There was injudicious partisanship as regarded their children: while Mrs. Cheyne idolized her boy, her husband lavished most of his attentions on the baby girl,--"papa's girl," as she always called herself in opposition to "mother's boy."
Mrs. Cheyne really believed she loved her boy best, but when diphtheria carried off her little Jane also, she was utterly inconsolable. Her husband was far away when it happened: he had been a great traveller before his marriage, and latterly his matrimonial relations with his wife had been so unsatisfactory that virtual separation had ensued. Two or three months before illness, and then death, had devastated the nursery at the White House, he had set out for a long exploring expedition in Central Africa.
"You make my life so unbearable that, but for the children, I would never care to set foot in my home again," he had said to her, in one of his violent moods; and, though he repented of this speech afterwards, she could not be brought to believe that he had not meant it, and her heart had been hard against him even in their parting.
But before many months were over she would have given all she possessed--to her very life--to have recalled him to her side. She was childless, and her health was broken; but no such recall was possible. Vague rumors reached her of some miserable disaster: people talked of a missing Englishman. One of the little party had already succumbed to fever and hardship; by and by another followed; and the last news that reached them was that Herbert Cheyne lay at the point of death in the kraal of a friendly tribe. Since then the silence had been of the grave: not one of the party had survived to bring the news of his last moments: there had been illness and disaster from the first.
When Mrs. Cheyne recovered from the nervous disorder that had attacked her on the receipt of this news, she put on widow's mourning, and wore it for two years; then she sent for Miss Mewlstone, and set herself to go through with the burden of her life. If she found it heavy, she never complained: she was silent on her own as on other people's troubles. Only at the sight of a child of two or three years of age she would turn pale, and draw down her veil, and if it ran up to her, as would sometimes happen, she would put it away from her angrily, pushing it away almost with violence, and no child was ever suffered to cross her threshold.