“I don’t want to talk about Mrs Peveril,” I said.
“Oh, you don’t want to talk about her! no more do I. She’s very flighty and hoity-toighty. I remember when she was very glad to get a corner at my table. She thinks she’s set up now, with her thousand pounds. It’s a blessing as there’s no family. Miss Mary, I’ll take your instructions next time as I comes if you’ll put yourself in my hands. I’ve come to think on you as a relation too; but bless you, my dear, I know as you can’t be cheerful with visitors not just the first day. Don’t stand upon no ceremony with me.”
He wanted me to leave him, I thought, that he might examine everything, and perhaps, get at poor papa’s papers; but I would not do that. I stayed, though my heart was bursting, until he went away. What an afternoon that was! it was summer, but it rained all day. It rained and rained into the smoky street, and upon papa’s grave, which I seemed to see before me wet and cold and sodden, with little pools of water about. How heartless it seemed, how terrible, to have come into shelter ourselves and to have left him there alone in the wet, and the cold, and the misery! If one could but have gone back there and sat down by him and got one’s death, it would have been some consolation. I went up to my room and sat there drearily, watching the drops that chased each other down the window panes. It was so wet that the street was quite silent outside, nobody coming or going, except the milkman with his pails making a clank at every area. There were no cries in the street, no sound of children playing, nothing but the rain pattering, pattering, upon the roofs and the pavement, and in every little hollow on both. The house, too, was perfectly still; there was no dinner, nothing to break the long monotony. Ellen came up in her new black gown, with tears on her cheeks, to bring me a glass of wine and a sandwich. I could not eat, but I drank the wine. “Oh, Miss Mary,” said Ellen, “won’t you go to her now? There’s only you two. It ain’t a time, Miss, oh, it ain’t a time to think on things as may have been unpleasant. And she’s a taking on so, shut up in that room, as I think she’ll die.”
Why should she die any more than me? Why should she be more pitied than I was? I had lost as much, more than she had. She had known him but a short time, not two years; but he had been mine all my life. I turned my back upon Ellen’s appeal, and she went away crying, shaking her head and saying I was unkind, I was without feeling. Oh, was I without feeling? How my head ached, how my heart swelled, how the sobs rose into my throat; I should have been glad could I have felt that it was likely I should die.