Mrs. Mudgley looked a little scared at being left without support, but by the time she had poured out a glass of her wine for the guest, and he had tasted it, and said how good it was, and had asked her how it was made, she began to forget his exalted status, and even allowed herself to be persuaded to sit down in a chair opposite him.
He said: “Moffat has been telling me about the Five-acre field, I am sorry my agent would not let your son buy it, but, you see, he has had to be so very careful while I was a minor.”
She murmured something about her son’s being able to give a fair price for it.
“Well, I think I shall not sell it to him,” said the Duke. “I should like to give it to his bride for her dowry.”
“She looked at him in a puzzled way. “Your Grace is very good but—”
“Mrs. Mudgley, I didn’t come for that reason, but to ask you if you recall a girl named Belinda?”
She jumped. “Belinda!” she exclaimed. “Yes, and indeed I do, your Grace! Jasper was that taken with her he’ll not look at another wench! Poor thing, it wasn’t what I wished for him, sir, but seeing him so set on her, and him no more changeable than his father was before him, I would have let him wed her, and said naught, for she was so pretty you couldn’t but compassion her, and good-natured besides, even if she hadn’t much sense in her head, which dear knows she hadn’t! But she ran off from the woman she was apprenticed to, and try as he would my boy could never discover what had become of her. Why, sir, it couldn’t be that you know where she is?”
“Yes, I do know,” he replied. “She fell into the hands of a plausible rogue, who wished to use her for his own ends, and I think she has been very unhappy since she ran away from Bath, But although she has been drifting about the country, and is a very silly girl, I am quite sure she is still quite an innocent girl.” He paused. “I think I ought to tell you all I know of her,” he said, meeting her startled blue eyes candidly. “You won’t judge her harshly. I believe, and—and it would not be right not to tell you!”
She looked anxiously at him, but said nothing. But as he gently unfolded Belinda’s story to her the anxiety faded. She shook her head over it often, and clicked her tongue in censure, but at the end sighed, and said: “It all comes of her being a foundling, your Grace, and no one to bring her up right. Not that they don’t do their best at the Foundling Hospital, I’msure, but it’s not the same, and never could be. It’s like as if the poor children don’t have the feelings they would with homes of their own, and folks to care for them. It always seemed to me that Belinda was just like that leaf that’s just blown in through the door, sir, cast about she didn’t know where, and nothing to hold to, if your Grace takes my meaning.” He nodded. “I never thought she was a bad girl, for all the silly notions she had in her head.”
“No, that I know she is not,” he replied. “But she has the most dreadful way of going off with anyone who offers to give her silk dresses, or trinkets, I can’t deny!”