Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/541

Charles Dickens] is prejudiced to a certain extent, and I don't know—I'm not clever, you know, like she is—how far she's right. But I think plainly enough that Miss A.—I mean Mrs. Creswell—intends to have her own way in everything, and as she doesn't like us, and never did, she'll set much against us, and goodness knows the result!"

Mr. Benthall could not have been described as "goodness," nor was he a particularly far-seeing man, bat he thought he knew the result. As he cantered slowly home that afternoon he thought the matter out, and came to the conclusion that if Mrs. Creswell were the woman she was described, she would tolerate but for a very little time the presence of two persons so obnoxious in the same house with her, and that when that climax arrived, it was the time for the Rev. George Benthall to step in and do himself and everybody else concerned a good turn by taking Gertrude off her uncle's hands.

There was very little doubt that the shelter of the Woolgreaves roof and the luxuries of the Woolgreaves establishment would be required by one of its inmates for but a very short time. Mrs. Ashurst's strength, which had been gradually declining, began to fail her altogether, and it was evident to all that the end was at hand. Dr. Osborne, who was in constant attendance—and the little man never showed to such advantage as under the most trying professional circumstances—shook his head sadly, and confessed that it had now become a question of days. But the old lady was so tranquil, and apparently so happy, that he hesitated to summon her daughter, more especially as the newly-married couple were so soon expected home. The girl who attended on the old lady in the capacity of night-nurse had a different experience from Dr. Osborne so far as the tranquillity of the patient was concerned. She knew when she was awake—and considering that she was a full-blooded, heavy, bacon-fed lass, she really deserved much credit for the manner in which she propped her eyelids up with her forefingers, and resorted to sniffing instead of snoring—she knew that Mrs. Ashurst had very disturbed nights, when she lay moaning and groaning and plucking at the bed-clothes, and constantly murmuring one phrase: "For my sake! Lord help her! God grant it may turn out right! She did it, I know, for my sake!" Gradually she lost consciousness, and in her wandering state she repeated nothing but this one phrase, "For my sake!" Occasionally she would smile placidly and look round the room as though in admiration of its comfort and appointments, but then the sad look would come over her face, and she would repeat the melancholy sentence in the saddest of tones. Dr. Osborne, when he eventually came to hear of this, and to witness it, confessed he could not understand it. It was not a case for the College of Surgeons, nor get-at-able by the pharmacopœia; it was what Shakespeare said—he'd heard his girl read it—about not being able to minister to a mind diseased, or something of that sort; and yet, God bless him, Mrs. Ashurst was about the last woman to have anything of the kind. However, he should be deuced glad when little Marian—ah, mustn't call her little Marian now, beg pardon, Mrs. Creswell—funny, wasn't it? couldn't get that into his head! had known 'em all so long, and never thought—nor anybody else for the matter of that. However, that's neither here nor there. What's that? Proverb? Eh, "there's no fool like an" No, no, mustn't say that before him, please. What was he saying? Oh, he should be glad when Mrs. Creswell came home, and took her mother under her own charge.

Mr. and Mrs. Creswell came home two days before they were expected, or rather before they had originally intended. Marian had heard of her mother's illness, and expressed a wish to go to her at once—a wish which of course decided Mr. Creswell's course of action. The tenants and villagers, to whom the news of Mr. Creswell's intended political experiment had been imparted during his absence, had intended to give him a welcome in which they could express their sentiments on flags and mottoes and triumphal arches, and they had already arranged an alliterative sentence, in which "Creswell and Conservatism!" each picked out with gigantic capital letters, were to play conspicuous parts; but Dr. Osborne, who got wind of what was threatened, drove off to Brocksopp in his little pony chaise, and there took Mr. Teesdale, the agent, into confidence, and revealed to him the real state—hovering between life and death—in which Mrs. Ashurst then lay. On the reception of this information, Mr. Teesdale took upon himself to hint that the intended demonstration had better be postponed for a more convenient season; and accordingly Mr. and Mrs. Creswell, arriving by the train at Brocksopp, and having their carriage to meet them, drove through the streets when the working people were all