Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/543

 is the matter, Marian? what is it, my love?"

"Simply that I arrive here to find my mother wandering and imbecile—she whom I left comparatively cheerful, and certainly in the possession of all her senses—that is all, nothing more," said Marian, in a hard low voice, and with a dead-white face and dried bloodless lips. "I thought," she continued, turning to the girls, "that I might have left her safely in your charge. I never asked for your sympathy, God knows; I would not have had it if you had offered it to me; but I thought you seemed to be disposed kindly and affectionately towards her. There was so much gush and display in your attachment, I might have known it had no real foundation."

"You have no right to speak to us in this way, Mrs. Creswell!" cried Maud, making a step in advance and standing very stiff and erect; "you have no right to"

"Maud," broke in Mr. Creswell, in his coldest tone, "recollect to whom you are speaking, if you please."

"I do recollect, uncle; I am speaking to Mrs. Ashurst's daughter—dear Mrs. Ashurst, whom both Gertrude and I love, and have tried to show we love her, as she would tell you, if she could, poor darling! And it is only because Mrs. Creswell is her daughter that I answer her at all, after her speaking to me in that way. I will tell you now, Mrs. Creswell, what I should not otherwise have mentioned, that Gerty and I have been constant in our attendance on Mrs. Ashurst, and that one or other of us has always slept in the next room, to be within call if we were wanted, and"

"Why did you take upon yourselves to keep me in ignorance of the change in my mother's mental state, of this fearful wandering and unconsciousness?—that is what I complain of."

"Oh, I must not let them say they took it upon themselves at all," said Dr. Osborne, who had been looking on uncomfortably during this dialogue; "that was my fault entirely; the girls wanted to send for you, but I said no, much better not. I knew you were due home in a few days, and your earlier arrival could not have done the least good to my poor old friend upstairs, and would only have been distressing to you."

"Oh, you accept the responsibility, Dr. Osborne?" said Marian, still in the same hard voice. "Would you have acted in the same way with any ordinary patient, any stranger?"

"Eh?" exclaimed the little doctor, in a very loud key, rubbing his face hard with his pocket-handkerchief. "What do you ask, Marian?—any stranger?"

"Would you have taken upon yourself to keep a daughter from her mother under similar circumstances, supposing they had been strangers to you?"

"No—no, perhaps not," said the little doctor, still wildly astonished.

"It will be perhaps better, then, if henceforth you put us on the footing of strangers!" said Marian.

"Marian!" exclaimed Mr. Creswell.

"I mean what I said," she replied. "Had we been on that footing now, I should have been at my mother's bedside some days since!" And she walked quickly from the room.

Dr. Osborne made two steps towards his hat, seized it, clapped it on his head, and with remarkably unsteady legs was making his way to the door when Mr. Creswell took him by the arm, begged him not to think of what had just passed, but to remember the shock which Marian had received, the suddenness with which this new phase of her mother's illness had come upon her, &c. The little doctor did not leave the room, as apparently he had intended at first; he sat down on a chair close by, muttering, "Treat her as a stranger! rocked her on my knee! brought her through measles! father died in my arms! treat her as a stranger!"

Two days afterwards Marian stood by the bed on which lay Mrs. Ashurst, dead. As she reverently arranged the grey hair under the close cap, and kissed the cold lips, she said, "You did not enjoy the money very long, darling mother! But you died in comfort at any rate! and that was worth the sacrifice—if sacrifice it were! "

last, as the war grew hotter, Mrs. Coclough carried her husband away out of the country to Cheltenham. Boteler House, where they now lived, became a sort of genteel prison—no one was admitted without giving the countersign, as it were. "She directed the avenue gates to be locked," said the relations—a custom they might be reminded that obtains a good deal. Servants were directed not to admit any one to see him without summoning her. Sometimes she made him do the housemaid's