“No, Dulcibella, indeed,” said Alice, smiling, very pale, and her eyes filled up with tears.
“I’ll frighten her no more; and that you may be sure on; and if what I told her be frightful, ’tisn’t me as made it so. Thankless work it be; but ’tisn’t her nor you I sought to please, but just to take it off my shoulders, and leave her none to blame but herself if she turns a deaf ear. It’s ill offering counsel to a wilful lass. Ye’ll excuse me, ma’am, for speaking so plain, but better now than too late,” she added, recollecting herself a little. “And can I do anything, please, ma’am, below stairs? I should be going, for who knows what that child may be a-doing all this time?”
“Thanks, very much; no, not anything,” said Alice.
And Mildred Tarnley, with a hard, dark glance at her, dropped another stiff little courtesy, and withdrew.
“Well, I never see such a one as that,” said old Dulcibella, gazing after her, as it were through the panel of the door. “You must not let her talk that way to you, my darling. She’s no business to talk up to her mistress that way. I don’t know what sort o’ manners people has in these here out o’ the way places, I’m sure; but I think ye’ll do well, my dear, to keep that one at arm’s length, and make her know her place. Nothing else but encroaching and impudence, and domineering from such as her, and no thanks for any condescension, only the more affable you’ll be, the more saucy and conceited she’ll grow, and I don’t think she likes you, Miss Alice, no more I do.”
It pains young people, and some persons always, to hear from an impartial observer such a conclusion. There is much mortification, and often some alarm.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter,” said Alice. “I don’t think she can harm me much. I don’t suppose she would if she could, and I don’t mind such stories.”
“Why should you, my dear? No one minds the like now-a-days.”
“But I wish she liked me; there are so few of us here. It is such a little world, and I have never done anything to vex her. I can’t think what good it can do her hating me.”
“No good, dear; but she’s bin here so long—the only hen in the house, and she doesn’t like to be drove off the roost, I suppose; and I don’t know why she told you all that, if it wasn’t to make your mind uneasy; and, dear knows, there’s enough to trouble it in this moping place without her riggamarolin’ sich a yarn.”