“You always was one for thanksgiving, Mistress Benden.”
“Surely; I were an ingrate else.”
“Well, I may be a nigrate too, though I wis not what it be without ’tis a blackamoor, and I’m not that any way, as I knows: but look you, good Mistress, that’s what I alway wasn’t. ’Tis all well and good for them as can to sing psalms in dens o’ lions; but I’m alway looking for to be ate up. I can’t do it, and that’s flat.”
“The Lord can shut the lions’ mouths, Sens.”
“Very good, Mistress; but how am I to know as they be shut?”
“‘They that trust in the Lord shall not want any good thing.’” A sudden moan escaped Alice’s lips just after she had said this, the result of an attempt to move slightly. Sens Bradbridge was on her knees beside her in a moment.
“Why, my dear heart, how’s this, now? Be you sick, or what’s took you?”
“I was kept nine weeks, Sens, on foul straw, with never a shift of clothes, and no meat save bread and water, the which has brought me to this pass, being so lame of rheumatic pains that I cannot scarce move without moaning.”
“Did ever man hear the like! Didn’t you trust in the Lord, then, Mistress, an’t like you?—or be soft beds and well-dressed meat and clean raiment not good things?”
Alice Benden’s bright little laugh struck poor desponding Sens as a very strange thing.