“No, ma’am.”
“Then do as I bid ye, and off ye go,” said Mrs. Tarnley, despatching her with a peremptory gesture.
So with a quaking heart, not knowing what dangers might still be lurking there, Lilly Dogger ran into the yard on her way to her bonnet, and peeped through the kitchen window, but saw nothing there in the pale gray light but “still life.”
With a timid finger she lifted the latch, and stole into the familiar passage as if she were exploring a haunted house. She had quaked in her bed as thin and far away the shrill sounds of terror had penetrated through walls and passages to her bedroom. She had murmured “Lord bless us!” at intervals, and listened, chilled with a sense of danger—associated in her imagination with the stranger who had visited her room and frighted away her slumbers. And she had jumped out of bed, and thrown on her clothes in panic, blessed herself, and pinned and tied strings, and listened, and blessed herself again; and seeing Mrs. Tarnley cross the window accompanied by some one else whom she did not then recognise, and fearing to remain thus deserted in the house more than the risk of being blown up by Mrs. Tarnley, she had followed that grim protectress.
Now, as on tiptoe she recrossed the kitchen with her straw bonnet in her hand she heard on a sudden cries of fury, and words, as doors opened and shut, reached her that excited her horror and piqued her curiosity.
She hastened, however, to leave the house, and again approached and passed by the lady and Mildred Tarnley, having tied her bonnet under her chin, and obeying Mildred’s impatient beckon, and—
“Run, lass, run. Stir your stumps, will ye?”
She started at a pace that promised soon to see her across Cressley Common.
Old Mildred saw this with comfort. She knew that broad-shouldered, brown-eyed lass for a shrewd and accurate messenger, and seeing how dangerous and complicated things were growing, she was glad that fortune had opened so short and sharp a way of getting rid of the troubler of their peace.
“Come in, ma’am, ye’ll catch your death o’ cold here. All’s quiet by this time, and I’ll make the kitchen safe against the world; and Mr. Charles is in the house, and Tom Clinton up, and all safe—and who cares a rush for that blind old cat? Not I for one. She’ll come no nonsense over Mildred Tarnley in her own kitchen, while there’s a poker to rap her ower the pate. Hoot! one old blind limmer; I’d tackle six o’ her sort, old as I am, and tumble ’em one after t’other into the Brawl. Never ye trouble your head about that, ma’am, and I’ll bolt the door on the passage, and the scullery door likewise, and lock ’em if ye like; and we’ll get down old Dulcibella to sit wi’ ye, and ye’ll be a deal less like to see that beast in the kitchen than here. There’s Miss Crane,” by which title she indicated old Dulcibella, “a lookin’ out o’ her window. Ho! Miss Crane—will ye please, Miss Crane, come down and stay a bit wi’ your mistress?”