“And they’re right. I’m no papist, nor dissenter neither, but I don’t like the Whigs. They’re a low-born crew, and that’s why I don’t like ’em.”
Roger had never expected to smile, much less laugh again; but the energy with which the turnkey’s niece reviled the Whigs on account of their low birth, made him laugh in spite of himself.
Bess, who was quick of wit, divined in a moment what he was laughing at, and flushing with anger and mortification, she told him so.
“And if I say they’re low born, who should know it any better than I?” she said, bitterly. “Don’t I know what it is to be low born? Don’t people say, ‘There goes Bess Lukens, niece of Lukens, the turnkey’? And though my uncle be an honest man, yet his calling is vile, and I know it. And I would rather be well born than to have all the money in the King’s chests—that I would!”
Unshed tears were flashing in Bess’s eyes, and her red mouth was quivering. Roger was ashamed of his thoughtlessness, but Bess was still, to him, only the handsome niece of the turnkey. His reply, therefore, was an attempt to flip her under the chin (which Bess skilfully avoided) and to say,—
“Never mind, my girl. One may be well born, and very miserable, too.”
The devil did not leave Roger Egremont at once, although he had come in full panoply at short notice; but for a little while longer he alternated, coming and going fitfully. However, Roger was no longer ill, and so no longer in need of Bess Lukens’s pity and nursing. But Bess, who treated Diggory Hutchinson—an honest lad, for all he was an under-turnkey—like a dog, and whose sharp tongue and strong arm were ample protection against any man in Newgate, could not so easily put Roger out of her mind. Oftentimes she stopped in her spinning and knitting and sweeping and dusting and bent her handsome brows to listen for the sound of his footstep, or his pleasant, courtier-like voice, as he passed to and fro at the end of the corridor. But she neither saw him nor had speech with him, until, near a fortnight later, one evening just at dusk, she met him face to face in the mouth of the corridor.
Bess had been out to buy a broom, and had brought her purchase home with her. Roger was walking along immersed in black melancholy, but as Bess came into the circle of light made by the lantern on the wall, he noticed how handsome she looked, with her hood thrown back, and her face flushed with exercise. The devil in Roger Egremont made him pretend to be tipsy, and lurching forward he fell against her. Bess, with the most innocent good-will, mingled with wrath at his supposed condition, held him up; and the return he made for this was to clasp her in his arms, crying:
“Ah, my girl, you knew I was after those sweet lips of yours!” and he kissed her furiously and insultingly.
For one moment Bess stood dazed, then, commanding all her young strength, she thrust him away from her, so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered, and a fierce and well directed shove actually threw him on the floor. Then, like an active and capable general who knows how to follow up an advantage, Bess whipped out her broom, and attacking the prostrate Roger with the handle, gave him then and there the first and last beating of his life—all the time crying out,—