'Excellent!' said Lady Fairfax. 'The fresh air will be very beneficial.'
Marion gravely thanked the gentleman, and bending over her hand he contrived to throw into his gesture and parting look just the amount of friendliness she could bear.
'Then we will have our wine and cake together in your room,' said Lady Fairfax, passing her arm round Marion's waist. 'You can read yonder letter and tell me all about it. You have done bravely this last hour.'
CHAPTER XI
AUNT AND NIECE
Marion lay in her bed, staring through the drawn curtains into the dark night. Her window was ajar, and sweet cool airs played fitfully in the room. It was past three o'clock; soon the summer dawn would break; cocks crowed faintly in the farmyards that dotted the fields beyond Kensington village.
To and fro Marion turned, chafing at the hotness of her bed, trying to find a cool space for her body and a spot on the pillow that might tempt her throbbing head to lie still. The only ease she could gain was by turning a certain way, her eyes on the quiet vagueness of the sky. She kept telling herself there was no cause for this turmoil of mind; time after time she turned her thoughts back to the ball, thinking of the dances, of a certain melody that had pleased her so that she had sent to the fiddlers to play it again—of the men and women whose language and manners, still unfamiliar, fascinated her and gave her the pleasant feeling of being at home in a strange land. But behind their faces she saw that of Charity; running with the strains of the minuet was a phrase she could not forget—'i be afeered, Mistress Marion, mightilie afeered, and moste of al for Master Roger.'
'Who is this Charity?' Lady Fairfax had asked after she herself, at Marion's request, had read the sprawled sheet. On learning the story of the girl, and hearing of the hostile feeling of Garth for the Admiral's ward, the first instinct of Lady Fairfax had been to take the part of her own class against another that was uneducated, prejudiced, and superstitious to a degree.
'You can't get away from what is in your blood,' argued the lady. 'Those Cornish fisherfolk are the children of countless generations that have spent themselves in enmity with the French: a continual cross-channel warfare. They first hate the Devon men, because they are not Cornish, and then they hate the French because they are not English. To their way of thinking the only people who have any excuse to be alive, or have any hope to enter heaven, are English folk who have been born and bred in Cornwall.'
Marion smiled faintly. 'True enough, Aunt Constance. But you don't know Elise.'