"Don't trouble myself to repeat it?" echoed Lady Lundie--with her dignity up in arms at the bare prospect of finding her remarks abridged. "Ah, Sir Patrick! that little constitutional impatience of yours!--Oh, dear me! how often you must have given way to it, and how often you must have regretted it, in your time!"
"My dear lady! if you wish to repeat the report, why not say so, in plain words? Don't let me hurry you. Let us have the prognosis, by all means."
Lady Lundie shook her head compassionately, and smiled with angelic sadness. "Our little besetting sins!" she said. "What slaves we are to our little besetting sins! Take a turn in the room--do!"
Any ordinary man would have lost his temper. But the law (as Sir Patrick had told his niece) has a special temper of its own.
Without exhibiting the smallest irritation, Sir Patrick dextrously applied his sister-in-law's blister to his sister-in-law herself.
"What an eye you have!" he said. "I was impatient. I _am_ impatient. I am dying to know what Blanche said to you when she got better?"
The British Matron froze up into a matron of stone on the spot.
"Nothing!" answered her ladyship, with a vicious snap of her teeth, as if she had tried to bite the word before it escaped her.
"Nothing!" exclaimed Sir Patrick.
"Nothing," repeated Lady Lundie, with her most formidable emphasis of look and tone. "I applied all the remedies with my own hands; I cut her laces with my own scissors, I completely wetted her head through with cold water; I remained with her until she was quite exhausted- I took her in my arms, and folded her to my bosom; I sent every body out of the room; I said, 'Dear child, confide in me.' And how were my advances--my motherly advances--met? I have already told you. By heartless secrecy. By undutiful silence."
Sir Patrick pressed the blister a little closer to the skin. "She was probably afraid to speak," he said.
"Afraid? Oh!" cried Lady Lundie, distrusting the evidence of her own senses. "You can't have said that? I have evidently misapprehended you. You didn't really say, afraid?"
"I said she was probably afraid--"
"Stop! I can't be told to my face that I have failed to do my duty by Blanche. No, Sir Patrick! I can bear a great deal; but I can't bear that. After having been more than a mother to your dear brother's child; after having been an elder sister to Blanche; after having toiled--I say _toiled,_ Sir Patrick!--to cultivate her intelligence (with the sweet lines of the poet ever present to my memory: 'Delightful task to rear the tender mind, and teach the young idea how to shoot!'); after having done all I have done--a place in the carriage only yesterday, and a visit to the most interesting relic of feudal times in Perthshire--after having sacrificed all I have sacrificed, to be told that I have behaved in such a manner to Blanche as to frighten her when I ask her to confide in me, is a little too cruel. I have a sensitive--an unduly sensitive nature, dear Sir Patrick. Forgive me for wincing when I am wounded. Forgive me for feeling it when the wound is dealt me by a person whom I revere."
Her ladyship put her handkerchief to her eyes. Any other man would have taken off the blister. Sir Patrick pressed it harder than ever.
"You quite mistake me," he replied. "I meant that Blanche was afraid to tell you the true cause of her illness. The true cause is anxiety about Miss Silvester."
Lady Lundie emitted another scream--a loud scream this time--and closed her eyes in horror.
"I can run out of the house," cried her ladyship, wildly. "I can fly to the uttermost corners of the earth; but I can _not_ hear that person's name mentioned! No, Sir Patrick! not in my pre sence! not in my room! not while I am mistress at Windygates House!"
"I am sorry to say any thing that is disagreeable to you, Lady Lundie. But the nature of my errand here obliges me to touch--as lightly as possible--on something which has happened in your house without your knowledge."
Lady Lundie suddenly opened her eyes, and became the picture of attention. A casual observer might have supposed her ladyship to be not wholly inaccessible to the vulgar emotion of curiosity.
"A visitor came to Windygates yesterday, while we were all at lunch," proceeded Sir Patrick. "She--"
Lady Lundie seized the scarlet memorandum-book, and stopped her brother-in-law, before he could get any further. Her ladyship's next words escaped her lips spasmodically, like words let at intervals out of a trap.
"I undertake--as a woman accustomed to self-restraint, Sir Patrick--I undertake to control myself, on one condition. I won't have the name mentioned. I won't have the *** mentioned. Say, 'The Person,' if you please. 'The Person,' " continued Lady Lundie, opening her memorandum-book and taking up her pen, "committed an audacious invasion of my premises yesterday?"
Sir Patrick bowed. Her ladyship made a note--a fiercely-penned note that scratched the paper viciously--and then proceeded to examine her brother-in-law, in the capacity of witness.
"What part of my house did 'The Person' invade? Be very careful, Sir Patrick! I propose to place myself under the protection of a justice of the peace; and this is a memorandum of my statement.
The library--did I understand you to say? Just so--the library."
"Add," said Sir Patrick, with another pressure on the blister, "that The Person had an interview with Blanche in the library."
Lady Lundie's pen suddenly stuck in the paper, and scattered a little shower of ink-drops all round it. "The library," repeated her ladyship, in a voice suggestive of approaching suffocation.
"I undertake to control myself, Sir Patrick! Any thing missing from the library?"
"Nothing missing, Lady Lundie, but The Person herself. She--"
"No, Sir Patrick! I won't have it! In the name of my own ***, I won't have it!"