But one
day, coming softly as a cat, she heard Sir Charles and Lady Bassett
talking over their calamity. Sir Charles was saying that it was
Heaven's curse; that all the poor people in the village had children;
that Richard Bassett's weak, puny little wife had brought him an heir,
and was about to make him a parent again; he alone was marked out and
doomed to be the last of his race. "And yet," said he, "if I had
married any other woman, and you had married any other man, we should
have had children by the dozen, I suppose."
Upon the whole, though he said nothing palpably unjust, he had the tone
of a man blaming his wife as the real cause of their joint calamity,
under which she suffered a deeper, nobler, and more silent anguish than
himself. This was hard to bear; and when Sir Charles went away, Mary
Wells ran in, with an angry expression on the tip of her tongue.
She found Lady Bassett in a pitiable condition, lying rather than
leaning on the table, with her hair loose about her, sobbing as if her
heart would break.
All that was good in Mary Wells tugged at her heart-strings. She flung
herself on her knees beside her, and seizing her mistress's hand, and
drawing it to her bosom, fell to crying and sobbing along with her.
This canine devotion took Lady Bassett by surprise.
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