XIX
The Lady Letitia sat before the fire in the red parlor with a copy of theGentleman’s Magazinelying upon her lap. In the fender lay a bundle of feathers which the old lady was burning, having heard that the smoke therefrom was very efficacious in the preventing of fevers. Very cross and querulous she felt, and very cross she looked as she sat there burning the feathers and taking snuff from time to time, for the Lady Letitia was not a woman fitted to play the Dorcas or to take pleasure in ministering to the sick. Pain, disease, and poverty were things she dreaded and detested as vulgar intruders, marring the polite gayeties of life.
Hence she had shown no little impatience that morning when Peter Gladden had announced the fact that Mr. Richard was indisposed and would keep his bed. Gladden, bearer of cocoa and shaving-water, had found his master looking flushed and feverish, with dry lips and heavy eyes, and complaining of sickness and headache and sharp pain in the small of the back. Jeffray would not have the curtains drawn, for the sunlight seemed to intensify his feeling of nausea and the feverish throbbing in his head. He had ordered Gladden to send a groom down to Rodenham village to insure Surgeon Stott’s calling that day.
As the Lady Letitia sat burning her feathers and muttering to herself in the red parlor, Peter Gladden’s black-coated figure appeared in the doorway, his colorless face imperturbable as ever. The dowager glanced at the butler irritably over her shoulder, and asked him, sharply, what he wanted.
“Surgeon Stott, madam, requests the honor of speaking with you.”
“What’s the man want with me, Gladden?”
“It concerns Mr. Richard, madam.”
The Lady Letitia scowled—and straightened her cap.
“Tell the man to come in, Gladden,” she said. “Tell him to remain by the door. Of course his clothes reek of the small-pox.”
The butler disappeared with a cynical twinkle in his eyes, and turned to where Mr. Stott was standing with his broad back to the hall fire. The surgeon and Mr. Gladden looked at each other with a certain comical flash of sympathy. Stott was a florid and well-complexioned person who wore a blue coat, a scratch wig, brown riding-breeches, and top-boots. The surgeon did not cultivate the town graces and delicacies of “the faculty.” He had to ride through mud and ford streams, dive into hovels where gowns and periwigs would have been a nuisance and the pomposities of the profession more than ridiculous.
The dowager scrutinized Mr. Stott from top to toe with an air of aristocratic insolence as he bowed himself into the red parlor. She scanned his muddy boots, noticed the bourgeois redness of his face and hands, and desired him, with some hauteur, not to approach too near her chair. Surgeon Stott’s humorous mouth twitched expressively. He inhaled the odors of lavender and burned feathers, and seated himself, with the amiable docility of a philosopher, near the door.
The Lady Letitia had cocked her beak at him commandingly.
“Well, sir, what is your business with me?”
“I have come to speak to you about Mr. Jeffray, madam.”
The dowager caught a solemn twinkle in the man’s vulgar, blue eyes; the suave curve of his clean-shaven mouth seemed to suggest that the surgeon possessed a strong sense of humor. The Lady Letitia’s dignity increased. She did not exist to amuse muddy apothecaries peddling boluses in provincial towns. She, to whom the great Dr. Billinghurst, of London, would listen for an hour, was not to be smiled at by this rustic blue-bottle.
“You are the apothecary from Rookhurst, sir, I believe?”
“Surgeon, madam.”
“A member of the company?”
“I claim that distinction.”
The Lady Letitia’s face expressed surprise. Her manner suggested to Mr. Stott that he had not impressed her with any great degree of authority in the art of healing.
“We thought we would have your opinion, sir,” she explained, “as a temporary satisfaction. Should my nephew show signs of serious indisposition, we shall send for a responsible physician to attend him. Now, sir, will you oblige me with your candid opinion as to Mr. Jeffray’s health.”
Surgeon Stott was watching the old lady with grim curiosity. She was a distinct study in aristocratic arrogance with her air of condescending patronage, and her detestable old face painted and powdered to the very complexion of her vanity.
“If you care to consider my opinion, madam—”
“Well, sir?”
“I may state that Mr. Jeffray is sickening with the small-pox.”
“What!”
The Lady Letitia perked up like a frightened hen, much to Surgeon Stott’s inward satisfaction.
“That is my diagnosis, madam,” he said. “I have bled Mr. Jeffray of ten ounces, and ordered him to be sponged with tepid water. One of the grooms is to ride back with me to Rookhurst for the physic. There will be a fever mixture and a bolus. Can I oblige your ladyship in any way?”
The dowager plied her handkerchief and strove to recover her disturbed dignity. Richard with the small-pox! How deplorably vexatious, not to say—inconsiderate—her nephew’s illness appeared! Meanwhile, Surgeon Stott had risen. He bowed to the dowager till his tight riding-breeches creaked, and seemed not a little amused at the old lady’s fluster.
“With your kind permission, madam,” he said, “I will call again to-morrow. Your ladyship may even need my humble attention.”
The dowager bridled at the insinuation.
“Call by all means,” she retorted, “but I shall have transferred myself to some locality where I can obtain trustworthy advice.”
When Mr. Stott had gone, the dowager pealed the bell, and almost squealed at Gladden when his emotionless face appeared at the door.
“Send Parsons to me at once, and order Betsy to pack my boxes.”
Peter Gladden bowed, smiled curiously, and departed. At the end of three minutes Parsons, the Lady Letitia’s confidential man, a thin, circumspect individual with a prim mouth and a long nose, marched in to receive his mistress’s orders.
“Parsons, we must leave Rodenham at once. Have the coach ready by one, and order Betsy to pack my trunks. Can we make Tunbridge Wells before dusk?”
Parsons bowed, and apologized for the roads—in that they had the bad taste to be execrably heavy.
“Drat the roads,” quoth the old lady, in a fine fume. “No decent folk should venture into this abominable wilderness. Where can we bait for the night, Parsons?”
“We can find a good inn at Grinstead, madam.”
“Let it be Grinstead, then. And Parsons, see that Gladden and the servants have their vails; a guinea will do for the wenches; here is my purse. And see to your pistols, Parsons; this beggarly slough is full of smugglers and footpads.”
The suave and obsequious Parsons left to prepare his mistress’s departure. The Lady Letitia, still unduly distressed, hobbled up to her bedroom by the back stairs, so that she should not pass her nephew’s door. The guineas Richard had loaned to her were sewn up in a leather bag under her hoop. Miss Betsy was flinging gowns, petticoats, and underclothing into the trunks, being no less eager than the Lady Letitia to flee the house that the pest had entered. The room was littered with scarves, pomade-boxes, pins, ribbons, jewelry, gowns, stockings, and shoes. The dowager stood leaning on her stick, scolding and directing the girl as she hurried the multifarious articles into the trunks.
The old lady did not attempt to conceal either her nervousness or her annoyance from her maid.
“Drat the small-pox,” she said, with feeling; “one would think that the devil had the sowing of the pest. Confusion, wench, what are you doing with that green silk sack? Don’t crush it up as though it were dirty linen. Yes. I have told Parsons that we must make Grinstead before dusk.”
Miss Betsy sat back on her heels as she knelt beside the largest trunk, and glanced round at the hundred and one articles littering the floor.
“Poor Mr. Richard!” she said.
“What’s that you’re saying?”
“It does seem mean, ma’am, that we should be running away and leaving him alone.”
“Betsy,” quoth the dowager, curtly, “you’re a fool.”
“La, ma’am!”
“What good can we do by staying here, hey? You should be grateful that I have the moral courage to go.”
Before she departed the Lady Letitia wrote an affectionate note to her nephew, addressing him as “Mon beau Richard, mon cher neveu,” praying for his speedy recovery, and explaining that nothing but the extreme delicacy of her health persuaded her to leave him at such a crisis. Shortly after noon the dowager’s coach rolled away from the priory porch, with Peter Gladden bowing stiffly on the threshold, and staring a contemptuous farewell at Mr. Parsons on the back seat, who was looking to his pistols. Richard, half delirious in his room above, heard the grinding of the wheels and the rattling of the harness. He understood dimly that his aunt was deserting him with his guineas under her petticoat. And thus the small-pox drove the old lady out of Rodenham, and the sick man was left to Peter Gladden and Surgeon Stott.
XX
It was on the night of Tuesday that Isaac came to Ursula’s cottage and seated himself on the oak settle before the fire. Old Ursula was in the ingle-nook with a pile of stockings in her lap, Bess on a stool beside the fender, her hands clasped about her knees, her eyes full of the thought of Jeffray. She had opened the door to the patriarch, greeted him somewhat sullenly, and shot the bolts after him for fear that Dan should be lurking outside the cottage. Isaac Grimshaw’s smooth face suggested that he was in the most sociable of moods. He persuaded his sister to brew a bowl of rum punch, and, drawing out a short pipe and a tobacco-box from the tail-pocket of his coat, sat smoking before the fire. Bess, on her stool, was watching the old man suspiciously, and wondering what thoughts were passing in his mind. She always distrusted Isaac’s good-humor, and preferred a frown from him to a smile.
Isaac began to prattle on all manner of matters, poking fun at old Ursula and looking as simple and jolly an old fellow as ever sniffed the odors of lemon and rum, cloves and cinnamon. He talked of Rookhurst Fair, and promised to buy a bunch of ribbons for Ursula, and a pair of red shoes for her to wear on May-day.
Bess grew very mistrustful of the old man’s mood as he sat there shaking his silvery hair in the firelight, thrusting out his lower lip, and watching her with his keen, gray eyes. She would take none of his punch, though he pressed her often, noticing that Ursula was growing drowsy after she had drunk of it more than once. She felt instinctively that there was something false in the old man’s hilarity. Often Bess fancied that Isaac was listening for some sound he intended that she should not hear. She concealed her suspicions from him, humored his gayety, and kept her wits alert lest there might be treachery afoot against herself. Isaac still ladled out the punch, winking at Bess as old Ursula waxed sleepy in the ingle-nook. He began to tell the women of Rookhurst Fair in the old days, when he could handle a cudgel with any youngster in the country. His shrill yet melodious voice flowed on without ceasing, as though he were endeavoring to drown the silence with a perpetual plash of words.
“Ah, dame,” he said, “I can remember when Jeremy brought ye your wedding-ribbons and a ring at Rookhurst. You were a merry bit of mutton then. Do you call to mind old Stumpy Job, the Jew who used to have his stall in the corner of the market before Surgeon Stott’s door? It was John Stott in those days, and, deuce take me, he was a rough devil; he’d bleed you half dead and blister your back till there wasn’t a sound bit of skin over your kidneys. Well, Stumpy Job, he was about the cleverest knave as ever I knew. Half the smugglers in the Channel had dealings with him, and if ‘my lady’ wanted French lace or silks, she had but to let Stumpy know, and a pack load of finery would drop over the garden-wall one quiet night. Yes, Stumpy was a neat rogue, but too greedy on the main chance, and they stretched his neck for him at the end of it. They hanged him on Dardan Heath for shooting an exciseman, and he showed the white-feather terrible at the end. I did hear that he promised to pay ’em all a powerful lot of money if they’d let him run and cross the water. His guineas were buried somewhere down Chichester way, and they do say that a flash dame who kept an inn there had it, for Stumpy was always hot on the women.”
Bess had been sitting motionless all through the old man’s monologue, her brows contracted, and an expression of alertness on her face. Her eyes were fixed upon the door opening upon the stairs, though she cast rapid glances ever and again at Isaac’s countenance shining in the firelight under his silvery hair. Ursula was half asleep in the ingle-nook, nodding her head mechanically over her brother’s reminiscences. Bess had caught a vague and indefinite sound that had quickened her pulses and deepened her distrust. She rose up very quietly from her stool, yawned, and reached for the brass candlestick upon the mantle-shelf.
Old Isaac, wide-awake on the instant, turned on the settle and looked at her suspiciously.
“What’s amiss, lass?” he asked her, with a smile.
Bess lit the candle, steadied herself, betraying nothing of the dread that was in her heart.
“I am tired, and it is growing late.”
“Tut, tut, lass, stay with us a little longer. Have you listened too much to an old man’s tales?”
Bess yawned behind her hand, laughed, and walked towards the stairs.
“Ursula will sit and listen to you, uncle,” she said. “There is hot water in the kettle if you want more punch.”
She opened the stair door, and, shutting it quickly after her, shot the bolt on the inside. Isaac had started up from the settle, and limped across the room with an impatient grin upon his face. Bess heard him try the door and go back balked to the fire when he found it bolted. Holding the candle above her head she climbed the stairs slowly, step by step, frowning when the bare boards creaked, and halting continually to listen. She had drawn one of Jeffray’s pistols from her bosom, and the steel barrel quivered a little as her fingers strained nervously about the stock.
Coming to the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, she stood listening, with her head bent forward, the candle shaded behind her hand. The two doors that opened upon the landing were shut, and Bess knew not what their black panelling might hide. Putting her ear close to the door of her own bedroom, she heard the casement rattling from time to time, and a sound as of some one at work on the iron bars closing the window. The candle shook a little in her hand. Setting it down on an old chest by the wall, she gathered her courage, and, lifting the latch, threw the door open at arm’s-length.
Outlined against the dark square of the window, Bess saw the head and shoulders of a man. He appeared to be half kneeling on the window-ledge without, working at the clamps that held the iron bars in their sockets. The casement frame was open, and for the moment Bess could not see his face.
He looked up suddenly on hearing the door open, swore, and hung there staring at Bess as she stood in the doorway with the candle behind her. She had recognized Dan, and understood with a flash of fury why he was loosening the bars of the window. There was a short ladder leaning against the cottage wall under Dan’s feet. He let himself half drop from the window-sill as Bess came forward into the room hiding her pistol behind her back.
“Dan, you devil—”
She stood, pointing at him, her face ablaze, her eyes hard and cruel. Dan was feeling the bar warily with his hand, grinning and showing his yellow fangs, and looking at Bess like a hungry animal.
“Let me in, wench,” he said.
Bess eyed him and fingered her pistol.
“Let you in, Dan! The stair door’s bolted and the bar is up. Come at me—if you can—you coward.”
There was a sudden splintering of wood as the bar was forced in by the man’s powerful arm. He lifted his chest to the sill, and hung there straining and panting, working with his knees and feet against the wall. Bess could hear Isaac beating upon the door that closed the staircase. She moved quite close to Dan, and pointed her pistol at his head.
“Stop, or I’ll kill ye!”
Dan gave a great heave and brought his knees up on the sill. Bess fired at him on the instant, and sprang back towards the door. The ball whipped off the lobe of Dan’s right ear, the charge blackening and scorching his face. The shock lost him his balance. Bess saw him clutch at the casement frame, and go tumbling down, tearing the lattice with him as he fell. Awed for the moment, she stepped to the window and saw Dan lying in a black heap under the ladder that had toppled down on him. From below came old Ursula’s cries and Isaac’s cursing. Bess heard the cottage door open. Footsteps came through the garden under the trees. Isaac’s white head gleamed in the moonlight as he ran forward and pulled the ladder from off Dan’s body.
Bess turned to the cupboard in the corner of the room, and took out the second pistol Jeffray had given her. She went to the window again and looked out. Isaac had his arms under Dan’s shoulders; the old man was kneeling and supporting his son’s body, questioning him in a shrill, fierce voice as to whether he was badly hurt. Dan was little the worse save for a strained back and a torn ear. He scrambled up stupidly with his hand to his head, and stood looking up at Bess with savage spite in his eyes.
“Thank the Lord, you she-dog,” shouted old Isaac, his mouth working like the mouth of a man in pain, “the shot went wide of the lad’s head.”
Ursula, who had hobbled round, laid a hand on her brother’s shoulder.
“Don’t vex the girl further, Isaac,” she whimpered.
Old Grimshaw shook her hand away, and cursed Bess to her face.
“By Heaven, you shall be tamed,” he said. “Dan shall have you yet. Who gave you your shooting-irons, eh? I’ll come round and make ’em safe to-morrow; you shall give ’em up, or I’ll know why. Come, lad, pick up the ladder; we must see to your burned face.”
They took the ladder between them, and marched away in the moonlight towards the hamlet. Ursula, who had barred the door again, came up to Bess in her bedroom, querulous and frightened. The girl told her the whole truth, how Dan had loosened the window-bars in their sockets while Isaac was talking to them in the kitchen. Ursula shook her head over the treachery, cursed Dan, and tottered off to bed.
Bess did not sleep that night, but, wrapping herself in her cloak, lay down to think. The moon was sinking towards the west, flooding the little room with silvery light, and making the girl’s face seem white and wistful in the gloom. From the bed, Bess could see the towering woods melting away into dreamlands of mist and magic. All Pevensel seemed asleep, with no wind stirring. The pines about the cottage stood black and motionless under the stars. From below Bess could catch the quiet laughter of the stream in the valley running under the moonlight amid the trees.
She lay there a long while in a stupor of fierce and rebellious thought, the sense of her own loneliness deepened by the vast silence of the night. Despite her woman’s fury against Dan, she shivered and felt cold, and even the shadowy magic of Pevensel seemed full of treachery and whispering horror. Not till another morrow would she meet Jeffray at Holy Cross, and she had much to fear from Isaac and his son.
As she lay on the bed with the moonlight flooding in, the sudden, shrill cry of a bird taken by a weasel in the woods trembled up out of the silence. Bess shuddered and started up from the pillow. She caught a warning in this wild thing’s cry, an omen vouchsafed to her by savage Pevensel. White and cold about the lips, she rose up suddenly, went to the window, and looked out. She could see the broken lattice lying at the foot of the wall, and even imagined that the stains of Dan’s blood were visible upon the grass. How she hated and feared the man! The thought of his coarse face and great, heavy hands strengthened her in her passion to escape from the forest.
Turning back into the room, she put one of Jeffray’s pistols into her bosom and hid the other under the mattress of the bed. Then she buckled on her best shoes, hooked up her cloak, and drew the hood forward over her face. Very softly she crept down the stairs into the kitchen, and listened for a moment outside Ursula’s door to discover whether the old woman was awake or no. She heard the sound of deep and regular breathing within, and knew that the dame was fast asleep. The embers of the fire still glowed on the hearth, and the kitchen reeked of Isaac’s tobacco. Creeping to the cottage door, she took down the bar noiselessly and shot back the bolts. Without the world seemed built up of magic, the moonlight flooding down upon the orchards and the woods. Bess shut the door gently, passed through the garden, and half ran across the open grass-land betwixt the cottage and the forest. She took the path leading up towards the heath about the Beacon Rock, and, gathering her cloak round her, fled away into the moon-streaked shadows.
It was early in the morning when Bess, who had asked her way of a laborer trimming the hedges by the road, came down from the high lands and saw Rodenham village with its red-and-white walls and thatched roofs in the valley. The smoke ascended from the chimneys in purple threads towards the blue, and a haze of gold hung over the woods and meadows, dimming the grand outlines of the distant downs. Bess saw the priory standing apart from the village amid the green billows of its park and the shadows of its mighty trees. The place looked very solemn and stately in the morning light, and almost forbidding to her in the autocracy of its solitude. She felt much like a beggar-woman as she slipped through the lodge gates and passed under the yews that stood there in massive and shadowy repose.
Iron gates swinging on stone pillars, each topped with a carved dragon, opened upon the terrace and garden. Bess pushed in and passed on bravely towards the Tudor porch, with its massive timbers, and roses and acorns carved in oak. Each tall window of the house seemed to stare at her superciliously, and the peacocks strutting on the terrace in the sun were like so many gaudy lackeys ruffling it about her. She climbed the three steps, and laid her hand on the iron bell-pull with a fluttering feeling at the heart. How the rusty thing creaked and resisted her! Then the rod slid so vigorously in its rusty sockets that the loud and insistent clangor of the bell made Bess fancy that the whole house was startled by her boldness.
An elderly woman in a mob-cap, her hair in curl papers, opened the door to Bess. The servants had fled the house, and Peter Gladden and his wife alone remained to minister to Jeffray in his sickness. The butler was sitting by the open window of Richard’s room, watching for Surgeon Stott and listening to his master’s delirious mutterings. It was Mrs. Barbara who opened the door to Bess that morning and stared at her in some surprise. Mrs. Barbara was a sour-tempered person, very sure of her own importance; nor had the flight of her maids tended to sanctify her resentful soul.
“Well, what d’you want, eh?”
Bess colored under the woman’s curious stare. There was nothing suggestive of courtesy in Mrs. Gladden’s manner.
“I have come to see Mr. Jeffray.”
The woman’s eyes studied the girl’s person with impertinent composure. She looked at Bess’s handsome face, considered her clothes, and prepared for circumspection in her dealings with so gypsyish a wench.
“What’s your name?”
“Bess Grimshaw.”
“Grimshaw?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Pevensel.”
“And what’s your business?”
Bess’s eyes smouldered at such cross-questioning. Mrs. Barbara’s attitude was brusque and insolent. She was in the habit of bullying the girls under her, and, like an underling intrusted with some authority, she made the most of it, and mistook impertinence for dignity.
“I want to see Mr. Jeffray,” quoth Bess, quietly.
“You do, do you?”
“Mr. Jeffray knows my name.”
Mrs. Barbara’s brows contracted, and there was an unpleasant glint in her brown eyes.
“And what may your business with the squire be?” she asked, suspiciously.
Bess reddened and began to look fierce.
“My business is not yours,” she retorted. “If you will tell Mr. Jeffray that I am here he will see me.”
Mrs. Gladden drew herself up, and expressed amazement that a gypsy wench should give herself such mighty airs.
“Highty-tighty!” she exclaimed, with elevated nostrils; “are we on visiting terms at the priory? You Grimshaws may have broken Mr. Jeffray’s head, but you are not of the quality the young master receives. Come. What d’you want? Money, eh? The back door is the place for beggars.”
Bess’s natural dignity appeared to lift her out of the squabble and to set her immeasurably above Mrs. Barbara’s papered head.
“I have come to speak with Mr. Jeffray, that is all,” she said, looking very haughtily into the elder woman’s face. “I have not come to beg or to wrangle with Mr. Jeffray’s servants.”
“Servants! The impertinence of it!”
“I will bide here—till you have taken my name to your master, madam.”
Mrs. Gladden’s nose suggested the presence of some very unpleasant odor. She thrust her hands under her dirty apron, and strove to look as portentous as her fat and frowsy person would permit.
“Don’t let me have any more of your impertinence, young woman,” she said. “Mr. Jeffray’s in bed with the small-pox. There’s the long and short of it. I reckon you had better be moving.”
Bess’s face had softened of a sudden, and there was a pathetic drooping of her mouth.
“Mr. Jeffray—ill!”
“Didn’t I say so, saucy! The poor young gentleman’s quite out of his senses. Here is Mr. Gladden coming down the stairs; he’s good at persuading them as are not wanted, to go.”
But Bess did not wait for Peter Gladden’s advent. She turned away suddenly from Mrs. Barbara, and went down out of the porch with a look as of pain upon her face.
XXI
Bess passed back in her red cloak between the cedars with Mrs. Barbara’s taunts still sounding in her ears. She felt benumbed at heart, baffled and very miserable, not knowing whither to turn for shelter now that Jeffray’s promise could have no fulfilment. Mrs. Gladden’s insolence had not hurt her so much as the thought of Richard stricken down so suddenly by this disease. Had but two days passed since he had talked with her in Holy Cross, and gazed with such earnestness upon her face? As she crossed the park Bess looked back wistfully at the great house where Jeffray lay sick of the fever. Her heart waxed very tender towards the man, despite her wounded pride and Mrs. Barbara’s insolence. If only it had been her lot to wait on Jeffray and spend her desire in such sweet service! If he had only fallen sick in Ursula’s cottage and lain there to be nursed by her as she had tended him that night not long ago! She felt desperate enough for her own sake as she thought of Dan. Ursula would have discovered her flight by now, and doubtless the whole hamlet was as wise as Ursula.
Passing under the yews and out by the lodge gates, she leaned against the park walls to rest and think. She had little money in her pocket, and knew next to nothing of the world. Where should she go, and how should she come by food and shelter? The very thought of returning to Pevensel was an utter abhorrence to her soul, and now at Rodenham Priory she could win no welcome. To hide herself from Dan and Isaac, that was her whole desire. She would beg, slave, feed pigs to escape their treachery until Jeffray was recovered of his disease.
Much beset by her dreads and her dilemmas, she took the road for Rodenham village after a last look at the priory half hidden amid its trees. She felt tired and hungry, having forgotten to take even a loaf with her in her fever to be gone. Her shoes were dusty, her mouth dry, for she had not drunk since dawn, when she had taken water in her palms from a brook that ran through the woods. She would go down to the village to buy food, despite the danger that the boors might set Dan on her track if he hunted her by way of Rodenham. Then, with her strength refreshed, she could trudge on towards Rookhurst, and perhaps find refuge as a servant in some farm-house.
As Bess was passing the garden gate of the rectory above the church, she saw a fat gentleman in his shirt-sleeves weeding the gravel path that wound up to the house. The place looked very peaceful in the morning light, with its tiled gables showing above chestnuts, yews, and hollies, and a single trail of smoke ascending from one tall chimney-stack. Bess conjectured that it was the parsonage, and that the stout gentleman was the incumbent. She knew nothing much of parsons save that they preached on the ten commandments, made wedlock honest, and baptized babies. Dr. Sugg’s red face was turned towards her as she stood outside the gate looking wistfully in. The rector had a garden-trug beside him and a hoe in his right hand. He was proud of his flowers and fruit trees, and was more severe on weeds than he was on sinners.
Bess was looking at Dr. Sugg very steadfastly. Surely the old gentleman had a good-tempered face and a pair of kindly eyes that were inclined to twinkle. Why should she not lay the burden of her distress before his broad, buckled shoes, and, being a man of God, he should be able to advise her. She turned in suddenly at the gate, purposing to try the sincerity of the old gentleman’s profession.
“May I speak with you, sir?”
Dr. Sugg stood up with several daisy roots in his hand, and stared at Bess with his shrewd and genial eyes. At the first glance, with her black hair and ruddy face, she might have been taken for a gypsy. A closer scrutiny suggested a more romantic and interesting vagrant. The girl was strangely handsome, with a fine carriage and almost the air of a great lady, and Dr. Sugg always had an appreciative smile for a comely woman.
“Well, Susan, what can I do for you?”
The rector addressed all young women as “Susan,” a fatherly and comprehensive pseudonyme that mingled benignity with good-humor. Bess’s lips parted in a smile. The old gentleman’s manner pleased her, and she thought he appeared capable of being trusted.
“Are you a parson, sir?”
Dr. Sugg seemed amused by the blunt innocence of the question. He threw the daisy roots into the trug, and reached for his coat that was hanging on a neighboring laurel.
“I happen to be the rector of Rodenham, young woman,” he said, studying her with the professional eye.
“Will you give me your advice, sir?”
“My advice is at your service, my dear, for what it is worth.”
Bess had come well within the gate. She stood before the rector, with her black hair peeping out from under the hood of her cloak and her eyes fixed steadfastly on Dr. Sugg’s face. The rector had never heard a professional beggar ask him for his advice, and there was much in the girl’s manner that pleased him. He had perused her lines admiringly, and noticed the beautiful cleanliness of her clothes. It was not often that so tall and fine a girl was to be seen trudging the high-road through Rodenham.
“Well, my dear,” he said, with a shrewd smile, “how can I advise you?”
Bess’s eyes were still fixed frankly on his face. Their expression convinced the reverend gentleman that this red-mouthed Phœbe was telling the truth.
“My trouble is just this, sir,” she confessed: “My kinsfolk want to bully me into marriage against my will, and I ran away from home last night, and came to see Mr. Jeffray yonder, who had promised to be my friend.”
Parson Sugg elevated his eyebrows and noticed that Bess was blushing prettily.
“Mr. Jeffray’s ill with the small-pox,” he said.
“So they told me, sir, at the house. It was a great distress to me.”
Dr. Sugg took snuff, sneezed twice with emphasis, and glanced at Bess with a curious twinkle in his eyes.
“Are you from Pevensel, my dear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One of the Grimshaws, eh?”
Bess nodded, and watched the stolid passage of thought over the rector’s good-natured countenance.
“And are you the girl, my dear, for whom Mr. Jeffray had his head broken in the woods?”
Bess laughed and colored, her eyes brightening wonderfully.
“Mr. Jeffray saved me from my cousin Dan,” she confessed.
Dr. Sugg shook his head reprovingly, and yet smiled as though he thoroughly sympathized with Mr. Richard in the adventure. He had heard of the affair from Jeffray himself. His respect for the young squire was solid and sincere. Possibly it was this same affection for his patron and a lively liking for this forest wench that persuaded the good-natured old gentleman to interest himself in her behalf.
“So Mr. Jeffray offered to play the protector to you?” he asked.
“He is an honorable gentleman, sir.”
“Egad, you are quite right, my dear. And this would-be husband of yours, you don’t fancy him, eh?”
The sincerity of her disrelish was passioned forth on the girl’s face.
“I hate him,” she answered, hotly, “for he has tried to play many a coward’s trick by me. It was only the pistols Mr. Jeffray gave me that saved me last night. I want to hide myself, sir, till Mr. Jeffray is recovered.”
Dr. Sugg looked grave and not a little puzzled. The girl’s frank and childish trust in the master of Rodenham was certainly a charming Platonism, but one that might lead to delicate complications. Richard Jeffray might be a generous young gentleman, and a man of honor, but he had hardly arrived at that patriarchal and convincing age when romantic philanthropy becomes disinterested in the eyes of the world. Bess Grimshaw’s spirit pleased the old gentleman not a little. He was a born sportsman as well as a Christian, and was honestly concerned for the girl’s future.
“What’s your age, my dear?” he asked, settling his wig and brushing the snuff from his waistcoat.
“Two-and-twenty, sir.”
“Can you milk and cook and use your needle?”
Bess smiled and confessed to all these accomplishments.
“I would serve in a farm-house,” she said, “to get myself an honest home.”
Dr. Sugg appeared to be pondering the matter with all the gravity he could gather. That he was justified in abetting the girl’s frank spirit of independence he had no doubt at all. Besides, his efforts on her behalf could not fail to please Richard Jeffray should that gentleman recover.
“Listen to me, my dear,” he said, at length. “Farmer Pelham, of Beechhurst, needs a girl. He is an honest fellow, and his wife is a kindly body. Supposing I take my nag and see about the place for you?”
Bess looked as though she were ready to embrace Dr. Sugg and his proposal at one and the same moment.
“I should bless the chance, sir,” she said.
“That is spoken like a woman of sense.”
“I don’t mind about the pay, sir.”
Dr. Sugg twinkled and patted the girl’s shoulder.
“You leave it to me, my dear,” he said. “I like your honesty and the way you have trusted me. It is a pleasure to help those who are willing to help themselves. You can make yourself comfortable at the rectory for the day; my daughter Mary will make you welcome. There, give me a kiss, my dear, to show your good feeling.”
And Bess kissed the old gentleman, a display of gratitude that might have shocked most grievously the more straitlaced of Dr. Sugg’s parishioners.
Mary Sugg assumed an air of mild and genteel hauteur when her father brought Bess into the parlor and desired his daughter to exercise his hospitality in the girl’s behalf. Like many plain and pious young women, Mary Sugg was inclined to view beauty with suspicion and to make of virtue a Madonna of Ugliness. She conceived it to be distinctly indiscreet of her father to introduce a strange girl into the house, especially when Janet and Sarah, the housemaid and the cook, had fled the place because of the small-pox. Mary Sugg atoned for her grimness, however, by being the possessor of a kind heart and a sympathetic nature. She made Bess a gracious little courtesy, and looked shyly at the girl, who was gazing round the parlor, with its solid Dutch furniture, its bookshelves, and its prints. A tall clock ticked sententiously beside the door. The chintz-curtained windows looked out upon the lawn and flower-beds, where Dr. Sugg’s daffodils and crocuses were in bloom.
The rector took his daughter apart into the hall, and, after closing the door, told her the whole of Bess’s trouble. Dr. Sugg was a great man when giving voice to his opinions, and his daughter still believed him certain of a bishopric. Perhaps, also, it was Bess’s very virtuous disinclination to be married that impressed Miss Mary’s virgin heart. Besides, Richard Jeffray had promised the girl help, and poor Mary thought Mr. Richard one of the sweetest fellows in Christendom. Therefore, she kissed her father and declared that she approved heartily of his sentiments and his sensibility.
“Why should not the girl stay with us?” she said, of a sudden, her tired eyes brightening. “Now that Janet and Sarah have left us I should like some help, and I do not want to get a woman up from the village.”
Dr. Sugg slapped his thigh, and regarded Mary as though she were a genius.
“Bless my soul,” he said, “what a clodpoll I am, to be sure. The very thing, my dear. The wench has been clear of the fever, and if she will stay with us there is no need for me to ride to Beechhurst. Go in and talk to her yourself, Mary.”
Miss Sugg’s sallow face had flushed a little.
“To be sure,” she exclaimed, “she looks a very decent young woman, clean and capable. I am surprised, sir—”
“Surprised, Mary?” asked the rector, with an amused twinkle.
“That a girl out of Pevensel should look so neat and respectable.”
“Can any good thing come out of Nazareth, eh?”
“Yes, father.”
“Egad, many good things do originate from Nazareth, my dear—more, I imagine, than from polite Jerusalem.”
Mary Sugg returned to the parlor, and confessed with some shy courtesy to Bess that the rector himself was in need of a servant. Could Bess cook and milk and mend stockings? Bess’s eyes were fixed searchingly on Miss Sugg’s face for the moment as though probing her sincerity. Contrasts that they were, there was a gentleness and an air of quiet sympathy about the parson’s daughter that appealed instinctively to the child of the woods. She met Mary’s offer in the spirit that prompted it, and thanked her with a tremulous light in her eyes.
“Madam,” she said, with simple stateliness, holding out her hand and making poor Mary look utterly commonplace, “I thank you for your kindness and your trust in me. I will serve you with all my heart.”
There is magic in gratitude, and Mary, blushing shyly, took Bess’s hand and liked the girl unreservedly from that moment.
“My father is a kind man,” she said, a little confusedly; “he is always ready to help those who are in trouble.”
“And I see that you are his daughter, madam.”
“I hope I try to be worthy of him, my dear.”
It was a quaint sight to see Mary Sugg with her awkward little body and her ugly face mothering Bess, who could have carried her in her arms like a child. Bess seemed to become strangely sweet and gentle. Her heart had gone out to this faded, shrivelled little person with the quiet face and the pale, short-sighted eyes. She was soon talking to Mary of her life in Pevensel, and Miss Sugg’s shocked face was a study in pained propriety when she heard of Dan’s brutality. Yet Mary Sugg was a very simple and untainted young woman for all her primness, and there was a certain inevitable ardor in Bess’s personality that appealed to good women and to children.
Mary took the girl into the kitchen, brewed her some coffee, and saw that she ate an honest meal. Then she showed her the whole house—the attic that was to be her bedroom, the press where the clean linen was kept, the closet where the pans and brushes were. She gave Bess one of her own aprons, an old pair of house shoes, and a cap. Bess had much of the practical in her constitution, and, moreover, she was burning to prove her gratitude to her friends. There was to be a leg of mutton for Dr. Sugg’s dinner that day. Bess bared her brown forearms, fastened on her apron, and blessed old Ursula for having taught her to be useful. Dr. Sugg was delighted with her cooking and with the quiet and graceful way she waited at table. Mary, a perfect housewife herself, congratulated her father on their refugee’s success.
“The girl looks quite a lady,” she said. “I must say I am in love with her, though she has only been with us half a day. I trust her terrible kinsfolk will not trouble her here.”
Dr. Sugg frowned and looked bellicose.
“The authority of this house,” he answered, “is sufficient to awe the rascals. My sympathies are wholly with the girl, my dear, and I shall protect her to the best of my ability.”