“Will you obey me if I give you a chance?”
“As you please, ma’am. You’re stronger than me—that I know too well, and wiser than me, I know too well also. And, as for being my own master, I’ve fared ill enough with that as yet. So whatever your ladyship pleases to order me; for I’m beat, and that’s the truth.”
“Be it so then—you may come out. But remember, disobey me again, and into a worse place still you go.”
“I beg pardon ma’am, but I never disobeyed you that I know of. I never had the honour of setting eyes upon you till I came to these ugly quarters.”
“Never saw me? Who said to you, Those that will be foul, foul they will be?”
Grimes looked up; and Tom looked up too; for the voice was that of the Irishwoman who met them the day that they went out together to Harthover. “I gave you your warning then: but you gave it yourself a thousand times before and since. Every bad word that you said—every cruel and mean thing that you did—every time that you got tipsy—every day that you went dirty—you were disobeying me, whether you knew it or not.”
“If I’d only known, ma’am—”
“You knew well enough that you were disobeying something, though you did not know it was me. But come out and take your chance. Perhaps it may be your last.”
So Grimes stepped out of the chimney, and really, if it had not been for the scars on his face, he looked as clean and respectable as a master-sweep need look.
“Take him away,” said she to the truncheon, “and give him his ticket-of-leave.”