Denasia coloured furiously, but she answered with the moderation of accepted punishment, "Very well, then! I will call him 'John' after my father. I hope he may be as good a man."
Matters went on in this unhappy fashion until the end of October--nay, they continually grew worse, for poverty deepened and hope lessened. Denasia had lost the freshness of her beauty, and she was too simple and ignorant to make art replace nature. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any persuasion could have made her imitate the "painted Jezebel" who had always been one of the most pointed examples of her religious education. In her first experience of public life her radiant health and colouring shamed all meaner aids and had been amply sufficient for the brightest lights and the longest hours. But that fierce ordeal of acclimating under conditions of constant travel and hard work had drained even the magnificent vitality that had been her heritage from generations of seamen, and typhoid and unhappy maternity had robbed her of much of her almost defiant youth, with its indomitable spirit and invincible hope.
She had become by the close of October pale, fragile-looking, and woefully depressed. Roland no longer found her always smiling and hoping, and he called the change bad temper when he ought to have called it hunger. Not indeed hunger in its baldest form for mere bread, but hunger just as killing--hunger for the nourishing delicate food and proper tonics that were just as necessary as bread; hunger for hope, for work, and, above all, hunger for affection.
For Roland had begun privately--yea, and sometimes openly--to call himself a fool. And the devil, who never chooses a wrong hour, sent him at this time an important letter from Elizabeth. In it she told him that Mr. Burrell had died suddenly from apoplexy, and that she had resolved to sell Burrell Court and make her residence in London and Lucerne. She deplored his absence, and said how much she had needed some one of her own family in the removal from Cornwall and in the settlement of her husband's estate; and she sent her brother a much smaller sum of money than she had ever sent before.
When Roland had finished reading this epistle he looked at Denasia. She was walking about the room trying to soothe and quiet the child. It was very ill, and she had not dared to speak about a doctor. Therefore she was feeling hurt and sorrowful, and when Roland said, "Elizabeth's husband is dead," she did not answer him.