“Oh, mamma!” said Lucy with her usual tone of gentle remonstrance.
Lady Curtis was very quick and outspoken. She said a great many things with her lips which people in general say only in the seclusion of their mind. Lucy _faisait les cornes_ again when her mother spoke of mourning for Arthur. The suggestion was intolerable to her. It threw an additional cloud upon the dreary streaming avenue and the grey blank of the eyeless house.
Sir John, who was in reality expecting them anxiously, did not come to the door to meet them, being a little too late in moving from his chair in the library, which was his way. There were often advantages in it; and perhaps to-day, as on other occasions, it was just as well that it was in his library he received his wife and daughter, instead of meeting them in the full sight of the servants. Sir John was a tall grey-haired man with a sort of homely dignity about him. He was not clever, and often enough the ladies felt it was difficult to get an idea into his head--and when the idea was in his head, he was in the way of treating it somewhat hardly, as if it was a thing rather than an idea. He could not play with plans and intentions as his wife’s quick mind loved to do--and when he received a blow, it crushed him with a sort of solid monotony to which there was no relief. He had not believed it possible that Arthur would persevere with a marriage which was so seriously against his interests, and had thought it only “some of my lady’s nonsense,” to think that this very fact would make Arthur more decided in throwing himself away. But now that the thing was done, he would allow no hope in it. His son was lost--the prey probably of a bad, certainly of a designing woman, seeking her own interests alone. He might as well die at once for any good that was likely to come of him now. And in consequence of this determination, on the part of Sir John that such a thing could not happen, the final act in the drama having taken him entirely by surprise, notwithstanding all warnings, had shaken him enormously in his health as well as in his immediate comfort. “He might as well be dead,” he had said, after he knew that there was no more hope; and those were the words which he repeated by way of greeting to his wife and daughter.