"Oh, no! no! but--" Miss Wellwood made a great confusion of noes, buts,
and my dears, and Mrs. Curtis came to the rescue. "After all, my love,
one can't so much wonder! You have always been very peculiar, you know,
and so clever, and you took up this so eagerly. And then the Greys saw
you so unwilling to prosecute. And--and I have always allowed you too
much liberty--ever since your poor dear papa was taken--and now it has
come upon you, my poor child! Oh, I hope dear Fanny will take warning by
me," and off went poor Mrs. Curtis into a fit of sobs.
"Mother--mother! this is worse than anything," exclaimed Rachel in an
agony, springing to her feet, and flying after sal volatile, but feeling
frightfully helpless without Grace, the manager of all Mrs. Curtis's
ailments and troubles. Grace would have let her quietly cry it out.
Rachel's remedies and incoherent protestations of all being her own
fault only made things worse, and perhaps those ten minutes were the
most overwhelming of all the griefs that Rachel had brought on herself.
However, what with Miss Wellwood's soothing, and her own sense of the
becoming, Mrs. Curtis struggled herself into composure again by the time
the maid came to dress them for dinner; Rachel all the while longing for
Grace's return, not so much for the sake of hearing the verdict, as of
knowing whether the mother ought to be allowed to go down to dinner, so
shaken did she look; for indeed, besides her distress for her daughter,
no small ingredient in her agitation was this recurrence to a stated
custom of her husband's magisterial days.
Persuasion was unavailing. At any cost the Curtis family must present
an unassailable front to the public eye, and if Mrs. Curtis had forced
forward her much tried and suffering daughter, far more would she
persist in devoting herself to gaiety and indifference, but her
nervousness was exceeding, and betrayed itself in a continual wearying
for Grace, without whom neither her own dress nor Rachel's could be
arranged to her satisfaction, and she was absolutely incapable of not
worrying Rachel about every fold, every plait, every bow, in a manner
that from any one else would have been unbearable; but those tears
had frightened Rachel into a penitent submission that endured with an
absolute semblance of cheerfulness each of these torments. The languor
and exhaustion had been driven away, and feverish excitement had set in,
not so much from the spirit of defiance that the two elder ladies had
expected to excite, as from the having been goaded into a reckless
determination to sustain her part. No matter for the rest.
It often happened in these parties that the ladies would come in from
the country in reasonable time, while their lords would be detained
much later in court, so when the cathedral clock had given notice of
the half-hour, Mrs. Curtis began to pick up fan and handkerchief, and
prepare to descend. Rachel suggested there would be no occasion so to
do till Grace's return, since it was plain that no one could yet be
released.