“There, now!”
“-And goose flesh and flushes all over my body.”
“Dear heart-and to pass the night in this grave of a place!”
“—And by morning I shall be in a high fever: and oh! I feel I shall die of it!”
“Don’t—don’t!” The honest girl’s eyes were full of tears. “I wonder, now—” she began: and I waited, eager for her next words. “Sure, master’s at cards in the parlor, and ’ll be drunk by midnight. Shalt pass the night by the kitchen fire, if only thou make no noise.”
“But your mistress—what will she say?”
“Is in heaven these two years: and out of master’s speaking distance forever. So blow out the light and follow me gently.”
Still feigning to shiver, I follow’d her down the ladder, and through the stable into the open. The wind by this time had brought up some heavy clouds, and mass’d them about the moon: but ’twas freezing hard, nevertheless. The girl took me by the hand to guide me: for, save from the one bright window in the upper floor, there was no light at all in the yard. Clearly, she was in dread of her master’s anger, for we stole across like ghosts, and once or twice she whisper’d a warning when my toe kick’d against a loose cobble. But just as I seem’d to be walking into a stone wall, she put out her hand, I heard the click of a latch, and stood in a dark, narrow passage.
The passage led to a second door that open’d on a wide, stone-pav’d kitchen, lit by a cheerful fire, whereon a kettle hissed and bubbled as the vapor lifted the cover. Close by the chimney corner was a sort of trap, or buttery hatch, for pushing the hot dishes conveniently into the parlor on the other side of the wall. Besides this, for furniture, the room held a broad deal table, an oak dresser, a linen press, a rack with hams and strings of onions depending from it, a settle and a chair or two, with (for decoration) a dozen or so of ballad sheets stuck among the dish covers along the wall.
“Sit,” whisper’d the girl, “and make no noise, while I brew a rack-punch for the men-folk in the parlor.” She jerked her thumb toward the buttery hatch, where I had already caught the mur-mer of voices.