s, would let th" daughter marry Old Scratch, for the sake of gettin" rid of her."
This is how Mrs. Woolper argued the matter. She came of a prudent race; and anything like prudence seemed to her a commendable virtue. She wished to think well of her master; for her he had been a Providence in the hour of calamity and old age. Where else could she look, if not to him? And to suspect him, or think ill of him, was to reject the one refuge offered to her distress. A magnanimous independence of spirit is not an easy virtue for the old and friendless and poor. The drowning wretch will scarcely question the soundness of the plank that sustains him upon the storm-tossed billows; nor was Mrs. Woolper inclined to question the motives of the man to whom she now owed her daily bread.
It is possible that before invoking Mrs. Woolper from the ashes of the past to take her seat by the hearthstone of the present, Mr. Sheldon may have contemplated the question of her return in all its bearings, and may have a.s.sured himself that she was his own, by a tie not easily broken--his bond-slave, fettered hand and foot by the bondage of necessity.
"What choice can she have, except the choice between my house and the workhouse?" he may naturally have asked himself; "and is it likely she will quarrel with her bread-and-b.u.t.ter in order to fall back upon dry bread?" Mr. Sheldon, contemplating this and all other questions from his one unchanging standpoint, may reasonably have concluded that Mrs.
Woolper would do nothing opposed to her own interests; and that so long as it suited her interest to remain at the Lawn, and to serve him, she would there remain, his docile and unquestioning slave.
The influence of affection, the force of generous impulse, were qualities that did not come into Mr. Sheldon"s calculations upon this subject. His addition and subtraction, division and multiplication, were all based on one system.
That happy and unconscious art by which Charlotte Halliday made herself dear to all who knew her had a speedy effect upon the old housekeeper.
The girl"s amiable consideration for her age and infirmities; the pretty affectionate familiarity with which she treated this countrywoman, who had known her father, and who could talk to her of Yorkshire and Yorkshire people, soon made their way to Nancy Woolper"s heart of hearts.
For Miss Halliday to come to the housekeeper"s room with some message from her mother, and to linger for a few minutes" chat, was a delight to Mrs. Woolper. She would have detained the bright young visitant for hours instead of minutes, if she could have found any excuse for so doing. Nor was there any treason against Mr. Sheldon in her growing attachment to his stepdaughter. Whenever Nancy spoke of that master and benefactor, she spoke with unfeigned grat.i.tude and affection.
"I nursed your step-papa as a baby, Miss Halliday," she said very often on these occasions. "You wouldn"t think, to look at him now, that he ever was _that_, would you? But he was one of the finest babies you could wish to see--tall, and strong, and with eyes that pierced one through, they were so bright and big and black. He was rather stubborn-spirited with his teething; but what baby isn"t trying at such times? I had rare work with him, I can tell you, Miss, walking him about of nights, and jogging him till there wasn"t a jog left in me, as you may say, from sleepiness.
I often wonder if he thinks of this now, when I see him looking so grave and stern. But, you see, being jogged doesn"t impress the mind like having to jog; and though I can bring that time back as plain as if it was yesterday, with the very nursery I slept in at Barlingford, and the rushlight in a tall iron cage on the floor, and the shadow of the cage on the bare whitewashed walls--it"s clean gone out of his mind, I dare say."
"I"m afraid it has, Nancy."
"But, O, I was fond of him, Miss Halliday; and what I went through with him about his teeth made me only the fonder of him. He was the first baby I ever nursed, you see, and the last; for before Master George came to town I"d taken to the cooking, and Mrs. Sheldon hired another girl as nurse; a regular softy _she_ was, and it isn"t her fault that Master George has got anything christian-like in the way of a back, for the way she carried that blessed child used to make my blood run cold."
Thus would Mrs. Woolper discourse whenever she had a fair excuse for detaining Miss Halliday in her comfortable apartment. Charlotte did not perceive much interest in these reminiscences of Mr. Sheldon"s infancy, but she was much too kind to bring them abruptly to a close by any show of impatience. When she could get Nancy to talk of Barlingford and Hyley, and the people whom Charlotte herself had known as a child, the conversation was really interesting; and these recollections formed a link between the old woman and the fair young damsel.
When the change arose in Charlotte"s health and spirits, Mrs. Woolper was one of the first to perceive it. She was skilled in those old woman"s remedies which Mr. Sheldon held in such supreme contempt, and she would fain have dosed the invalid with nauseous decoctions of hops, or home-brewed quinine. Charlotte appreciated the kindness of the intent, but she rebelled against the home-brewed medicines, and pinned her faith to the more scientific and less obnoxious preparations procured from the chemist"s.