Chapter 18
Lady G.o.dolphin did not detect the irony, and felt really alarmed. Maria, growing calmer, and perhaps feeling half ashamed of the emotion which fear had caused her to display, drew away from George G.o.dolphin. He would not suffer that, and made her take his arm. "I am sorry to have alarmed you all so much," she said. "Indeed, I could not help it, Lady G.o.dolphin."
"A serpent in the gra.s.s!" repeated her ladys.h.i.+p, unable to get over the surprise. "How did it come to you, Maria? Were you lying down?"
"I was sitting on the camp-stool, there; busy with my drawing," she answered. "My left hand was hanging down, touching, I believe, the gra.s.s. I began to feel something cold at my wrist, but at first did not notice it. Then I lifted it and saw that dreadful thing wound round it.
I could not shake it off. Oh, Lady G.o.dolphin! I felt--I hardly know how I felt--almost as if I should have died, had there been no one near to run to."
Lady G.o.dolphin, her skirts still lifted, the tips of her toes touching the path gingerly, to which they had now hastened, and her eyes alert, lest the serpent should come trailing forth from any unexpected direction, remarked that it was a mercy Maria had escaped with only fright. "You seem to experience enough of that," she said. "Don't faint, child."
Maria's lips parted with a sickly smile, which she meant should be a brave one. She was both timid and excitable; and, if terror did attack her, she felt it in no common degree. What would have been but a pa.s.sing fear to another, forgotten almost as soon as felt, was to her agony.
Remarkably susceptible, was she, to the extreme of pleasure and the extreme of pain. "There is no fear of my fainting," she answered to Lady G.o.dolphin. "I never fainted in my life."
"I am on my road to see an old servant who lives in that house," said Lady G.o.dolphin, pointing to the tenement, little thinking how far it had formed their theme of discourse. "You shall come with me and rest, and have some water."
"Yes, that is the best thing to be done," said George G.o.dolphin. "I'll take you there, Maria, and then I'll have a hunt after the beast. I ought to have killed him at the time."
Lady G.o.dolphin walked on, Charlotte Pain at her side. Charlotte's lip was curling.
The house door, to which they were bound, stood open. Across its lower portion, as if to prevent the exit of children, was a board, formerly placed there for that express purpose. The children were grown now and scattered, but the board remained; the inmates stepping over it at their will. Sandy Bray, who must have skulked back to his home by some unseen circuit, made a rush to the board at sight of Lady G.o.dolphin, and pulled it out of its grooves, leaving the entrance clear. But for his intense idleness, he, knowing she was coming, would have removed it earlier.
They entered upon a large room, half sitting-room, half kitchen, its boarded floor very clean. The old Welshwoman, a cleanly, well-mannered, honest-faced old woman, was busy knitting then, and came forward, curtseying: no vestige of pipe to be seen or smelt. "Selina was in bed,"
Bray said, standing humbly before Lady G.o.dolphin. "Selina had heard bad news of one of the brats, and had worried herself sick over it, as my lady knew it was in the stupid nature of Selina to do. Would my lady be pleased to step up to see her?"
Yes; my lady would be pleased to do so by-and-by. But at present she directed a gla.s.s of water to be brought to Miss Hastings. Bray brought the water in a cracked yellow cup.
"Eh, but there is some of them things about here," he said, when the cause of alarm was mentioned. "I think there must be a nest of 'em. They are harmless, so far as I know."
"Why don't you find the nest?" asked Mr. George G.o.dolphin.
"And what good, if I did find 'em, sir?" said he.
"Kill the lot," responded George.
He strode out of the house, Bray following in his wake, to look for the reptile which had caused the alarm. Bray was sure nothing would come of it: the thing had had time to get clear away.
In point of fact, nothing did come of it. George G.o.dolphin could not decide upon the precise
Gathering up her treasures, including the camp-stool, he set off with them. Bray made a feeble show of offering to bear the stool. "No," said George, "I'll carry it myself: it would be too much trouble for you."
Charlotte Pain stood at the door, watching as they approached, her rich cheek glowing, her eye flas.h.i.+ng. Never had she looked more beautiful, and she bent her sweetest smile upon Mr. George, who had the camp-stool swinging on his back. Lady G.o.dolphin had gone up to the invalid. Maria, quite herself again, came forward.
"No luck," said George. "I meant to have secured the fellow and put him under a gla.s.s case as a memento: but he has been too cunning. Here's your sketch, Maria; undamaged. And here are the other rattletraps."
She bent over the drawing quite fondly. "I am glad I had finished it,"
she said. "I can do the filling-in later. I should not have had courage to sit in that place again."
"Well, old lady," cried George in his free-and-easy manner, as he stood by the Welshwoman, and looked down at her nimble fingers, "so you have come all the way from Wales on foot, I hear! You put some of us to shame."
She looked up and smiled pleasantly. She understood English better than she could speak it.
"Not on foot all the way," she managed to explain. "On foot to the great steamer, and then on foot again after the steamer landed her in Scotland. Not less than a hundred miles of land, taking both ways together."
"Oh, I see!" said George, perceiving that Margery had taken up a wrong impression. "But you must have been a good time doing that?"
"She had the time before her," she answered, more by signs than words, "and her legs were used to the roads. In her husband's lifetime she had oftentimes accompanied him on foot to different parts of England, when he went there with his droves of cattle. It was in those journeys that she learnt to talk English."
George laughed at her idea of talking English. "Did you learn the use of the pipe also in the journeys, old lady?"
She certainly had; for she nodded fifty times in answer, and looked delighted at his divination. "But she was obliged to put up with cheap tobacco now," she said: "and had a trouble to get that!"
George pulled out a supply of Turkey from some hidden receptacle of his coat. "Did she like that sort?"
She looked at it with the eye of a connoisseur, touched it, smelt it, and finally tasted it. "Ah, yes! that was good; very good; too good for her."
"Not a bit of it," said George. "It's yours, old lady. There! It will keep your pipe going, on the road home."
When fully convinced that he meant it in earnest, she seized his hand, shook it heartily, and plunged into a Welsh oration. It was cut short in the midst. She caught sight of Bray, coming in at the house door, and smuggled the present out of sight amidst her petticoats. Had Mr. Sandy seen it, she might have derived little benefit from it herself.
Time lagged, while they waited for Lady G.o.dolphin. The conversation fell upon Bray's trade--as the man was wont to call it: though who or what led to the topic none of them could remember. He recounted two or three interesting incidents; one, of a gentleman marrying a young wife and being shot dead the next day by her friends. She was an heiress, and they had run away from Ireland. But that occurred years and years ago, he added. Would the ladies like to see the room?
He opened a door at the back of the kitchen, traversed a pa.s.sage, and entered a small place, which could only be called a room by courtesy.
They followed, wonderingly. The walls were whitewashed, the floor was of brick, and the small skylight, by which it was lighted, was of thick coa.r.s.e gla.s.s, embellished with green n.o.bs. What with the lowering sky, and this lowering window, the room wore an appearance of the gloomiest twilight. No furniture was in it, except a table (or something that served for one) covered with a green baize cloth, on which lay a book.
The contrast from the kitchen, bright with its fire, with the appliances of household life, to this strange comfortless place made them s.h.i.+ver.
"A fit place for the noose to be tied in!" cried irreverent George, surveying it critically.
Bray took the words literally. "Yes," said he. "It's kept for that purpose alone. It is a bit out of the common, and that pleases the women. If I said the words in my kitchen, it might not be so satisfying to them, ye see. It does not take two minutes to do," he added, taking his stand behind the table and opening the book. "I wish I had as many pieces of gold as I have done it, here, in my time."
Charlotte Pain took up the words defiantly. "It is impossible that such a marriage can stand. It is not a marriage."
"'Deed, but it is, young lady."
"It cannot be legal," she haughtily rejoined. "If it stands good for this loose-lawed country, it cannot do so for others."
"Ay, how about that?" interrupted George, still in his light tone of ridicule. "Would it hold good in England?"
Minister Bray craned his long neck towards them, over the table, where they stood in a group. He took the hand of George G.o.dolphin, and that of Charlotte Pain, and put them to together. "Ye have but to say, 'I take you, young lady, to be my lawful wife;' and, 'I take you, sir, to be my husband,' in your right names. I'd then p.r.o.nounce ye man and wife, and say the blessing on it; and the deed would be done, and hold good all over the world."
Did Mr. Sandy Bray antic.i.p.ate that he might thus extemporise an impromptu ceremony, which should bring some grist to his empty mill? Not improbably: for he did not release their hands, but kept them joined together, looking at both in silence.
George G.o.dolphin was the first to draw his hand away. Charlotte had only stared with wondering eyes, and she now burst into a laugh of ridicule.
"Thank you for your information," said Mr. George. "There's no knowing, Bray, but I may call your services into requisition some time."
"Where are you?" came the soft voice of Lady G.o.dolphin down the pa.s.sage.
"We must all hurry home: it is going to rain. Charlotte, are you there?
Where have you all gone to? Charlotte, I say?"
Charlotte hastened out. Lady G.o.dolphin took her arm at once, and walked with a quick step through the kitchen into the open air, nodding adieu to the old Welshwoman. My lady herself, her ermine, her velvets, possibly her delicately-bloomed complexion, all shrank from the violence of a storm. Storms, neither of life nor of weather, had ever come too near Lady G.o.dolphin. She glanced upward at the threatening and angry sky, and urged Charlotte on.
"Can you walk fast? So lovely a morning as it was!"
"Here comes one of the servants," exclaimed Charlotte. "With umbrellas, no doubt. How he runs!"