Part 103

Lady Lundie put her hand to her head, and smiled faintly.

“A little pressure here, Sir Patrick. Pray sit down. Duty finds me earnest; Duty finds me cheerful; Duty finds me accessible. From a poor, weak woman, Duty must expect no more. Now what is it?” (Her ladyship consulted her scarlet memorandum-book.) “I have got it here, under its proper head, distinguished by initial letters. P.--the poor. No. H.M.--heathen missions. No. V.T.A.--Visitors to arrive. No. P. I. P.--Here it is: private interview with Patrick. Will you forgive me the little harmless familiarity of omitting your title? Thank you! You are always so good. I am quite at your service when you like to begin. If it’s any thing painful, pray don’t hesitate. I am quite prepared.”

With that intimation her ladyship threw herself back in her chair, with her elbows on the arms, and her fingers joined at the tips, as if she was receiving a deputation. “Yes?” she said, interrogatively. Sir Patrick paid a private tribute of pity to his late brother’s memory, and entered on his business.

“We won’t call it a painful matter,” he began. “Let us say it’s a matter of domestic anxiety. Blanche--”

Lady Lundie emitted a faint scream, and put her hand over her eyes.

“Must you?” cried her ladyship, in a tone of touching remonstrance. “Oh, Sir Patrick, must you?”

“Yes. I must.”

Lady Lundie’s magnificent eyes looked up at that hidden court of human appeal which is lodged in the ceiling. The hidden court looked down at Lady Lundie, and saw--Duty advertising itself in the largest capital letters.

“Go on, Sir Patrick. The motto of woman is Self-sacrifice. You sha’n’t see how you distress me. Go on.”

Sir Patrick went on impenetrably--without betraying the slightest expression of sympathy or surprise.

“I was about to refer to the nervous attack from which Blanche has suffered this morning,” he said. “May I ask whether you have been informed of the cause to which the attack is attributable?”

“There!” exclaimed Lady Lundie with a sudden bound in her chair, and a sudden development of vocal power to correspond. “The one thing I shrank from speaking of! the cruel, cruel, cruel behavior I was prepared to pass over! And Sir Patrick hints on it! Innocently--don’t let me do an injustice--innocently hints on it!”

“Hints on what, my dear Madam?”

“Blanche’s conduct to me this morning. Blanche’s heartless secrecy. Blanche’s undutiful silence. I repeat the words: Heartless secrecy. Undutiful silence.”

“Allow me for one moment, Lady Lundie--”

“Allow me, Sir Patrick! Heaven knows how unwilling I am to speak of it. Heaven knows that not a word of reference to it escaped my lips. But you leave me no choice now. As mistress of the household, as a Christian woman, as the widow of your dear brother, as a mother to this misguided girl, I must state the facts. I know you mean well; I know you wish to spare me. Quite useless! I must state the facts.”

Sir Patrick bowed, and submitted. (If he had only been a bricklayer! and if Lady Lundie had not been, what her ladyship unquestionably was, the strongest person of the two!)

“Permit me to draw a veil, for your sake,” said Lady Lundie, “over the horrors--I can not, with the best wish to spare you, conscientiously call them by any other name--the horrors that took place up stairs. The moment I heard that Blanche was ill I was at my post. Duty will always find me ready, Sir Patrick, to my dying day. Shocking as the whole thing was, I presided calmly over the screams and sobs of my step-daughter. I closed my ears to the profane violence of her language. I set the necessary example, as an English gentlewoman at the head of her household. It was only when I distinctly heard the name of a person, never to be mentioned again in my family circle, issue (if I may use the expression) from Blanche’s lips that I began to be really alarmed. I said to my maid: ‘Hopkins, this is not Hysteria. This is a possession of the devil. Fetch the chloroform.’”

Chloroform, applied in the capacity of an exorcism, was entirely new to Sir Patrick. He preserved his gravity with considerable difficulty. Lady Lundie went on:

“Hopkins is an excellent person--but Hopkins has a tongue. She met our distinguished medical guest in the corridor, and told him. He was so good as to come to the door. I was shocked to trouble him to act in his professional capacity while he was a visitor, an honored visitor, in my house. Besides, I considered it more a case for a clergyman than for a medical man. However, there was no help for it after Hopkins’s tongue. I requested our eminent friend to favor us with--I think the exact scientific term is--a Prognosis. He took the purely material view which was only to be expected from a person in his profession. He prognosed--am I right? Did he prognose? or did he diagnose? A habit of speaking correctly is so important, Sir Patrick! and I should be so grieved to mislead you!”

“Never mind, Lady Lundie! I have heard the medical report. Don’t trouble yourself to repeat it.”

“Don’t trouble myself to repeat it?” echoed Lady Lundie--with her dignity up in arms at the bare prospect of finding her remarks abridged. “Ah, Sir Patrick! that little constitutional impatience of yours!--Oh, dear me! how often you must have given way to it, and how often you must have regretted it, in your time!”

“My dear lady! if you wish to repeat the report, why not say so, in plain words? Don’t let me hurry you. Let us have the prognosis, by all means.”

Lady Lundie shook her head compassionately, and smiled with angelic sadness. “Our little besetting sins!” she said. “What slaves we are to our little besetting sins! Take a turn in the room--do!”

Any ordinary man would have lost his temper. But the law (as Sir Patrick had told his niece) has a special temper of its own. Without exhibiting the smallest irritation, Sir Patrick dextrously applied his sister-in-law’s blister to his sister-in-law herself.

“What an eye you have!” he said. “I was impatient. I am impatient. I am dying to know what Blanche said to you when she got better?”

The British Matron froze up into a matron of stone on the spot.

“Nothing!” answered her ladyship, with a vicious snap of her teeth, as if she had tried to bite the word before it escaped her.