“If I don’t wed Master Dick, Nan, Pet Salt—” Nan began to mumble again, but Anny took no notice—“saith that he will carry me off without him marrying me—and, Mother, I would be wed.”
Nan paused in her muttered imprecations to look at the girl. This was a new side of the affair, and she realized the importance to the girl’s mind. She began to consider it carefully, while Anny watched her face with almost painful eagerness.
But Nan’s hatred for Pet Salt was too great to allow her to think clearly on any subject connected with her old enemy for more than two minutes at a time, and she soon broke forth into low, tense reviling.
“Look!” she said, suddenly springing up and standing between Anny and the open doorway, a tall black figure against a background of stars. “Look at me, child—do you know how old I am?—forty-three! You’re surprised? Of course, I look sixty, don’t I?—tell me—tell me.”
Anny looked at the rugged face that had evidently once been so beautiful; the light from the dip flickered over it and accentuated each wrinkle and hollow. She nodded.
“Ah!” Nan lifted her clenched fist above her head. “That is her work, the woman of hell. Once my cabin was the sweetest, cleanest, and neatest on the Island, my lips were the reddest, my hair the blackest, my smile the most prized—— Oh, that crawling filcher, would I might feel these hands about her scabby neck!”
Anny sighed. She knew it was no use to attempt to stop Mistress Swayle in this mood, so she crouched back in her corner, while the cat, which had at first objected to her, now came to hide in the folds of her kirtle. He also knew his mistress’s vagaries.
Nan went on, her voice rising higher and higher, and her words coming faster and faster until she seemed to be repeating some frenzied chant.
“She took my man—your grandsire—she stole him from me with promises of rum to rot his soul with—God curse her. I, a sweet milk lass working all day in my dairy with a flowered kirtle to my back and shoes to my feet—and she a dirty, mange-eaten quean. Oh! may the red-plague fall on her and her rat-eaten boat. And he a simple, kind-hearted lad with a liking for the spirit! Oh! that kite shall go through torments in her time! But he loved me—not her, devil baste her.”
Anny rose to her feet and the cat ran away squealing.