That Stick ...

‘I never heard such intolerable nonsense!’ burst out Ida.  ‘Mere absurdity!’

Herbert looked at her with surprise at the strange passion she exhibited.  He asked—

‘Did you say the Hall girl had run away?’

‘Oh, never mind, Herbert!’ cried Ida, as if unable to command herself.  ‘What is it to you what a nasty, horrid girl like that does?’

‘Hold your tongue, Ida!’ he said resolutely.  ‘If you won’t speak, let Rose.’

‘She did,’ said Rose, in a low, anxious, terrified p. 234voice.  ‘I only heard it since I came home.  She was married at the registrar’s office to that man Jones, whom they call the Rattler, and went off with him.  It must have been her whom I saw, really and truly; and, oh, Herbert, could she have been so wicked as to steal Master Michael!’

‘Somebody else has been wicked then,’ said Herbert, laying hold of his sister’s arm.

‘I don’t know what all this means,’ exclaimed Ida, in great agitation; ‘nor what you and Rose are at!  Making up such horrible, abominable insinuations against me, your poor sister!  But Rose Rollstone always hated me!’

‘She does not know what she is saying,’ sighed Rose; and, with much delicacy, she moved away.

‘Let me go, Herbert!’ cried Ida, as she felt his grip on her hand.

‘Not I, Ida—till you have answered me!  Is this so—that Michael is not drowned, but carried off by that woman?’ demanded Herbert, holding her fast and looking at her with manly gravity, not devoid of horror.

‘He is a horrid little impostor, palmed off to keep you out of the title and everything!  That’s why I did it!’ sobbed Ida, trying to wrench herself away.

‘Oh, you did it, did you?  You confess that!  And what have you done with him?’

‘I tell you he is no Morton at all—just the nurse-woman’s child, taken to spite you.  I found it all out at—what’s its name?—Botzen; only ma would not be convinced.’

‘I should suppose not!  To think that my p. 235uncle and aunt would do such a thing—why, I don’t know whether it is not worse than stealing the child!’

‘Herbert!  Herbert! do you want to bring your sister to jail, talking in that way?’

‘It is no more than you deserve.  I would bring you there if it is the only way to get back the child!  I do not know what is bad enough for you.  My poor uncle and aunt!  To have brought such misery on them!’  He clenched his hands as he spoke.

‘Everybody said she didn’t mind—didn’t ask questions, didn’t cry, didn’t go on a bit like his real mother.’

‘She could not, or it might have been the death of my uncle.  Bertha wrote it all to me; but you—you would never understand.  Ida, I can’t believe that you, my sister, could have done such an awfully wicked thing!’

‘I wouldn’t, only I was sure he was not—’

‘No more of that stuff!’ said Herbert.  ‘You don’t know what they are.’

‘I do.  So strict—not a bit like a mother.’

‘If our mother had been like them, you might not have been such a senseless monster,’ said Herbert, pausing for a word.  ‘Come, now; tell me what you have done with him, or I shall have to set on the police.’

‘Oh, Herbert, how can you be so cruel?’

‘It is not I that am cruel!  Come, speak out!  Did you bribe her with your teapot?  Ah! I see: what has she done with him?’

He gripped her arm almost as he used to torture p. 236her when they were children, and insisted again that either she must tell him the whole truth or he should set the police on the track.

‘You wouldn’t,’ she said, awed.  ‘Think of the exposure and of mother!’

‘I can think of nothing but saving Mite!  I say—my mother knows nothing of this?’

‘Oh no, no!’

Herbert breathed more freely, but he was firm, and seemed suddenly to have grown out of boyishness into manly determination, and gradually he extracted the whole story from her.  He would not listen to the delusion in which she had worked herself into believing, founded upon the negations for which she had sedulously avoided seeking positive refutation, and which had been bolstered up by her imagination and wishes, working on the unsubstantial precedents of novels.  She had brought herself absolutely to believe in the imposture, and at a moment when her uncle’s condition seemed absolutely to place within her grasp the coronet for Herbert, with all possibilities for herself.