In which Lady Kew leaves his Lordship quite convalescent

Immediately after Lord Kew’s wound, and as it was necessary to apprise the Newcome family of the accident which had occurred, the good-natured young Kew had himself written a brief note to acquaint his relatives with his mishap, and had even taken the precaution to antedate a couple of billets to be despatched on future days; kindly forgeries, which told the Newcome family and the Countess of Kew, that Lord Kew was progressing very favourably, and that his hurt was trifling. The fever had set in, and the young patient was lying in great danger, as most of the laggards at Baden knew, when his friends there were set at ease by this fallacious bulletin. On the third day after the accident, Lady Walham arrived with her younger son, to find Lord Kew in the fever which ensued after the wound. As the terrible anxiety during the illness had been Lady Walham’s, so was hers the delight of the recovery. The commander-inchief of the family, the old lady at Baden, showed her sympathy by sending couriers, and repeatedly issuing orders to have news of Kew. Sick-beds scared her away invariably. When illness befell a member of her family she hastily retreated from before the sufferer, showing her agitation of mind, however, by excessive ill-humour to all the others within her reach.

A fortnight passed, a ball had been found and extracted, the fever was over, the wound was progressing favourably, the patient advancing towards convalescence, and the mother, with her child once more under her wing, happier than she had been for seven years past, during which her young prodigal had been running the thoughtless career of which he himself was weary, and which had occasioned the fond lady such anguish. Those doubts which perplex many a thinking man, and, when formed and uttered, give many a fond and faithful woman pain so exquisite, had most fortunately never crossed Kew’s mind. His early impressions were such as his mother had left them, and he came back to her, as she would have him, as a little child; owning his faults with a hearty humble repentance, and with a thousand simple confessions, lamenting the errors of his past days. We have seen him tired and ashamed of the pleasures which he was pursuing, of the companions who surrounded him, of the brawls and dissipations which amused him no more; in those hours of danger and doubt, when he had lain, with death perhaps before him, making up his account of the vain life which probably he would be called upon to surrender, no wonder this simple, kindly, modest, and courageous soul thought seriously of the past and of the future; and prayed, and resolved, if a future were awarded to him, it should make amends for the days gone by; and surely as the mother and son read together the beloved assurance of the divine forgiveness, and of that joy which angels feel in heaven for a sinner repentant, we may fancy in the happy mother’s breast a feeling somewhat akin to that angelic felicity, a gratitude and joy of all others the loftiest, the purest, the keenest. Lady Walham might shrink with terror at the Frenchman’s name, but her son could forgive him, with all his heart, and kiss his mother’s hand, and thank him as the best friend of his life.

During all the days of his illness, Kew had never once mentioned Ethel’s name, and once or twice as his recovery progressed, when with doubt and tremor his mother alluded to it, he turned from the subject as one that was disagreeable and painful. Had she thought seriously on certain things? Lady Walham asked. Kew thought not, “but those who are bred up as you would have them, mother, are often none the better,” the humble young fellow said. “I believe she is a very good girl. She is very clever, she is exceedingly handsome, she is very good to her parents and her brothers and sisters; but —” he did not finish the sentence. Perhaps he thought, as he told Ethel afterwards, that she would have agreed with Lady Walham even worse than with her imperious old grandmother.

Lady Walham then fell to deplore Sir Brian’s condition, accounts of whose seizure of course had been despatched to the Kehl party, and to lament that a worldly man as he was should have such an affliction, so near the grave and so little prepared for it. Here honest Kew, however, held out. “Every man for himself, mother,” says he. “Sir Brian was bred up very strictly, perhaps too strictly as a young man. Don’t you know that that good Colonel, his elder brother, who seems to me about the most honest and good old gentleman I ever met in my life, was driven into rebellion and all sorts of wild courses by old Mrs. Newcome’s tyranny over him? As for Sir Brian, he goes to church every Sunday: has prayers in the family every day: I’m sure has led a hundred times better life than I have, poor old Sir Brian. I often have thought, mother, that though our side was wrong, you could not be altogether right, because I remember how my tutor, and Mr. Bonner, and Dr. Laud, when they used to come down to us at Kewbury, used to make themselves so unhappy about other people.” So the widow withdrew her unhappiness about Sir Brian; she was quite glad to hope for the best regarding that invalid.

With some fears yet regarding her son — for many of the books with which the good lady travelled could not be got to interest him; at some he would laugh outright — with fear mixed with the maternal joy that he was returned to her, and had quitted his old ways; with keen feminine triumph, perhaps, that she had won him back, and happiness at his daily mending health, all Lady Walham’s hours were passed in thankful and delighted occupation. George Barnes kept the Newcomes acquainted with the state of his brother’s health. The skilful surgeon from Strasbourg reported daily better and better of him, and the little family were living in great peace and contentment, with one subject of dread, however, hanging over the mother of the two young men, the arrival of Lady Kew, as she was foreboding, the fierce old mother-inlaw who had worsted Lady Walham in many a previous battle.

It was what they call the summer of St. Martin, and the weather was luckily very fine; Kew could presently be wheeled into the garden of the hotel, whence he could see the broad turbid current of the swollen Rhine: the French bank fringed with alders, the vast yellow fields behind them, the great avenue of poplars stretching away to the Alsatian city, and its purple minster yonder. Good Lady Walham was for improving the shining hour by reading amusing extracts from her favourite volumes, gentle anecdotes of Chinese and Hottentot converts, and incidents from missionary travel. George Barnes, a wily young diplomatist, insinuated Galignani, and hinted that Kew might like a novel; and a profane work called Oliver Twist having appeared about this time, which George read out to his family with admirable emphasis, it is a fact that Lady Walham became so interested in the parish boy’s progress, that she took his history into her bedroom (where it was discovered, under Blatherwick’s Voice from Mesopotamia, by her ladyship’s maid), and that Kew laughed so immensely at Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, as to endanger the reopening of his wound.

While, one day, they were so harmlessly and pleasantly occupied, a great whacking of whips, blowing of horns, and whirring of wheels was heard in the street without. The wheels stopped at their hotel gate; Lady Walham started up; ran through the garden door, closing it behind her; and divined justly who had arrived. The landlord was bowing; the courier pushing about; waiters in attendance; one of them, coming up to pale-faced Lady Walham; said, “Her Excellency the Frau Graefinn von Kew is even now absteiging.”

“Will you be good enough to walk into our salon, Lady Kew?” said the daughter-inlaw, stepping forward and opening the door of that apartment. The Countess, leaning on her staff, entered that darkened chamber. She ran up towards an easy-chair, where she supposed Lord Kew was. “My dear Frank!” cries the old lady; “my dear boy, what a pretty fright you have given us all! They don’t keep you in this horrid noisy room facing that —— Ho — what is this?” cries the Countess, closing her sentence abruptly.

“It is not Frank. It is only a bolster, Lady Kew, and I don’t keep him in a noisy room towards the street,” said Lady Walham.

“Ho! how do you do? This is the way to him, I suppose;” and she went to another door — it was a cupboard full of the relics of Frank’s illness, from which Lady Walham’s mother-inlaw shrunk back aghast. “Will you please to see that I have a comfortable room, Maria; and one for my maid, next me? I will thank you to see yourself,” the Empress of Kew said, pointing with her stick, before which many a time the younger lady had trembled.

This time Lady Walham only rang the bell. “I don’t speak German; and have never been on any floor of the house but this. Your servant had better see to your room, Lady Kew. That next is mine; and I keep the door, which you are trying, locked on other side.”

“And I suppose Frank is locked up there!” cried the old lady, “with a basin of gruel and a book of Watts’s hymns.” A servant entered at this moment, answering Lady Walham’s summons. “Peacock, the Countess of Kew says that she proposes to stay here this evening. Please to ask the landlord to show her ladyship rooms,” said Lady Walham; and by this time she had thought of a reply to Lady Kew’s last kind speech.

“If my son were locked up in my room, madam, his mother is surely the best nurse for him. Why did you not come to him three weeks sooner, when there was nobody with him?”

Lady Kew said nothing, but glared and showed her teeth — those pearls set in gold.

“And my company may not amuse Lord Kew —”

“He-e-e!” grinned the elder, savagely.

“— But at least it is better than some to which you introduced my son,” continued Lady Kew’s daughter-inlaw, gathering force and wrath as she spoke. “Your ladyship may think lightly of me, but you can hardly think so ill of me as of the Duchesse d’Ivry, I should suppose, to whom you sent my boy, to form him, you said; about whom, when I remonstrated — for though I live out of the world I hear of it sometimes — you were pleased to tell me that I was a prude and a fool. It is you I thank for separating my child from me — yes, you — for so many years of my life; and for bringing me to him when he was bleeding and almost a corpse, but that God preserved him to the widow’s prayers; — and you, you were by, and never came near him.”

“I— I did not come to see you — or — or — for this kind of scene, Lady Walham,” muttered the other. Lady Kew was accustomed to triumph, by attacking in masses, like Napoleon. Those who faced her routed her.

“No; you did not come for me, I know very well,” the daughter went on. “You loved me no better than you loved your son, whose life, as long as you meddled with it, you made wretched. You came here for my boy. Haven’t you done him evil enough? And now God has mercifully preserved him, you want to lead him back again into ruin and crime. It shall not be so, wicked woman! bad mother! cruel, heartless parent! — George!” (Here her younger son entered the room, and she ran towards him with fluttering robes and seized his hands.) “Here is your grandmother; here is the Countess of Kew, come from Baden at last; and she wants — she wants to take Frank from us, my dear, and to — give — him — back to the — Frenchwoman again. No, no! Oh, my God! Never! never!” And she flung herself into George Barnes’s arms, fainting with an hysteric burst of tears.

“You had best get a strait-waistcoat for your mother, George Barnes,” Lady Kew said, scorn and hatred in her face. (If she had been Iago’s daughter, with a strong likeness to her sire, Lord Steyne’s sister could not have looked more diabolical.) “Have you had advice for her? Has nursing poor Kew turned her head? I came to see him. Why have I been left alone for half an hour with this madwoman? You ought not to trust her to give Frank medicine. It is positively ——”

“Excuse me,” said George, with a bow; “I don’t think the complaint has as yet exhibited itself in my mother’s branch of the family. (She always hated me,” thought George; “but if she had by chance left me a legacy, there it goes.) You would like, ma’am, to see the rooms upstairs? Here is the landlord to conduct your ladyship. Frank will be quite ready to receive you when you come down. I am sure I need not beg of your kindness that nothing may be said to agitate him. It is barely three weeks since M. de Castillonnes’s ball was extracted; and the doctors wish he should be kept as quiet as possible.”

Be sure that the landlord, the courier, and the persons engaged in showing the Countess of Kew the apartments above spent an agreeable time with Her Excellency the Frau Graefinn von Kew. She must have had better luck in her encounter with these than in her previous passages with her grandson and his mother; for when she issued from her apartment in a new dress and fresh cap, Lady Kew’s face wore an expression of perfect serenity. Her attendant may have shook her fist behind her, and her man’s eyes and face looked Blitz and Donnerwetter; but their mistress’s features wore that pleased look which they assumed when she had been satisfactorily punishing somebody. Lord Kew had by this time got back from the garden to his own room, where he awaited grandmamma. If the mother and her two sons had in the interval of Lady Kew’s toilette tried to resume the history of Bumble the Beadle, I fear they could not have found it very comical.

“Bless me, my dear child! How well you look! Many a girl would give the world to have such a complexion. There is nothing like a mother for a nurse! Ah, no! Maria, you deserve to be the Mother Superior of a House of Sisters of Charity, you do. The landlord has given me a delightful apartment, thank you. He is an extortionate wretch; but I have no doubt I shall be very comfortable. The Dodsburys stopped here, I see by the travellers’ book-quite right, instead of sleeping at that odious buggy Strasbourg. We have had a sad, sad time, my dears, at Baden. Between anxiety about poor Sir Brian, and about you, you naughty boy, I am sure I wonder how I have got through it all. Doctor Finck would not let me come away today; would I would come.”

“I am sure it was uncommonly kind, ma’am,” says poor Kew, with a rueful face.

“That horrible woman against whom I always warned but yo............