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Hattersley, who had now entered, and been watching us for some time. ‘Why, Mrs. Huntingdon, your hand trembles as if you had staked your all upon it! and, Walter, you dog, you look as deep and cool as if you were certain of success, and as keen and cruel as if you would drain her heart’s blood! But if I were you, I wouldn’t beat her, for very fear: she’ll hate you if you do—she will, by heaven!
This is as it should be; but Arthur never will let me be satisfied with him. I have never, for a single hour since I married him, known what it is to realise that sweet idea, ‘In quietness and confidence shall be your rest.’ Those two detestable men, Grimsby and Hattersley, have destroyed all my labour against his love of wine.
‘Where is Annabella?’ said Hargrave, gravely, after glancing round the room. ‘Gone out with Lord Lowborough,’ answered I, for he looked at me for a reply. ‘And not yet returned!’ he said, seriously. ‘I suppose not.’ ‘Where is Huntingdon?’ looking round again. ‘Gone out with Grimsby, as you know,’ said Hattersley, suppressing a laugh, which broke forth as he concluded the sentence.
‘And yet you do hope, still, even for Mr. Huntingdon?’ ‘I do, I confess, “even” for him; for it seems as if life and hope must cease together. And is he so much worse, Milicent, than Mr. Hattersley?’ ‘Well, to give you my candid opinion, I think there is no comparison between them. But you mustn’t be offended, Helen, for you know I always speak my mind, and you may speak yours too.
As for Mr. Hattersley, he had never wholly forgotten his resolution to ‘come out from among them,’ and behave like a man and a Christian, and the last illness and death of his once jolly friend Huntingdon so deeply and seriously impressed him with the evil of their former practices, that he never needed another lesson of the kind.
The latter was full of hope and joy, yet with a trembling consciousness that this happiness would not last; praising his goodness to the skies, but with an evident, though but half-expressed wish, that it were based on a surer foundation than the natural impulses of the heart, and a half-prophetic dread of the fall of that house so founded on the sand,—which fall had shortly after taken place, as Hattersley must have been conscious while he read.
Hattersley came in, attracted, I suppose, by the voice of his child, as he was crossing the hall, for he is prodigiously fond of her, and she of him. He was redolent of the stables, where he had been regaling himself with the company of his fellow-creatures the horses ever since breakfast.
Much as I had longed for their coming, my heart failed me at the riotous uproar of their approach; and Milicent turned pale, and almost started from her seat, as Mr. Hattersley burst into the room with a clamorous volley of oaths in his mouth, which Hargrave endeavoured to check by entreating him to remember the ladies.
Sometimes he tries to joke and laugh with him, but that will not do; sometimes he endeavours to cheer him with talk about old times, and this at one time may serve to divert the sufferer from his own sad thoughts; at another, it will only plunge him into deeper melancholy than before; and then Hattersley is confounded, and knows not what to say, unless it be a timid suggestion that the clergyman might be sent for.
‘She’s hit it, by Jove!’ cried Hattersley, rearing his gun against the wall; and, stepping into the room, he took his precious friend by the arm, and attempted to drag him away. ‘Come, my lad,’ he muttered; ‘true or false, you’ve no right to blame her, you know, nor him either; after what you said last night. So come along.’ There was something implied here that I could not endure.
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