The Vivian Inheritance by Jean Stubbs

Author:Jean Stubbs
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781800550025
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2020-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

‘Nay,’ said Dick, troubled, ‘we never fetched a doctor to her. We thought it were bronchitis, like you had when you was little.’

‘Dick, my dear,’ said Charlotte carefully, for this was a delicate subject, ‘I know that you and Alice are the best of parents, but perhaps Kit’s Hill is not the best of places for someone with Mary’s kind of constitution. It was so with me, if you remember.’

He turned his unfashionable hat round and round in his big hands.

‘Mary’s hearty enough,’ he said sturdily. ‘Nowt wrong with her. Just a bit on the nervy side. She’ll grow out of that.’

Charlotte wondered why, having survived seven years’ transportation, she should still find family life so difficult.

‘Dick dear,’ she said directly, ‘will you not let me keep her for the winter months, at least? Our parents sent me here to live with Aunt Wilde when I was much the same age as Mary, and for similar reasons. It is no reflection upon you and Alice — merely common sense.’

‘Alice needs her,’ said Dick obstinately. ‘It’s Mary’s duty to help her mother, and bide at home until she gets wed.’

‘But Mary is not the slightest use to Alice,’ Charlotte persisted, though still gently, ‘and has never been helpful with young children. Indeed, if we are to be perfectly frank with each other, she thoroughly dislikes them.’

Dick had inherited their father’s mouth, and seeing its line of hurt Charlotte was wrung with recollection.

‘Dick dear, I know how much you love her. But father loved me as much, and let me go.’

He looked up with a sternness which always disconcerted those who thought him an easy-going fellow.

‘And what good did Millbridge ever do you, our Charlotte?’

She saw the abyss into which they could fall if they began to argue and explain. She walked over to the window, and stood looking out at the melee of the High Street on market day.

‘I have gone about the matter in the wrong way,’ she said quietly.

‘The proper folk to bring up a child, to my mind, are its parents,’ Dick continued, feeling he had made a telling point. ‘They know best.’

Charlotte had the uncanny feeling of standing outside life, of seeing the easy lies by which people live. She would not acquiesce.

‘I wish that were true,’ she replied, calmly and deliberately, ‘for then there would be no evil in the world.’

Taken aback, he cried, ‘There’s no evil in Alice and me!’

‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘You are both good people.’

And left him to live with that statement.

‘I want what’s best for Mary,’ he pleaded.

‘No. You want what you think is best for her.’

He blurted out, in his fear of loss, ‘If I don’t take her back now, she’ll never leave of her own free will. She don’t want to come home.’

‘You think so?’ Charlotte asked, facing him.

‘I know it,’ said Dick.

She regarded him with some wonder.

‘And still you would take her?’

He could not answer, smoothing the brim of his old hat.

‘Dick, you will never lose her if you let her go,’ said Charlotte.

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