CHAPTER VI
MISS GRIP
She is active, stirring, all fire,
Cannot rest, cannot tire.
Browning.
Within ten days after the despatch of the doctor’s letter it was answered in person by the colonel’s maiden aunt, who, after many misadventures, reached Promontory Hall in the afternoon of a very bitter cold January day.
Miss Agrippina de Crespigney, called by her familiars Miss Grip, was a slight, wiry little woman, with a dark skin, sharp nose and chin, small, keen, brilliant black eyes, tightly curled, bright black hair, and a trim figure, clothed in a close black cashmere gown, with stiff white linen collar and cuffs—a tough little body she was, whose sixty years of life’s hard buffeting had not seemed to have saddened, weakened or in any other way aged, but rather matured, hardened and strengthened.
For now, in the very depth of one of the hardest winters that ever was known here, she had undertaken an arduous journey of more than twelve hundred miles, from the green savannahs of the “Sunny South” to the frozen regions of the icy North, traveling without rest, both day and night, by railroads, stage-coaches, and tavern hacks, and at length arrived at her destination, none the worse for her performance, without showing the slightest sign of suffering from cold or from fatigue.
The last half-day of her hard week’s journey had been peculiarly trying. She had reached St. Inigoes by stage-coach, early in the morning. After a hasty breakfast she had started in the springless carryall belonging to the inn, for the Promontory. When she reached the shore she had to wait hours there for the tide to ebb before she could cross over the neck of land that connected the island cape to the main.
Even then the passage was difficult and dangerous from the piled up blocks of ice that lay across the road.
“I really thought that I was coming to a habitable part of the globe, at least; but this is Nova Zembla! Just Nova Zembla and nothing else! A waste fragment of a continent, flung out as useless into an arctic sea!” said Miss Grip, as the old carriage pitched and tumbled along the narrow ice-encumbered isthmus towards the snow-clad promontory.