The second day after our arrival there, uncle Edmund came. He had found perfect proof, not only that lady Cairnedge was John's step-mother, but that she had no authority over him or his property whatever.
A long discussion took place in my uncles' study--I have to shift the apostrophe of possession--as to whether John ought to compel restitution of what she might have wrongfully spent or otherwise appropriated. She had been left an income by each of her husbands, upon either of which incomes she might have lived at ease; but they had a strong suspicion, soon entirely justified, that while spending John's money, she had been saving up far more than her own. But in the discussion, John held to it that, as she had once been the wife of his father, he would spare her so far--provided she had nowise impoverished either of the estates. He would insist only upon her immediate departure.
“Yes, little one,” said my uncle, one summer evening, as he and I talked together, seated alone in the wilderness, “what we call misfortune is always the only good fortune. Few will say _yes_ in response, but Truth is independent of supporters, being justified by her children.
“Until _misfortune_ found us,” he went on, “my brother and I had indeed loved one another, but with a love so poor that a wicked woman was able to send it to sleep. To what she might have brought us, had she had full scope, God only knows: _now_ all the women in hell could not separate us!”
“And all the women in paradise would but bring you closer!” I ventured to add.
The day after our marriage, which took place within a month of our return from Paris, John went to Rising, on a visit to lady Cairnedge of anything but ceremony, and took his uncles and myself with him.
“Will you tell her ladyship,” he said to the footman, “that Mr. Day desires to see her.”
The man would have shut the door in our faces, with the words, “I will see if my lady is at home;” but John was prepared for him. He put his foot between the door and the jamb, and his two hands against the door, driving it to the wall with the man behind it. There he held him till we were all in, then closed the door, and said to him, in a tone I had never heard him use till that moment,