Warmer and tenderer yet was the welcome in the Credence Chamber, where Aunt Joyce lay on her couch, looking as though not a day had passed since she bade them farewell. She greeted each of them lovingly until Aubrey came to her. Then she said, playfully yet meaningly,—“Who is this?”
“Aunt Joyce,” replied Aubrey, as he bent down to kiss her, “shall I say, ‘A penitent fool?’”
“Nay, my lad,” was the firm answer. “A fool is never a penitent, nor a penitent a fool. The fool hath been: let the penitent abide.”
“This is our dear, kind friend, Mr Marshall, Joyce,” said Lady Louvaine. “He is so good as to come with us, and be our chaplain at Selwick: and here is his daughter.”
“I think Mrs Joyce can guess,” said the clergyman, “that the true meaning of those words is that her Lady ship hath been so good as to allow of the same, to our much comfort.”
“Very like you are neither of you over bad,” said Aunt Joyce with her kindly yet rather sarcastic smile. “I am glad to see you, Mr Marshall; hitherto we have known each other but on paper. Is this your daughter? Why, my maid, you have a look of the dearest and blessedest woman of all your kin—dear old Cousin Bess, that we so loved. May God make you like her in the heart, no less than the face!”
“Indeed, Mistress, I would say Amen, with all mine heart,” answered Agnes, with a flush of pleasure.
There was a long discussion the next day upon ways and means, which ended in the decision that Aubrey and Hans, Faith and Temperance, with the two maids, should go forward to Selwick after a few days’ rest, to get things in order; Lady Louvaine, Edith, Lettice, Agnes, and Mr Marshall, remaining at Minster Lovel for some weeks.
“And I’m as fain as I’d be of forty shillings,” said old Rebecca to Edith. “Eh, but the mistress just opens out when you’re here like a flower in the sunlight!”
“Now, don’t you go to want Faith to tarry behind,” observed Temperance, addressing the same person: “the dear old gentlewomen shall be a deal happier without her and her handkerchief. It shall do her good to bustle about at Selwick, as she will if she’s mistress for a bit, and I’ll try and see that she does no mischief, so far as I can.”