Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 257: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

240 REYNOLDS’ WORKS around her. In this condition she remained nearly a week, and when she came to herself, it was only to learn the dreadful intelligence that Adolphus had been taken ill on the same day as herself — Just one week back — and that he had died during the night. Indeed, the funeral was to take place on that very same day on which my poor mistress recovered her senses. Her anguish was ineffable; it must have been so, and in the wildness of her despair, as she afterward told me, she plainly and openly accused her brother-in-law, who in the meantime had returned to the Park, of making*away with his nephew. He rejected the accusation with an indignant burst of passion, which seemed so natural that it made her ladyship regret she should have advanced such a charge. The medical man was there to corroborate Mr. Everton’s denial of the wickedness, and for the time being the poor lady’s dark suspicions were lulled, or perhaps absorbed in the bitterness of her grief. She had not the satisfaction, as she subsequently observed to me, of contemplating her dear child’s remains, for they were already, as was represented to her, locked up in the coffin which was about to be borne away to the tomb. ‘She was, however, conveyed by her female dependents to the chamber of death, and she wept scalding tears over the. coffin,’ She:was’ borne back to’ her agri meena of unconsciousness, fever supervened, and she remained delirious for several days. When convalescent, her brother- in-law remonstrated with her for the infamous charge she had levelled against him, and while again indignantly repudi- ating it, he bade her observe that it was an ungrateful recom- pense for his kind forbearance in keeping the secret of her amour with your lordship. My poor lady fancied she beheld a threat in this intimation, and though her suspicions in respect to poor Adolphus’s death revived somewhat in her bosom, she felt herself so completely in the power of her brother-in-law that she dared not give utterance to another word.”’ “The earth contains no miscreant greater than that brother-in-law,’’ interjected the Marquis of Eagledean. ‘Mrs. Jameson, all those arrangements which he made at the Park, and which vou have described, — the surrounding Adolphus with his own creatures, the introduction of a medical man, doubtless well bribed to his interests, the Eomicbooks:- co