I did not argue, for I am aware that the best wisdom of the child comes sometimes from the silence of the parent, rather than from the speech; but I felt sure my words would come back later to Bess, and that when she had had time for reflection, her better nature would make her give up the wish to have a collection of butterflies. Whilst we thus sat on, Nana swooped down and captured Bess.
“I must wash your face and hands, miss, before going to the station,” she said tartly, and at the same time informed me that a poor woman was waiting outside in the monk’s passage, who wished to speak to me. “I can’t make head nor tail of what she wants,” said Nana, sourly.
“A pack of rubbish and not a grain of sense, that’s what we often feel about our neighbours’ sayings and doings,” I answered. “But ask her to come and see me.”
Mrs. Milner disappeared, and in a few moments reappeared, followed by a little brown, undersized woman, with a mahogany skin, and wrinkled like a walnut. Mrs. Eccles was a little hunchback, and had come from the Dingle to see me. She walked a bit lamely, and carried a stick. Mouse gave a growl, and Prince Charming, who had rolled himself up on the edge of my skirt, tumbled up with a snort, and a gruffle. I begged the poor woman not to be afraid, told her to sit on a bench close by, and asked her mission.
“’Tisn’t no flannel, no, nor no dinners neither, not even a packet of tea,” she answered. For a moment Nana returned to fetch a ribbon or a tie—some lost possession of Bess’s. On seeing her Mrs. Eccles remained silent, for, as she whispered, “’twas a private matter.” Then when Nana had disappeared, her courage returned, and she blurted out, “I knows as yer have one, for all Mr. Burbidge says. There always was one—one out alongside of the walled garden.”
I felt puzzled, but nodded and begged my old friend to tell me what it was she had come for. But a direct answer is not often to be got from the poor, you must wait for an answer, as a dear old clergyman once said to me, “as you must wait for flowers in an English spring.” So I threaded my needle with a brilliant brown, and Mrs. Eccles’s speech bubbled on, like a brook in February.
MRS. ECCLES’S MISSION
“It be in this way, for I know this place, same as the inside of my own kitchen,” she said. “Didn’t I work here fifty years agone, in the old days? I knowed this place,” she said, looking round, “afore it war a haunt of the gentry, when it was farmer folk as lived here, and when I war a servin’ wench, when I scrubbed, and cleaned, plucked geese at Yule-tide, and helped the missus in making mince-meat, and in making butter for the market. I know’d it then, and I knows it now.”
I tried to stem the old dame’s eloquence, for the time I had at her disposal was limited; but my little old guest was voluble, and I had to sit quiet to learn her mission. At last light pierced through her discourse, and I discovered that she had come down for a leaf, or a sprig, of some plant.