“If you don't leave the room, I must; and I shall tell my brother, Sir Richard, how you have behaved yourself; and you may rely upon it——”
But here again she is overpowered by the strong voice of her visitor.
“It was in my next place, at Mr. Crump's, I took cold in my head, very bad, Miss, indeed, looking out of window to see two fellows fighting, in the lane—in both ears—and so I lost my hearing, and I've been deaf as a post ever since!”
Alice could not resist a laugh at her own indignant eloquence quite thrown away; and she hastily wrote with a pencil on a slip of paper:—
“Please don't come to me except when I send for you.”
“La! Ma'am, I forgot!” exclaims the woman, when she had examined it; “my orders was not to read any of your writing.”
“Not to read any of my writing!” said Alice, amazed; “then, how am I to tell you what I wish about anything?” she inquires, for the moment forgetting that not one word of her question was heard. The woman makes a curtsey and retires. “What can Richard have meant by giving her such a direction? I'll ask him when he comes.”
It was likely enough that the woman had misunderstood him, still she began to wish the little interval destined to be passed at Mortlake before her journey to Yorkshire, ended.
She told her maid, Louisa Diaper, to go down to the kitchen and find out all she could as to what people were in the house, and what duties they had undertaken, and when her brother was likely to arrive.
Louisa Diaper, slim, elegant, and demure, descended among these barbarous animals. She found in the kitchen, unexpectedly, a male stranger, a small, slight man, with great black eyes, a big sullen mouth, a sallow complexion, and a profusion of black ringlets. The deaf woman was conning over some writing of his on a torn-off blank leaf of a letter, and he was twiddling about the pencil, with which he had just traced it, in his fingers, and, in a singing drawl, holding forth to the other woman, who, with a long and high canvas apron on, and the handle of an empty saucepan in her right hand, stood gaping at him, with her arms hanging by her sides.