This consolatory farewell, Mrs. Wickam accompanied with a look of heartfelt anguish; and being left alone with the two children again, and becoming conscious that the wind was blowing mournfully, she indulged in melancholy—that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries—until she was overpowered by slumber.
Although the niece of Mrs. Pipchin did not expect to find that exemplary dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs, she was relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with every present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a comfort to all who knew her. Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in the course of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands still continued to disappear in regular succession, notwithstanding that Paul studied her as attentively as ever, and occupied his usual seat between the black skirts and the fender, with unwavering constancy.
But as Paul himself was no stronger at the expiration of that time than he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier in the face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and be wheeled down to the sea-side. Consistent in his odd tastes, the child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of this carriage, and selected, instead, his grandfather—a weazen, old, crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelt like a weedy sea-beach when the tide is out.
With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always walking by his side, and the despondent Wickam bringing up the rear, he went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would sit or lie in his carriage for hours together: never so distressed as by the company of children—Florence alone excepted, always.
"Go away, if you please," he would say to any child who came to bear him company. "Thank you, but I don’t want you."
Some small voice, near his ear, would ask him how he was, perhaps.
"I am very well, I thank you," he would answer. "But you had better go and play, if you please."
Then he would turn his head, and watch the child away, and say to Florence, "We don’t want any others, do we? Kiss me, Floy."
He had even a dislike, at such times, to the company of Wickam, and was well pleased when she strolled away, as she generally did, to pick up shells and acquaintances. His favourite spot was quite a lonely one, far away from most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his side at work, or reading to him, or talking to him, and the wind blowing on his face, and the water coming up among the wheels of his bed, he wanted nothing more.
"Floy," he said one day, "where’s India, where that boy’s friends live?"
"Oh, it’s a long, long distance off," said Florence, raising her eyes from her work.
"Weeks off?" asked Paul.
"Yes dear. Many weeks’ journey, night and day."
"If you were in India, Floy," said Paul, after being silent for a minute, "I should—what is it that Mama did? I forget."
"Loved me!" answered Florence.
"No, no. Don’t I love you now, Floy? What is it?—Died. If you were in India, I should die, Floy."
