When Aline had done the same to her, they put on their bed-gowns and Audry said, “You must sleep with me to-night.” So Aline got into her bed and although they both cried a little, they were soon asleep locked in each other’s arms. The moon peeped in and lit up the picture with a streak of light, which fell where one of Aline’s beautiful hands with its delicate fingers and perfect skin lay out on the coverlet. No one but the moon saw the picture, but she perhaps understood neither its beauty nor its pathos.
CHAPTER XXI
TORTURE
THE few days before Audry’s departure ran swiftly by and Aline found herself alone. Mistress Mowbray was determined to make the most of her opportunity and devised all manner of new tasks “to curb her proud spirit,” as she phrased it. What did this child mean by coming to disturb their household, and why should she be so beautiful, a wretched pauper Scot? Of course she must think herself better than other people! “I have no doubt,” said Mistress Mowbray to herself, “that the minx spends half her time when she gets the chance, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Yes, she’s pretty, no doubt, with her saintly hypocritical face, the Devil is handsome, they say; and I am sure she is a bad one.” It was no use for people to argue with Mistress Mowbray that Aline cared not the least about her looks, and indeed, strange as it seemed, was apparently unaware of her beauty. Mistress Mowbray only retorted that that was all part of her hypocrisy. “Why should the child have such hands?” she angrily asked herself one day, just after Audry had departed, “as if it wasn’t enough that she should have a face fairer than any one else without having hands that no one could see without comment.”
So one of Eleanor Mowbray’s devices was to set Aline to clean down some old furniture with lye. Naturally this greatly injured the skin, and as the cold weather set in, she contrived that the child should always be washing something, till in a very short time the little hands were chapped and cut and in a shocking condition round the nails. When they were in this state she was set to clean brass and iron, until it was a continual torture, and yet Aline did not complain.
How she longed for Audry when she went lonely to her bed at night. If only there had been some one in whom to confide it would not have been so terrible; but day after day it was the same thing.
At last the hands became so sore that one morning in handling a pitcher, she let it fall and it was broken to atoms. This was the kind of opportunity for which Mistress Mowbray had been looking, but Aline was such a careful, thoughtful child that the chance had been long in coming. She told Aline that her punishment was that she should be confined to the house for a fortnight and in this way she knew that she would deprive her of her principal pleasure, which was to visit the people in the hamlet, particularly those who were sick.
It was no use, when Aline offered to pay for the pitcher. Mistress Mowbray would not hear of it. So the little girl would sit by the window when she was not actually being made to work and watch the oncoming winter, with the first snow on the high ground and the brown withered grasses blown by the wind. All the purple of the heather had long since gone and the moor looked sere and joyless. “But, oh, for a breath of the fresh hill-airs.” Aline gradually began to long wildly and pine for a run in the open breeze.
The longing grew to an uncontrollable desire and at last Aline, the law-abiding innocent child, could bear the injustice no longer. After all, Mistress Mowbray was not her mother and there was no absolute reason why she should obey her. Master Mowbray, she knew, would disapprove of her being kept in, and so at length she decided one afternoon to make her way into the open along the secret passage.