Mrs Bonner was distraught.
‘When will she go?’ Laura asked.
‘We shall talk about it some other time,’ gasped Mrs Bonner.
‘Tomorrow at the latest,’ Laura replied. ‘I shall make a point of gathering all my strength, all the night.’
‘Yes, yes. Rest.’
‘So that I shall be strong enough.’
Mrs Bonner was almost suffocated by unhappiness and the mysterious smell.
Laura appeared to be sleeping. Only once she opened her eyes, and in a voice of great agony, cried out:
‘Oh, my darling little girl.’
When, later, Mr Bonner came into the room, he found his wife in a state of some agitation.
‘Such a scene!’ Mrs Bonner whispered. ‘She has decided, for some reason, that she ought to give up Mercy, as a kind of sacrifice, to send her to the Asbolds after all.’
‘Then would it not be best to act upon her wishes?’ suggested the unhappy merchant. ‘Particularly as they coincide with your own.’
‘Oh, but she is out of her wits at present,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘It would not be right.’
Mr Bonner seldom attempted to unravel the moral principles of his wife.
‘Besides,’ she added.
But she did not elaborate. On the contrary, she assumed an expression of cunning, to mask that secret life which she had begun to share with Laura’s child.
Mr Bonner would have been content to preserve the silence.
‘Oh, but there is a most intolerable smell! Do you not smell it?’ the good woman burst out.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Bonner. ‘I expect it is the pears.’
‘Which pears?’
‘The pears that I brought home for Laura, oh, on that night, the first night of her illness, and put down. Yes, here they are, my dear. In the confusion they have escaped your notice.’
‘My notice!’ cried Mrs Bonner.
There, indeed, were the black pears, somewhat viscid, in their nest of withered leaves.
‘Disgusting! Do, please, remove them, Mr Bonner.’
He was quite relieved to do so, this powerful man who had lost his power.
When she had dispatched the odious pears, and was alone except for her sleeping niece, Mrs Bonner was the better disposed for thought. I will think, she used to say, but in all her life had never discovered the secret of that process. It was a source of great exasperation to her, although most people did not guess.
Now, all night she was ready in fits of waking to welcome thought, which did not come. Then I am an empty thing, she admitted helplessly. Yet, she had been pretty as a girl.
By ashy morning, all joy or consolation seemed to have left the old woman, except their child, who was to go too.
So she rose quickly when the sun was up, and bundling the rich sleeves back along her arms, blundered into that room where Mercy had woken in a sound of doves.
‘There,’ said the woman. ‘We are together now.’
The child seemed to agree. How she fitted herself to the body. Beyond the window, all was now a drooling and consolation of doves. In the sunrise which was flooding the cool garden Mrs Bonner forgot those incidents of the past that she chose to forget, and was holding the flesh of the child against the present. All dark and dreadful things, all that she herself could not understand, might be waved away, if she could but keep the child.
‘How you do dribble,’ she said, almost with approval. ‘Dirty little thing!’
So she would address her secret child.
And Mercy clearly saw through the crumpled skin to those greater blemishes, which, in her presence, there was no necessity to hide.
That morning, when she was again decently concealed beneath a clean cap, Mrs Bonner went in to her niece, and was very brisk.
‘I declare you have slept beautifully, Laura,’ she said, arranging the pillows with her competent hands.
Laura did not contradict, but let things happen, for innerly she was inviolable.
And soon her aunt was trembling.
‘Will you not let me brush your hair?’ she asked.
‘But I have none,’ Laura replied.
Sometimes Mrs Bonner developed palpitations, which she would admit to her husband when it suited. Now, however, she realized that he had already left; the morning was hers, to arrange as she wished.
Laura turned her eyes, in that face which there was no escaping since the hair was cut, and said:
‘You will see that everything is packed neatly, Aunt, because I would not like to create a bad impression. You will find almost everything in the small cedar chest. Excepting those six nightdresses — you will remember we had too many — and the gauffered cap which Una Pringle gave. They are on the top shelf of the tallboy on the landing.’
Mrs Bonner’s face, that had been pretty in girlhood, was visibly swelling.
‘I do not know,’ she answered. ‘You must speak to your uncle. He would not allow it. One cannot dispose of a soul as if it were a parcel.’
Again, in the afternoon, Laura said:
‘I expect they will hire a carriage, or some kind of sprung conveyance. They would not carry a little child in a dray. All the way to Penrith.’
Mrs Bonner occupied herself with a piece of tatting.
Towards evening Laura raised herself on the pillows, and said:
‘Do you not see that I shall suffer by it? I could die by it? But I must. Then he will understand.’
‘Who?’ cried Mrs Bonner, her breath rank from her own suffering. ‘Who?’
And, laying down her work, she looked at her niece’s black eyelids.
Laura Trevelyan, by this time at the height of her illness, was almost dried up.
‘O Jesus,’ she begged, ‘have mercy. Oh, save us, or if we are not to be saved, then let us die. My love is too hard to bear. I am weak, after all.’
That evening, when Mr Bonner came in, unwillingly, he inquired:
‘Is there any improvement?’
His wife replied:
‘Do not ask me.’
There was some little consolation in the unexpected return of Dr Kilwinning. He was smelling of a glass of port wine that he had been invited to taste at a previous house, but which the Bonners forgave him in the circumstances.
Dr Kilwinning controlled his rich breath, and announced that he proposed to bleed Miss Trevelyan the following day. As he left the room, an ill-fitting door of a wardrobe was jumping, and flouting the silence. It was not a very good piece of furniture, but Mrs Bonner did truly love her niece, in whose room she had put it.
All the evening the old people were flapping like palm leaves.
The sick woman conducted herself at times with such rational gravity that her hallucinations were doubly awful whenever she felt compelled to share them.
‘I think it better,’ she announced, ‘if I do not see Mercy again. After all. In the morning, that is, before she goes. You will be sure that she has only a light breakfast, Aunt, because of the jolting of the cart. And she must wear something warm that can be taken off in the heat of the day.’
Then:
‘You will attend to it, Aunt? Won’t you?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs Bonner, who was wrestling with her conscience as never before.
In search of air or distraction, she went and drew back the curtains. Such was her preoccupation with earthly matters, she did not often notice the sky, but there it was now, most palpable, of solid, dark, enamelled blue. Or black. It was black like well-water, so cold her body could not bear it. But the great gaudy jumble of stars did please the child in her. And a curious phenomenon. As she followed its broad path of light, she almost dared hope it might lead her out of the state of mortal confusion.