“Must get up!—now I like that—my master will like it—do him good to hear the word must; hasn’t known the sound since he was a creeping baby; still, and nevertheless, my sweet witch of Endor, not having a fancy to get my head broken for teaching forgotten lessons, I shan’t step from this spot till you go back to the master who sent you, and just have the goodness to say from old Turner, that we have given up all dealings with him or his imps long ago.”
“I will see the Busne,” answered the Sibyl, clenching her hand till it looked like a gnarled oak knot. “Curses rest upon you—I will see him.”
“And just add by way of private information,” said Turner, as if her last speech had escaped him entirely, “that if he has a fancy to get us into mischief, there would be wisdom in sending a younger face. It is astonishing how strong a man’s principles become, what a deal of energy is given to his conscience when temptation takes a shape like yours. The amount of morality that lies in the contemplation of a face like a withered prune, and a form like a good English faggot, is wonderful!”
My great grandame was very, very aged. You will believe it when I tell you that these jeers on her person had no effect whatever. She did not even feel that they were intended for her, but determined in her resolve to penetrate to the young Englishman, she interrupted Turner’s philosophical soliloquy with an impatient dash of her person toward the space left open at his right hand. A slight scuffle ensued, in which the gipsy buried her claw-like nails deep into the flesh of her antagonist’s right arm, while he dropped the boot and grasped her lean throat with a force that made the breath gurgle from her lips.
That instant the sound of a voice from within the Fonde arrested the combatants, and after giving a farewell twist to the old woman’s neck, and wrenching his arm from the grapple of her fingers, which fell away with a blood tinge on the nails, Turner flung her off and disappeared through a side door that opened near the entrance.
CHAPTER XI.
A TRAVELLER’S TOILET.
In a little sleeping room, whitewashed till the walls looked like a snow drift, and carpeted with thick rush matting, he found Lord Clare sitting upon the side of a low camp bed, and looking hopelessly around for the garments which we have seen fluttering upon the mulberry boughs, and in the possession of Turner. A beautiful dressing-case, with its rich apparatus of gold, lay open on a little table. Above it hung a very small and very uncertain mirror, which gave to the beholder’s face the effect of a slight paralytic shock, sending one corner of the mouth shooting up toward the eyes, and another wandering off in search of the left shoulder. Lord Clare had evidently attempted to commence his own toilet, but one glance at the mirror, which appalled him with the apparition of a maniac leering over a razor, which he was brandishing as if to cut his own throat, terminated his labors at the first stage.
“Turner, take that glass away,” said the young lord, as his servant entered, “and bring me something that will throw back the features of a Christian. This makes me look like a fiend.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” muttered the servant, “everything is going crooked with us; and perhaps the looking-glass gives back the truth nearer than we calculate.”
“What are you saying, Turner?” questioned the young lord, in that quiet, gentle tone with which very proud men are apt to address inferiors.