Chapter Fourteen.
Unexpected tidings.
When Roger Hall came home that evening, he was greeted by Christie with an amount of excited enthusiasm which he did not often hear from his little invalid daughter.
“Oh Father, Father! I have a new friend, and such a good, pleasant maid she is!”
Christie did not term her new friend “nice,” as she certainly would have done in the present day. To her ear that word had no meaning except that of particular and precise—the meaning which we still attach to its relative “nicety.”
“A new friend, forsooth?” said Christie’s father with a smile. “And who is she, sweet heart? Is it Mistress Final’s niece, that came to visit her this last week?”
“Oh no, Father! ’Tis somebody much—ever so much grander! Only think, the master’s daughter, Mistress Pandora Roberts, came with her aunt, Mistress Holland; and Mistress Holland went on to Cranbrook, and took Aunt Tabitha with her—she was here when she came—and Mistress Pandora tarried with me, and talked, till her aunt came back to fetch her. Oh, she is a sweet maid, and I do love her!”
Roger Hall looked rather grave. He had kept himself, and even more, his Christie, from the society of outsiders, for safety’s sake. For either of them to be known as a Gospeller, the name then given to the true, firm-hearted Protestants, would be a dangerous thing for their liberties, if not their lives. Pandora Roberts was the daughter of a man who, once a Protestant, had conformed to the Romanised form of religion restored by Queen Mary, and her uncle was one of the magistrates on the Cranbrook bench. Roger was sorry to hear that one so nearly allied to these dangerous people had found his little violet under the leaves where he had hoped that she was safely hidden. A sharp pang shot through his heart as the dread possibility rose before him of his delicate little girl being carried away to share the comfortless prison of his sister. Such treatment would most likely kill her very soon. For himself he would have cared far less: but Christie!