Rosamond went indoors and set out the plates for her supper.
By the slough, where the spinsters of Roseborough picnicked, the reeds and rushes were now silent and still, save where the light breeze passed; though there was a trail of freshly crushed and broken ones, where something heavier than the breeze had made its way through. One individual besides the toll-man saw the black-suited, black-whiskered stranger that afternoon. Johnson, the butcher’s boy, encountered him in a lane almost directly behind the two neighbouring cottages where lived Mr. Horace Ruggle and Miss Jenny’s mother, Mrs. Hackensee. Mrs. Hackensee occupied the front of her cottage and rented the two back rooms, overlooking the river, to Dr. Frei, the young musician who had come to Roseborough within the last few weeks. “Dr. Frei, Violin Instructor” said the written placard on his door.
Johnson nursed an intense dislike for aliens; he “suspected ’em of plottin’ agin the guver-mint.” Dr. Frei was an alien, and Johnson told Mrs. Witherby’s day maid, Hannah Ann, that he suspected the black-whiskered man of being in a plot with Dr. Frei to blow up the Roseborough gaol or the bell tower “or sump’n”; because, when he turned about at the end of the lane for a second look, the stranger had disappeared! After he had left her, Hannah Ann was in a seriously overwrought condition; and so Mrs. Witherby found her when she returned from her drive. Such was Mrs. Witherby’s own temperament, that it was not long before mistress and maid were in the same state of mind. Indeed, Mrs. Witherby was obliged to forego her customary glass of stout at dinner, because Hannah Ann refused to descend alone to the cellar for it and Mrs. Witherby would not allow her daughter Corinne to accompany her. Mabel Crewe, her niece, was not afraid, but she had turned sulky and bitter under her aunt’s jibes on Wilton Howard’s account. She revenged herself, therefore, by mocking at Mrs. Witherby’s fears and by making her go without her ale.
CHAPTER XIII
Rosamond brought out the roast chicken again and made another meal of it with milk and bread and butter. His Friggets would have raised a great to-do if they had known how slimly their distinguished master’s widow had lunched and dined during their absence. She cleared away her own few dishes quickly and put the contents of her larder on the dining-room table. It looked a very respectable collation when set off with the Mearely crockery and silver.
“I shan’t lay the table,” she decided, “because they never want to sit down at the same time. They can wander in and out as they like between games, and help themselves to plates and forks and so on.”
Blake, who was gardener as well as coachman, except in the seeding season, had brought in fresh lettuce already before he had set out to Trenton; and, as His Friggets kept a supply of their very excellent mayonnaise always on hand, the big bowl of chicken salad was soon made. She took another peep at Dom Paradis’s cake, and felt a just pride in its smooth, snow-white beauty.
“If I can’t stand Villa Rose, in the end I can always go and be somebody’s cake-maker.” She consoled herself with this thought as she ran upstairs to dress herself in one of the costliest gowns in her wardrobe.