“I tell you, madam—yes, I must tell you all—my madness and my ruin will be completed if I am left to my father’s will. I know what is hanging over me. He is only waiting till I am of age—at Midsummer, and the year of mourning is over for poor Oliver—I am sure no one mourns for him more heartily than I—to bind me to Martha Browning. If she would only bring the plague, or something worse than smallpox, to put an end to it at once!”
“But that would make any such scheme all the more impossible.”
“Listen, madam; do but hear me. Even as children the very sight of Martha Browning’s solemn face”—Peregrine drew his countenance down into a portentous length—“her horror at the slightest word or sport, her stiff broomstick carriage, all impelled me to the most impish tricks. And now—letting alone that pock-marks have seamed her grim face till she is as ugly as Alecto—she is a Precisian of the Precisians. I declare our household is in her eyes sinfully free! If she can hammer out a text of Scripture, and write her name in characters as big and gawky as herself, ’tis as far as her education has carried her, save in pickling, preserving, stitchery, and clear starching, the only arts not sinful in her eyes. If I am to have a broomstick, I had rather ride off on one at once to the Witches’ Sabbath on the Wartburg than be tied to one for life.”
“I should think she would scarce accept you.”
“There’s no such hope. She has been bred up to regard one of us as her lot, and she would accept me without a murmur if I were Beelzebub himself, horns and tail and all! Why, she ogles me with her gooseberry eyes already, and treats me as a chattel of her own.”
“Hush, hush, Peregrine! I cannot have you talk thus. If your father had such designs, it would be unworthy of us to favour you in crossing them.”
“Nay, madam, he hath never expressed them as yet. Only my mother and brother both refer to his purpose, and if I could show myself contracted to a young lady of good birth and education, he cannot gainsay; it might yet save me from what I will not and cannot endure. Not that such is by any means my chief and only motive. I have loved Mistress Anne with all my heart ever since she shone upon me like a being from a better world when I lay sick here. She has the same power of hushing the wild goblin within me as you have, madam. I am another man with her, as I am with you. It is my only hope! Give me that hope, and I shall be able to endure patiently.—Ah! what have I done? Have I said too much?”
He had talked longer and more eagerly than would have been good for the invalid even if the topic had been less agitating, and the emotion caused by this unexpected complication, consternation at the difficulties she foresaw, and the present difficulty of framing a reply, were altogether too much for Mrs. Woodford. She turned deadly white, and gasped for breath, so that Peregrine, in terror, dashed off in search of the maids, exclaiming that their mistress was in a swoon.
The Doctor came out of his study much distressed, and in Anne’s absence the household was almost helpless in giving the succours in which she had always been the foremost. Peregrine lingered about in remorse and despair, offering to fetch her or to go for the doctor, and finally took the latter course, thereto impelled by the angry words of the old cook, an enemy of his in former days.
“No better? no, sir, nor ’tis not your fault if ever she be. You’ve been and frought her nigh to death with your terrifying ways.”