Mrs. Wotnot made a curious grimace and clasped and unclasped her hands.
“Better you; much, much better, that it should be you,” she remarked.
“But ’twas thy tale, dearie; ’twas thy tale and surprisin’ discoverin’s,” protested Mrs. Fringe.
“Those that knows aren’t always those that tells,” observed the other sententiously.
“But you do think it’s proper and right the young lady should know?” said Mr. Clavering’s housekeeper.
Mrs. Wotnot nodded. “If ’taint too shameful for her, ’tis best what she’d a’ ought to hear,” said the lean woman.
Vennie became conscious at this moment that whenever Mrs. Wotnot opened her mouth there issued thence a most unpleasant smell of brandy, and it flashed upon her that this was the explanation of the singular converging of these antipodal orbits. In the absence of her master, Mrs. Wotnot had evidently “taken to drink,” and it was doubtless out of her protracted intoxication that Mrs. Fringe had derived whatever scandalous piece of gossip it was that she was now so anxious to impart.
“I’ll tell ’ee, miss,” said Mrs. Fringe, “with no nonsense-fangles and no shilly-shally. I’ll tell ’ee straight out and sober,—same as our dear friend did tell it to me. ’Tis along of Miss Romer,—ye be to understand, wot is to be confirmed this same blessed day.
“The dear woman, here, was out a-gatherin’ laurel-leaves one fine evenin’, long o’ some weeks since, and who should she get wind of, in the bushes near-by, but Mr. Luke and Miss Gladys. I been my own self ere now, moon-daft on that there lovely young man, but Satan’s ways be Satan’s ways, and none shall report that I takes countenance of such goings on. Mrs. Wotnot here, she heerd every Jack word them sinful young things did say,—and shameful-awful their words were, God in Heaven do know!
“They were cursin’ one another, like to split, that night. She were cryin’ and fandanderin’ and he were laughin’ and chaffin’. ’Twas God’s terror to hear how they went on, with the holy bare sky over their shameless heads!”