The smile left her father's face as he listened to this, and he shook his head gravely. And when she finished, he said, as though to himself, "'T is the enemies in one's own household that are ever the most dangerous." Then rising, he added, "Come with me, Dot, while I speak first to Tyntie."
The old Indian woman had been devoted to the interests of the family since forty years before, when Joseph Devereux found her—a beaten, half-starved child of ten—living with her drunken father in a wretched hut on the outskirts of the town, and brought her to his own house for his wife to rear and instruct. And because of her idolatrous love for her benefactor and his family, she had endured patiently the exacting tyranny of Aunt Penine, whom she detested.
Her tall, spare figure was now moving about her domain with a curious dignity inseparable from her Indian birth; but she paused in what she was doing the moment her master and his daughter appeared at the door, and remained facing them in respectful silence.
She was alone, the men having gone off to their duties about the farm, and the maids to the dairy, or to the housework above stairs.
"I desire to ask you, Tyntie," her master began, addressing her with the same grave courtesy he would have used in speaking to the best-born lady in the land, "if, since I forbade the making or using o' tea in my house, any has been brewed?"
"Yes, master," she answered without any hesitancy; and a sly look, as of revenge, crept into her black eyes.
"How dared ye do such a thing?" he demanded, his face severe with indignation.
"I never did it," was her laconic reply.
"Then who did? I command ye to make a clean breast o' the matter." And he struck his stick peremptorily upon the floor, while Dorothy, awed by the unusual anger showing in his voice and bearing, drew a little away from him.
"It was Mistress Penine brewed the tea, for her own drinking." And Tyntie showed actual pleasure in being thus enabled to expose her oppressor.