All this was changed by Mrs Marden’s strange and sudden illness. It began with a fainting fit. She fell downstairs and struck her head on a small protruding feature of the carved newel-post and was carried unconscious to her bedroom by the Dewdneys, mother and son. Mr Marden, arriving three days later in response to a hasty summons, snarled profusely at his domestics and studiously avoided meeting the desolate gaze of his son. Jacky, denied access to his mother, wandered like a pale wraith of himself about house and garden. Life lost its savour for him: the world was empty. And when, timidly or defiantly or with angry tears, he asked whether his mother was getting better and soon to come downstairs again, he was put off with palpable evasions. He was in the way; there was trouble enough in the house without his adding to it; he was assured that a really good and sensible child would be patient and ask no questions, for there were some things, many things indeed, that he couldn’t understand. Mrs Dewdney was the author of these maxims, which betokened no unkindness of heart, nothing worse than natural stupidity augmented by an excess of anxious love for her mistress and quaking fear of her master. Father Gandy, being with the physician in constant attendance on the patient, was for the most part beyond reach of the boy’s questions, which, at other times, he fended off by a benign and compassionate silence. In his few moments with his pupil he would talk much of God and the saints, but nothing of what was nearest his heart. And in this fashion many days passed, more days than Jacky could count, and at last, searching his mind for adequate reasons that should justify what he must do, he decided that Mamma could not be going to die, since the physician called more seldom than at first, and that if she were not going to die she must be getting better, and therefore—blissful conclusion to the whole matter—she would be as glad to see him as he to see her; and no words could ever tell how great his gladness would be. In these days of famine he had become conscious of something that hitherto only his inarticulate heart had known: that his mother was his world, and the love that made him one with her the joy of joys, the very bread and wine of his existence. His decision was forced in the end by the suspicion, fruit of judicious eavesdropping, that his elders were conspiring to send him away to the house of Aunt Chevenix. There he would have Charles and Petronella to play with, and of that thought was born a swift hatred of Charles and Petronella; for it was not they he wanted, it was his mother. If he could not have his mother he would have no one. And to go away without first seeing his mother—that was the blackest fear of all, a fear that filled him with bitterness and rage, which were presently, however, by force of his great need, translated into the quiet cunning, the similitude of patience, that would best serve him. He bided his time and watched his opportunity, and at last, one bright afternoon in May, he outwitted Mrs Dewdney’s vigilance and approached the forbidden door. Feverish and trembling with the anticipation of joy, he tapped softly; then, getting no response, tapped again, less softly; and at last, unable to wait longer, seized on the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door open by a few inches. But now, a new thought having visited him bringing remorse in its train, he was careful to make no noise; and it was in low excited tones that he asked, without venturing further, ‘Are you awake, Mamma?’ There was silence, broken after an agony of waiting by the rustle of bedclothes and the sound of a smothered cough. ‘Mamma,’ he repeated, on the verge of tears, ‘are you awake?’ At that a voice answered him, a voice that at once thrilled and dismayed him, so like and unlike was it to the voice he greatly loved. Had illness done this to her? Yet what the voice said was even more dismaying: ‘Who’s that coming after me? What are you doing at my door?’ And when he answered, stepping into the room, ‘It’s only me, Mamma,’ the voice said impatiently: ‘And who is me, pray?’ He was inside the room now, or this last rebuff would perhaps have deterred him. As it was, it made him yearn more passionately than ever to find his mother. He stared with saucer eyes at the woman who sat in the great canopied bed. ‘Well, Master Impudence,’ said she, and with all its difference it was his mother’s voice she used, ‘since you’ve come I’ll tell you a secret. Come hither, dearest, nearer, nearer. There’s a black cat in the belfry tower. Diddums know that, my pretty?’ Jacky could only stare. Her smile, glittering and false, froze his blood. ‘And tell me,’ said she, leaning towards him, ‘whose little boy are you?’
He backed across the room, unable to unfix his stare, and escaped into the passage. He ran downstairs, through the house, and out of it. Paul Dewdney, seeing his hurry, looked up with a friendly grin, and the next instant the child was clinging to him, screaming. ‘Husha, Master Jacky, where’ve you catched hurt, my champion? Tell Paul where you’ve catched hurt.’ But not yet could that tale be told. Indeed it was never fully told. After a storm of terror the child managed to falter out a few significant phrases, and Paul, who had sharper wits than most of bis kind, guessed the rest. ‘Ah, my dear, you mustn’t mind her. Her’ve had a fall, dauntee see, on her poor head, poor lady. She baint herself, Master Jacky, not she. And God send she’s not long for this warld, as we all says, and who wouldn’t? Now who’s for a ride on the pony, Master Jacky? Pony’s been asken after you, he has. Where’s that Master Jacky away to, says Pony . . .’
And so, being come full circle, young Squire Marden’s thoughts are back at Paul Dewdney, who now lies dead upstairs.
He had been absent in mind for but a moment, and now with a gesture he tried to shake off his load. ‘Well, we must all come to it.’ He turned again towards the priest, but would not meet his eyes. ‘He was a faithful fellow. God rest him.’
‘Amen,’ said Father Gandy. When he spoke again, after a long silence, it was in a quietly conversational tone. ‘Touching that other matter, my dear sir, I wish you may not distress yourself unduly about it. My lord Endham must wait for his money, as many a better man has done before him. You were at fault, I grant you, in hazarding a sum so far beyond your immediate reach; and still more at fault in nursing the pride that plunged you into that extravagance. But . . .’
‘He thought me a bumpkin,’ interrupted the young man. ‘He thought me a country cousin who for very prudery dared not risk a high stake.’
‘The devil himself,’ said Father Gandy, ‘feigns to think us timid when we resist him. It is his chief weapon against young men of spirit. But listen, my friend. I have formed a resolution. Tonight you have lost a servant, and needs must think of finding another.’