'Oh dear!' she said to her maid; 'look at those chimneys! My poor
sister Hale! I don't think I could have rested at Naples, if I
had known what it was! I must have come and fetched her and
Margaret away.' And to herself she acknowledged, that she had
always thought her brother-in-law rather a weak man, but never so
weak as now, when she saw for what a place he had exchanged the
lovely Helstone home.
Margaret had remained in the same state; white, motionless,
speechless, tearless. They had told her that her aunt Shaw was
coming; but she had not expressed either surprise or pleasure, or
dislike to the idea. Mr. Bell, whose appetite had returned, and
who appreciated Dixon's endeavours to gratify it, in vain urged
upon her to taste some sweetbreads stewed with oysters; she shook
her head with the same quiet obstinacy as on the previous day;
and he was obliged to console himself for her rejection, by
eating them all himself But Margaret was the first to hear the
stopping of the cab that brought her aunt from the railway
station. Her eyelids quivered, her lips coloured and trembled.
Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and when they came up,
Margaret was standing, trying to steady her dizzy self; and when
she saw her aunt, she went forward to the arms open to receive
her, and first found the passionate relief of tears on her aunt's
shoulder. All thoughts of quiet habitual love, of tenderness for
years, of relationship to the dead,--all that inexplicable
likeness in look, tone, and gesture, that seem to belong to one
family, and which reminded Margaret so forcibly at this moment of
her mother,--came in to melt and soften her numbed heart into the
overflow of warm tears.
Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went down into the study,
where he ordered a fire, and tried to divert his thoughts by
taking down and examining the different books. Each volume
brought a remembrance or a suggestion of his dead friend. It
might be a change of employment from his two days' work of
watching Margaret, but it was no change of thought. He was glad
to catch the sound of Mr. Thornton's voice, making enquiry at the
door. Dixon was rather cavalierly dismissing him; for with the
appearance of Mrs. Shaw's maid, came visions of former grandeur,
of the Beresford blood, of the 'station' (so she was pleased to
term it) from which her young lady had been ousted, and to which
she was now, please God, to be restored. These visions, which she
had been dwelling on with complacency in her conversation with
Mrs. Shaw's maid (skilfully eliciting meanwhile all the
circumstances of state and consequence connected with the Harley
Street establishment, for the edification of the listening
Martha), made Dixon rather inclined to be supercilious in her
treatment of any inhabitant of Milton; so, though she always
stood rather in awe of Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst
be in telling him that he could see none of the inmates of the
house that night. It was rather uncomfortable to be contradicted
in her statement by Mr. Bell's opening the study-door, and
calling out: 'Thornton! is that you? Come in for a minute or two; I want to
speak to you.' So Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon had
to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate herself in her own
esteem by a prodigious story of Sir John Beresford's coach and
six, when he was high sheriff.