“The fool!” said Lady Anne.
The Widow Levy nodded to each of the two ladies, as she lit the pipe again, but without speaking to them, turned to us, and said, “If the boys would meet me without my pipe, they’d not know me; or smell something odd, and guess I was on some unlawful errand.”
As she passed Berenice and me, who were standing together, she hastily added, “Keep a good heart, sweetest!—At the last push, you have one will shed the heart’s drop for ye!”
A quick, scarcely perceptible motion of her eye towards me marked her meaning; and one involuntary look from Berenice at that moment, even in the midst of alarm, spread joy through my whole frame. In the common danger we were drawn closer together—we thought together;—I was allowed to help her in the midst of the general bustle.
It was necessary, as quickly as possible, to determine what articles in the house were of most value, and to place these in security. It was immediately decided that the pictures were inestimable.—What was to be done with them? Berenice, whose presence of mind never forsook her, and whose quickness increased with the occasion, recollected that the unfinished picture-gallery, which had been built behind the house, adjoining to the back drawing-room, had no window opening to the street: it was lighted by a sky-light; it had no communication with any of the apartments in the house, except with the back drawing-room, into which it was intended to open by large glass doors; but fortunately these were not finished, and, at this time, there was no access to the picture-gallery but by a concealed door behind the gobelin tapestry of the back drawing-room—an entrance which could hardly be discovered by any stranger. In the gallery were all the plasterers’ trestles, and the carpenters’ lumber; however, there was room soon made for the pictures: all hands were in motion, every creature busy and eager, except Lady de Brantefield and her daughter, who never offered the smallest assistance, though we were continually passing with our loads through the front drawing-room, in which the two ladies now were. Lady Anne standing up in the middle of the room looked like an actress ready dressed for some character, but without one idea of her own. Her mind, naturally weak, was totally incapacitated by fear: she kept incessantly repeating as we passed and repassed, “Bless me! one would think the day of judgment was coming!”
Lady de Brantefield all the time sat in the most remote part of the room, fixed in a huge arm-chair. The pictures and the most valuable things were, by desperately hard work, just stowed into our place of safety, when we heard the shouts of the mob, at once at the back and front of the house, and soon a thundering knocking at the hall-door. Mr. Montenero and I went to the door, of course without opening it, and demanded, in a loud voice, what they wanted.
“We require the papists,” one answered for the rest, “the two women papists and the priest you’ve got within, to be given up, for your lives!”
“There is no priest here—there are no papists here:—two protestant ladies, strangers to me, have taken refuge here, and I will not give them up,” said Mr. Montenero.
“Then we’ll pull down the house.”
“The military will be here directly,” said Mr. Montenero, coolly; “you had better go away.”