‘But, godmamma, you are making a mistake,’ said Mary. ‘It is not Miss Rich Frank is going to marry. It is a young lady,--whom he met at Richmont.’
‘Not Miss Rich!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Another girl! The boy must be mad to go on making acquaintance with such people. And how much has she?’ the mother added, with plaintive submission to a hard fate, folding her patient hands.
Mary, thus driven to the last admission of all, grew quite pale, but made a brave stand for her client. ‘Oh, godmamma,’ she cried, ‘you must not be hard upon him. He is so young; and isn’t it better he should marry her because he loves her than because she is rich? She has not a penny, he says.’
When this awful revelation was made, Mrs. Renton was excited to the length of positive passion. Words failed her at first. Her eyes, though they were worn-out eyes, retaining little lustre, flashed fire. Her faded cheeks grew red. She was inarticulate in her rage and indignation. It was Mary who received the first brunt of the onslaught, for encouraging a foolish boy in such nonsense, and for taking it upon her to defend him against all who wished him well. You would have thought it was Mary who had inspired him with this mad fancy, put it in his head, encouraged him in it, urged him to commit it, and compromise himself in the face of the strenuous, steady, invariable opposition of ‘all who wished him well.’ The poor lady made herself quite ill with indignation, and had to be taken to bed, and comforted with more tonics and arrowroot than ever. She lay there moaning all the evening, refusing to allow poor Mary to read to her, or to perform any of her usual ministrations. If it had not been that Frank had left his boat, having himself returned to Royalborough by the railroad, and thus afforded Mary the opportunity of getting easily across the river, and running all the way to the Cottage to be comforted by her mother for half-an-hour before returning to her charge, I don’t know what would have become of her. Mrs. Westbury did not look the sort of woman to seek comfort from, but she was Mary’s mother, which makes all the difference, and she had never got over her compunction about her nephews. This trial they were all going through was her doing, and though she sympathised much more with her sister-in-law than with Frank in the present case, she was not without a certain pity for the boy. ‘He must be mad,’ she said; ‘but if it can’t be put a stop to, it must be put up with; and your aunt will have got a little used to it by to-morrow.’ Thus comforted Mary went back, not without a little wondering comparison in her own mind between the people who could do rash things and have their will, and those who had ‘to put up with’ everything that might chance to come in their way, and never had it in their power to please themselves. She was a very good girl, full of womanly kindness and charity; but it is not to be supposed that close attendance upon a weariful invalid like her aunt, not ill enough to move any depth of sympathy, but requiring perpetual _pettis soins_, and endless consideration in every detail of life, was a kind of existence to be chosen by a lively girl of twenty. Poor Mary was the scapegoat and ransom for the sins of her family. The three ‘Renton boys’ were all going away on their own courses, comforting themselves about their mother,--when they thought of her at all,--by the reflection that Mary was with her. They could go away, but Mary could not budge. It was rather hard, when you came to think of it. And that Frank, not three months older than herself, should marry and set out in life, and go blithely off to all the novelty and all the brightness, and no one have any power to stop him; while she stayed at home, making excuses for him, and doing duty for all three! Mary was a comfortable kind of young woman, and went into no hysterics over her fate; neither did she rave to herself about the awful blank of routine and the want of excitement in her life. But she did feel a little envy of Frank, and pity for herself, as she glided across the silvery river in the summer twilight. Doing must be a pleasanter thing than ‘putting up with,’ even to a philosophical mind.