Laura knew the nurse by sight, had occasionally spoken to her, and she seized hold of her arm.
“Tell me what the matter is!” she panted. "You know!”
Mrs. Pepperfly’s first movement was to go as quickly as she could inside the house and pull Lady Laura with her. The old woman shut the dining-room door upon them, leaving poor Jonathan alone in the hall.
“If you don’t tell me at once, I shall die,” came the passionate appeal. “What is it?”
“It’s one of them there ways of Providence we hears on when we has time to go to church,” was Mrs. Pepperfly’s lucid answer. “To think that we should have lived all these years and never suspected Mr. Carlton!—and him attending of the child every day at Tupper’s cottage! But murder will out. Yours is hard lines, my poor lady!”
Lady Laura, in her dreadful suspense, her vehement impatience, nearly shook her. Thought is very quick—and it was only that morning she had heard of the child’s death.
“Has he been murdered?—That child at Tupper’s cottage?”
“He!” responded Mrs. Pepperfly. “Bless your ladyship’s dear heart, he went off natural, like a lamb, with his bad knee. It’s his unfortunate mother.”
“Is she dead?” gasped Lady Laura, still more apprehensive ideas arising to her. “She, the woman?”
“Not her,” cried Mrs. Pepperfly, jerking her thumb over her shoulder to indicate the locality of Tupper’s cottage. “She warn’t his mother at all, as it turns out. It were that———"
“Not his mother!” interrupted Lady Laura; and all the absurdity of her past jealousy seemed to rise up before her in a moment, as it had done just before.
“No more nor me,” said Mrs. Pepperfly. “It were that other unfortunate, what I nursed my own self, my lady; she as was cut off by the prussic acid in Palace Street, and they do say it were Mr. Carlton that dropped it in. And her name was—oh dear, but it’s hard lines for all your ladyships!”
“Her name was what?” asked Laura, with blanched lips.
“Not Mrs. Crane at all, my lady, but Clarice Chesney. That is, Mrs. Carlton; for they say she was his wife.”
Lady Laura sank into a chair, terror-stricken, powerless. Mrs. Pepperfly, who was troubled with no superfluous sensitiveness on her own score and did not suspect that other people were, and who could talk enough for ten if once set going, continued:
“Folks tells of the finger of Fate, and such like incomprehension, but if Fate’s finger haven’t been in this here pie, it never were in one yet. It have all come to light through a letter, my lady; a letter of Mr. Carlton’s, which they say your ladyship found and got out of a place where it had laid for years, and gave it to my Lady Jane Chesney. And that letter have brought it home to him, and the justices had got it right afore their noses when they give the warrant to take him up.”
She sat back in her chair, her eyes dilating, her countenance one living horror. She! That letter! Had her underhand work, her dishonourable treachery against her husband, brought this to pass? Oh, miserable Laura Carlton! Surely the reminiscence would henceforth haunt her for ever!
“Now, poor dear lady, don’t take on so! We all have to bear, some in our minds, and some in our bodies; and some in our husbands, and some in having none. There ain’t nothing more soothing than a glass of gin-and-water hot,” added the sympathising Mrs. Pepperfly, “which can be had in a moment, where the kitchen’s got a biler in it, always on the bile.”
She turned about her rotund person to see if she could discover any signs of the chief ingredient for compounding that restoring cordial. The interrupted luncheon on the table, cold though it was now, looked tempting, as did the long green bottle, which Mrs. Pepperfly supposed contained some foreign sort of wine, and there was a sideboard with suggestive-looking cupboards in it. The old woman talked on, but Laura seemed dead to hearing, lying back with the same glassy stare, and the look of horror on her white face.
“If your ladyship wouldn’t object to my ringing of the bell, and asking for a spoonful of biling water from the servants, I’d soon bring the colour back into your cheeks. What a world this might be, my dear lady, if our minds never met with no upsets! I have been upset too with the news, I have, this morning, and ain’t recovered yet. And there was that pest of a crowd I got into outside, a poking in of my ribs and a treading of my shins! A quarter of a tumbler of gin-and-water hot———"
“Come home with me, Laura,” interrupted a soft voice, subdued in its grief, “come home with me. Oh, child, this is hard for us all; cruelly hard for you. Let me take you, Laura; my home shall henceforth be yours. Our father seemed to foresee storms for you when he was dying, and left you to me, he said, should they ever come.”
Laura rose up, her eye flashing, her face hot with passion, and stood defiantly before Lady Jane.
