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Updated: June 6, 2025
Nurse Rowe laid her hand on Alured's neck, as he knelt with his head close to Trevor's. Fulk and I looked at each other, and we knew that all was over. They had tried in vain to check the bleeding. No one could have done more than Arthur had done, but a main artery had been injured, and nothing could have saved him. He had said nothing after the first cry, except when he saw Alured's grief.
A life interest in an estate is a much pleasanter thing when the heir is a friend who can be walked about the property, than when he is an enemy who must be kept at arm's length. All these delights could now be Sir Alured's, if the old heir would give him his counsel and the young one his assistance. This change in affairs occasioned some flutter also in Manchester Square.
"A stray shot," we said again and again to each other; and we called Nurse Rowe, and made up a bed in Alured's old nursery, and lighted a fire, and were all ready, with hearts beating heavy with suspense before the steps came back my poor Alured first, as we held the door open.
Trevor shook his head, thanked him, and grew reserved. Alured's thirteenth birthday was on the 10th of January, and he had extracted a promise from Fulk, to take him duck-shooting to the mouth of our little river.
I was in a sort of maze all the time, thinking of very little beyond dear little Alured's struggle for life, and living upon his little faint smiles when he was a shade better. Jaquetta has told me more of what passed than I heeded at the time.
John Fletcher, Esq., of Longbarns, some twelve miles from Wharton, was a considerable man in Herefordshire. This present squire had married Sir Alured's eldest daughter, and the younger brother had, almost since they were children together, been known to be in love with Emily Wharton. All the Fletchers and everything belonging to them were almost worshipped at Wharton Hall.
"I found him on the parlour sofa, the little window and the escritoire open!" Fulk said breathlessly, "the villain!" "I'm not hurt," said dear Alured's voice, faintly, but reassuringly, "Oh! put me down, Fulk." We did put him down on the floor there was no other place with his head on my lap, and I found strange voices asking him what Perrault had done to him. "Oh! nothing! 'twasn't that.
She too, perhaps, found it harder to utter to a man than to a woman, and between the strangeness of speaking to one another again, and her shyness and his wonder and delight, it seemed to me unreasonable that poor little Alured's danger was counting for nothing between them, and I turned from the former reticence to the bereaved tigress style, and burst out, "And are we to stand talking here while our boy is in these people's power?"
So the Easter holidays drew on, and she was still far too weak and unwell for any thought of moving her; so that we were in trouble about Alured's holidays, not liking him to come home to a house of illness that would renew his sorrow, and advising him to accept some invitations from his schoolfellows; but he wrote that he particularly wished to come home he could not bear to be away, and Maitland wanted to see the place and know all about dear Lea, so might he bring him home?
The reader may perhaps remember that Sir Alured's heir, the heir to the title and property, was a nephew for whom he entertained no affection whatever. This Wharton had been discarded by all the Whartons as a profligate drunkard.
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