Starvecrow Farm Part 2

"Certainly," the landlady answered. She was a burly, red-faced, heavy-browed woman. "But you have come some way, ma'am. Will you not take supper with the gentleman?"

"No."

He interposed.

"At least let us go in!" he repeated pettishly. And there was an agitation in his tone and manner not easy to explain, except on the supposition that in some way she had thwarted him. "We do not want to spend the night on the road, I suppose?"

She did not reply. But none the less, as she followed Mrs. Gilson to the door, was she wondering what ailed him. She was unsuspicious by nature, and she would not entertain the thought that he wished her to act otherwise than she was acting. What was it then? Save for a burly man in a red waistcoat who stood in a lighted doorway farther along the front of the inn, and seemed to be watching their movements with lazy interest, there were only the people of the inn present. And the red-waistcoated man could hardly be in pursuit of them, for, for certain, he was a stranger. Then what was it?

She might have turned and asked her lover; but she was offended and she would not stoop. And before she thought better of it--or worse--she had crossed the threshold. A warmer air, an odour of spices and lemons and old rum, met her. On the left of the low-browed pa.s.sage a half-open door offered a glimpse of s.h.i.+ning gla.s.s and ruddy firelight; there was Mrs. Gilson's snuggery, sometimes called the coach office. On the right a room with a long table spoke of coaching meals and a groaning board. From beyond these, from the penetralia of kitchen and pantry, came faint indications of plenty and the spit.

A chambermaid was waiting at the foot of the narrow staircase to go before them with lights; but the landlady took the candles herself, and dismissed the woman with a single turn of the eye. A habit of obedience to Mrs. Gilson was the one habit of the inn, the one common ground on which all, from Tom Gilson to the smallest strapper in the stable, came together.

The landlady went ponderously up before her guest and opened the door of a dimity-hung chamber. It was small and simple, but of the cleanest. Hid in it were rosemary and lavender; and the leafless branches of a rose-tree whipped the diamond panes of the low, broad window. Mrs. Gilson lighted the two wax candles--"waxes" in those days formed part of every bill but the bagman's. Then she turned and looked at the girl with deliberate disapproval.

"You will take nothing, ma'am, to eat?" she said.

"No, thank you," Henrietta answered. And then, resenting the woman's look, "I may as well tell you," she continued, holding her head high, "that we have eloped, and are going to be married to-morrow. That is why I wished to be put in your charge."

The landlady, with her great face frowning, continued to look at the girl, and for a moment did not answer.

At length, "You've run away," she said, "from your friends?"

Henrietta nodded loftily.

"From a distance, I take it?"

"Yes."

"Well," Mrs. Gilson rejoined, her face continuing to express growing disapproval, "there's a stock of fools near and far. And if I did my duty, young lady, there'd be one who would likely be thankful all her life." She took the snuffers and slowly and carefully snuffed the two candles. "If I did my duty, I'd lock you up and keep you safe till your friends came for you."

"You are insolent," the girl cried, flaming up.

"That depends," Mrs. Gilson retorted, with the utmost coolness. "Fine feathers make fine birds. You may be my lady, or my lady's maid. Men are such fools--all's of the best that's red and white. But I'm not so easy."

Henrietta raised her chin a little higher.

"Be good enough to leave the room!" she said.

But the stout woman held her ground.

"Not before I've said what I have to say," she answered. "It is one thing, and one thing only, hinders me doing what I ought to do, and what if you were my girl I'd wish another to do. And that is--your friends may not want you back. And then, to be married tomorrow is like enough the best you can do for yourself! And the sooner the better!"

Henrietta's face turned scarlet, and she stamped on the floor.

"You are a wicked, insolent woman!" she said. "You do not know your place, nor mine. How dare you say such things to me? How dare you? Did you hear me bid you leave the room?"

"Hoity-toity!"

"Yes, at once!"

"Very good," Mrs. Gilson replied ponderously--"very good! But you may find worse friends than me. And maybe one of them is downstairs now."

"You hateful woman!" the girl cried; and had a glimpse of the landlady's red, frowning face as the woman turned for a last look in the doorway. Then the door closed, and she was left alone--alone with her thoughts.

Her face burned, her neck tingled. She was very, very angry, and a little frightened. This was a scene in her elopement which antic.i.p.ation had not pictured. It humiliated her--and scared her.

To-morrow, no doubt, all would be well; all would be cheerfulness, tenderness, suns.h.i.+ne; all would be on the right basis. But in the meantime the sense of forlornness which had attacked her in the chaise returned on her as her anger cooled, and with renewed strength. Her world, the world of her whole life up to daybreak of this day, was gone forever. In its place she had only this bare room with its small-paned cas.e.m.e.nt and its dimity hangings and its clean scent. Of course _he_ was below, and he was the world to her, and would make up a hundredfold what she had resigned for him. But he was below, he was absent; and meantime her ear and her heart ached for a tender word, a kind voice, a look of love. At least, she thought, he might have come under her window, and whistled the air that had been the dear signal for their meetings. Or he might have stood a while and chatted with her, and shown her that he was not offended. The severest prude, even that dreadful woman who had insulted her, could not object to that!

But he did not come. Of course he was supping--what things men were!

And then, out of sheer loneliness, her eyes filled, and her thoughts of him grew tender and more humble. She dwelt on him no longer as her conquest, her admirer, the prize of her bow and spear, subject to her lightest whim and her most foolish caprice; but as her all, the one to whom she must cling and on whom she must depend. She thought of him as for a brief while she had thought of him in the chaise. And she wondered with a chill of fear if she would be left after marriage as she was left now. She had heard of such things, but in the pride of her beauty, and his subjection, she had not thought that they could happen to her. Now---- But instead of dwelling on a possibility which frightened her, she vowed to be very good to him--good and tender and loyal, and a true wife. They were resolutions that a trifling temptation, an hour's neglect or a cross word, might have overcome.

But they were honest, they were sincere, they were made in the soberest moment that her young life had ever known; and they marked a step in development, a point in that progress from girlhood to womanhood which so few hours might see complete.

Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson had returned to her snuggery, wearing a face that, had the lemons and other comforts about her included cream, must have turned it sour. That snuggery, it may be, still exists in the older part of the Low Wood Inn. In that event it should have a value.

For to it Mr. Samuel Rogers, the rich London banker, would sometimes condescend from his apartments in the south gable; and with him Mr.

Kirkpatrick Sharp, a particular gentleman who sniffed a little at the rum; or Sir James Mackintosh, who, rumour had it, enjoyed some reputation in London as a writer. At times, too, Mr. Southey, Poet Laureate elsewhere, but here Squire of Greta Hall, would stop on his way to visit his neighbour at Storrs--no such shorthorns in the world as Mr. Bolton's at Storrs; and not seldom he brought with him a London gentleman, Mr. Brougham, whose vanity in opposing the Lowther interest at the late election had almost petrified Mrs. Gilson. Mr. Brougham called himself a Whig, but Mrs. Gilson held him little better than a Radical--a kind of cattle seldom seen in those days outside the dock of an a.s.size court. Or sometimes the visitor was that queer, half-moithered Mr. Wordsworth at Rydal; or Mr. Wilson of Elleray with his great voice and his homespun jacket. He had a sort of name too; but if he did anything better than he fished, the head ostler was a Dutchman!

The visits of these great people, however--not that Mrs. Gilson blenched before them, she blenched before n.o.body short of Lord Lonsdale--had place in the summer. To-night the landlady's sanctum, instead of its complement of favourite guests gathered to stare at Mr.

Southey's last order for "Horses on!" boasted but a single tenant.

Even he sat where the landlady did not at once see him; and it was not until she had cast a log on the dogs with a violence which betrayed her feelings that he announced his presence by a cough.

"There's the sign of a good house," he said with approval. "Never unprepared!--never unprepared! Come late, come early--coach, chaise, or gig--it is all one to a good house."

"Umph!"

"It is a pleasure to sit by"--he waved his pipe with unction--"and to see a thing done properly!"

"Ay, it's a pleasure to many to sit by," the landlady answered with withering sarcasm. "It's an easy way of making a living--especially if you are waiting for what doesn't come. Put a red waistcoat on old Sam the postboy, and he'd sit by and see as well as another!"

The man in the red waistcoat chuckled.

"I'm glad they don't take you into council at Bow Street, ma'am!" he said.

"They might do worse."

"They might do better," he rejoined. "They might take you into the force! I warrant"--with a look of respectful admiration--"if they did there's little would escape you. Now that young lady?" He indicated the upper regions with his pipe. "Postboys say she came from Lancaster. But from where before that?"

"Wherever she's from, she did not tell me!" Mrs. Gilson snapped.

"Ah!"

"And what is more, if she had, I shouldn't tell you."

"Oh, come, come, ma'am!" Mr. Bishop was mildly shocked. "Oh, come, ma'am! That is not like you. Think of the King and his royal prerogative!"

"Fiddlesticks!"

Mr. Bishop looked quite staggered.

"You don't mean it," he said--"you don't indeed. You would not have the Radicals and Jacobins ramping over the country, shooting honest men in their shops and burning and ravaging, and--and generally playing the devil?"