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They were perfectly ready to celebrate Mass for Leonora and her nurse, when they stayed at Branshaw, in a cleaned-up outhouse. But Edward was as obstinate as a hog about it. He was truly grieved at his wife's want of sentiment at her refusal to receive that amount of public homage from him. She appeared to him to be wanting in imagination to be cold and hard.
Edward recollected this, immediately after he had made the offer, and said quickly: "Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw until you have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a better." Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was lying down.
She had made twenty-two thousand pounds out of the Branshaw land and seven by the letting of Branshaw furnished. By fortunate investments in which Edward had helped her she had made another six or seven thousand that might well become more.
It was generally a disagreeable ordeal for newcomers but Edward Ashburnham bore it like an Englishman and a gentleman. I could see his lips form a word of three syllables remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice these niceties and immediately I knew that he must be Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh.
They were to leave in a month. It seemed to him to be his duty to leave that place and to go away, to support Leonora. He did his duty. It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that whatever she did caused him to hate her. He hated her when he found that she proposed to set him up as the Lord of Branshaw again as a sort of dummy lord, in swaddling clothes.
He believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that that, in the circumstances, was natural enough. At the same time she agreed, as it were, on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go from Branshaw to Ceylon.
She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw Teleragh. She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all day upon her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the chintzes and the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased Ashburnhams by Zoffany and Zucchero.
Even when she was mad Nancy could behave herself. Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was any chance of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible that if she could see someone from Branshaw it might soothe her and it might have a good effect. And he just simply wrote to Leonora: "Please come and see if you can do it."
Edward cried for two days over the disappearance of his ancestors and then she wished she had not done it; but it did not teach her anything and it lessened such esteem as she had for him. She did not also understand that to let Branshaw affected him with a feeling of physical soiling that it was almost as bad for him as if a woman belonging to him had become a prostitute.
We are both too ill to stay here any longer." Edward said nothing at all. "This," Leonora continued passionlessly, "is the great day of my life." Edward said: "You have managed the job amazingly. You are a wonderful woman." He was thinking that if they went back to Branshaw they would leave Maisie Maidan behind. That thought occupied him exclusively.
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