A consultation as to the despatching of the message, had taken place among the members of Lord Dannisburgh’s family present at his death.  Percy Dacier was one of them, and he settled the disputed point, after some time had been spent in persuading his father to take the plain view of obligation in the matter, and in opposing the dowager countess, his grandmother, by stating that he had already sent a special messenger to London.  Lord Dannisburgh on his death-bed had expressed a wish that Mrs. Warwick would sit with him for an hour one night before the nails were knocked in his coffin.  He spoke of it twice, putting it the second time to Percy as a formal request to be made to her, and Percy had promised him that Mrs. Warwick should have the message.  He had done his best to keep his pledge, aware of the disrelish of the whole family for the lady’s name, to say nothing of her presence.

‘She won’t come,’ said the earl.

‘She’ll come,’ said old Lady Dacier.

‘If the woman respects herself she’ll hold off it,’ the earl insisted because of his desire that way.  He signified in mutterings that the thing was improper and absurd, a piece of sentiment, sickly senility, unlike Lord Dannisburgh.  Also that Percy had been guilty of excessive folly.

To which Lady Dacier nodded her assent, remarking, ’The woman is on her mettle.  From what I’ve heard of her, she’s not a woman to stick at trifles.  She’ll take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she ‘ll come.’

They joined in abusing Percy, who had driven away to another part of the country.  Lord Creedmore, the heir of the house, was absent, hunting in America, or he might temporarily have been taken into favour by contrast.  Ultimately they agreed that the woman must be allowed to enter the house, but could not be received.  The earl was a widower; his mother managed the family, and being hard to convince, she customarily carried her point, save when it involved Percy’s freedom of action.  She was one of the veterans of her sex that age to toughness; and the ‘hysterical fuss’ she apprehended in the visit of this woman to Lord Dannisburgh’s death-bed and body, did not alarm her.  For the sake of the household she determined to remain, shut up in her room.  Before night the house was empty of any members of the family excepting old Lady Dacier and the outstretched figure on the bed.

Dacier fled to escape the hearing of the numberless ejaculations re-awakened in the family by his uncle’s extraordinary dying request.  They were an outrage to the lady, of whom he could now speak as a privileged champion; and the request itself had an air of proving her stainless, a white soul and efficacious advocate at the celestial gates (reading the mind of the dying man).  So he thought at one moment:  he had thought so when charged with the message to her; had even thought it a natural wish that she should look once on the face she would see no more, and say farewell