‘There’s a great change come over Miss Argemone, sir. She used not to be so ready to start out at midnight to visit dying folk. A blessed change!’
Lancelot thought so too, and he thought that he knew the cause of it.
Argemone’s appearance, and their late conversation, had started a new covey of strange fancies. Lancelot followed them over hill and dale, glad to escape a moment from the mournful lessons of that evening; but even over them there was a cloud of sadness. Harry Verney’s last words, and Argemone’s accidental whisper about ‘a curse upon the Lavingtons,’ rose to his mind. He longed to ask Tregarva, but he was afraid—not of the man, for there was a delicacy in his truthfulness which encouraged the most utter confidence; but of the subject itself; but curiosity conquered.
‘What did Old Harry mean about the Nun-pool?’ he said at last. ‘Every one seemed to understand him.’
‘Ah, sir, he oughtn’t to have talked of it! But dying men, at times, see over the dark water into deep things—deeper than they think themselves. Perhaps there’s one speaks through them. But I thought every one knew the story.’
‘I do not, at least.’
‘Perhaps it’s so much the better, sir.’
‘Why? I must insist on knowing. It is necessary—proper, that is—that I should hear everything that concerns—’
‘I understand, sir; so it is; and I’ll tell you. The story goes, that in the old Popish times, when the nuns held Whitford Priors, the first Mr. Lavington that ever was came from the king with a warrant to turn them all out, poor souls, and take the lands for his own. And they say the head lady of them—prioress, or abbess, as they called her—withstood him, and cursed him, in the name of the Lord, for a hypocrite who robbed harmless women under the cloak of punishing them for sins they’d never committed (for they say, sir, he went up to court, and slandered the nuns there for drunkards and worse). And she told him, “That the curse of the nuns of Whitford should be on him and his, till they helped the poor in the spirit of the nuns of Whitford, and the Nun-pool ran up to Ashy Down.’”
‘That time is not come yet,’ said Lancelot.