Her voice sounded suspiciously thick, and she smoked a short clay pipe. She was horribly dirty, and smelt of gin. Meg hardly noticed her, though at any other time she would have been disgusted.
The reins hung loose in the woman's gnarled hands, that were brown and knotted like the branches of one of the stunted trees of that country.
The donkey trotted on steadily with a responsible air. On he went through the street, where the passersby remarked on granny's companion, and where granny herself took the pipe from her lips to shout facetious observations in the broadest of dialect to her acquaintances. On into the open country again, where the view of the sky broadened, and one could see how the thunder-clouds were piled up, solid and threatening, like the battlements of a city—great purple masses, divided only in one place by a narrow red rift.
Granny pointed towards them with her whip. "Theer be a starm coomin' oop," she said. "Are yo' fleyed o' the thunder?"
Meg made no reply; she was thinking of many things past and to come. She was "fleyed"—but not of the thunder.
"An' if yo' wur th' queen hersel', yo' moight fash yersel' to answer when yo're spoke to!" cried granny with a sudden burst of fury. "Eh, I know what they all says, that ye be quality born, an' ran awa' wi' Barnabas Thorpe!—an gradely fule he wur that day!—and that yo've pined ever since. An', if yo' wur all th' quality o' th' land, theer's no call to be so high as not to hear a body as talks to 'ee—wastin' my good words, treatin' me loike th' dirt under yo' feet, who am nothin' o' th' soart! 'specially"—indignantly—"when yo're ridin' i' my donkey cart!"
"I am very sorry," said Meg, effectually roused this time. "I didn't know you were speaking to me; I was thinking of something else. Indeed,"—seeing that the excuse was likely to provoke a fresh storm,—"I didn't mean to be 'high' in the least; but,"—seizing on the point in her misfortunes most likely to appeal to granny's sympathies—"I lost my purse in the town, and it had money of my husband's in it."
"Eh!" said granny, twisting round in her seat and taking the pipe out of her mouth. "Theer's a pretty business! That do gi'e 'ee some'ut to think abeawt surely. My man 'ud ha' beaten me black and blue if I'd ha' done that; he wur free wi' his blows, Jacob wur, 'specially in his cups; but the preacher's noan o' that soart."
"No," said Meg; "he is not that sort." In a lighter mood she would have smiled at the statement. She was not afraid of physical violence. Even in her wildest terrors (and Meg's imagination was apt to become unreasonable in proportion to the overstrain on her bodily powers) she knew that that would be as impossible to Barnabas as to her own father.
Yet granny's suggestion, like Long John's story of "Maister Tummas," presented the more brutal side of life to her, and depressed her yet further. She shrank with increasing nervousness from the thought of that alien element of roughness at the farm.