“And again, I say, Tom, if ever ye was quick, be quick now,” and she clapped her lean hand down on his shoulder with a sort of fierce shake; “and if ever ye trod soft, go softly now, mind.”
Tom, who was scratching his head, and staring in her face, nodded.
“And mind you, the kitchen way, and afraid o’ slips, say ye the message over again to me?”
This he did, glibly enough.
“Here, light your candle from this, and if ye fail your master now, never call yourself man again.”
Having thus charged him, she went softly from this nook with its slanting roof, and thinking of the thankless world, and all the trouble her old bones and brain were put to, she lost her temper, at the foot of the great staircase, and was near turning back again to the kitchen, or perhaps whisking out of the door herself, and marching off to Cressley Common to meet her master, and shock and scare him all she could, and place her resignation, as more distinguished functionaries sometimes do theirs, in the hands of her employer, to prove his helplessness and her own importance, and so assert herself for time past and to come.
Her interview with Tom had not occupied much time. She knocked at the Vrau’s door, and entering, found that person at the close of a greedy repast.
Emotions of fear, I suppose, disturb the appetite, much more than others. Not caring one farthing about Charles, she did not grieve at his infidelity; taking profligacy for granted as the rule of life, it did not even shock her. But she was stung with a furious pang of jealousy, for that needs no love, being in its essence the sense of property invaded, supremacy insulted, and self despised. In this sort of jealousy there is neither the sublimity of despair nor the pathos of sorrow, but simply the malice, fury, and revenge of outraged egotism.
There she sat, unconscious of the glimmer of the firelight, feeding as a beast will bleeding after a blow. Beast she was, with the bestial faculty of cherishing a long revenge, with bestial treachery and seeming unconcern.
“Ho oh! you’ve come back,” she cried, with playful reproach, “cruel old girl! you leave your poor vrau alone, alone among the ghosts—now, sit down, are you sitting? and tell me everything, and all the news—did you bring a little brandy or what?”