“If Sir George shall then wish to do so as anxiously as he appeared to wish it to-night. Otherwise, I shall not object to delay it until the following one. I cannot remain longer: business demands my presence at home. And,” he added, lowering his voice, “I fear that speed is necessary for my father’s sake. If he does not go pretty soon, he may not be able to go at all. It is more than likely that we shall start to-morrow.”
“You cannot expect me to be ready in that space of time.”
“Certainly not. Just as you please, Lady Godolphin.”
Thomas Godolphin was shown to his room. Margery waylaid him in the corridor and entered it with him. “Did you get my epistle, Mr. Thomas?”
“It was that which brought me here now, Margery. Otherwise, I should not have come until the end of the week.”
“Then you would have come too late, sir. Yes, Mr. Thomas, I mean what I say,” added the woman, dropping her voice to solemnity. “By dreams and signs and tokens, which I have had——”
“Stay, Margery. You know that I am never very tolerant of your dreams and signs. Let them rest.”
“It’s true you are not,” answered Margery, without the least appearance of discomfiture; “and many’s the argument I would have liked to hold with you over it. But you’d never let me. When you were a young man, you’d laugh and joke it down—just as Mr. George might now, were I so foolish as to waste words upon him—and since you grew older and steadier you have just put me off as you are doing at this moment. Mr. Thomas, gifts are different in different people. They are not sent upon all alike: and the Scripture says so. One will see what another can’t. One will play beautiful music, while another can’t tell one tune from another. One man has a head for steam-engines and telegraphs, and will put ’em together as if he had a workshop inside him; and another, his own cousin maybe, can hardly tell an engine when he sees it, and couldn’t work one out if he lived to be a hundred years old. And so with other things.”
“Well?” responded Thomas Godolphin: for Margery paused, as if waiting for an answer.
“And do you suppose, Mr. Thomas, that it’s not the same with signs and warnings? It is not given to all to see or understand them. It is not given, as I take it, for many to see or understand them. But it is given to a few. And those few can no more be talked out of knowing that it’s truth, than they can be talked out of their own life, or of the skies above ’em. And, Mr. Thomas, it’s not only that those who have not the gift can’t see or believe for themselves, but they can’t be brought to believe that others may do so: and so they laugh at and ridicule it. Many a time, sir, you have laughed at me.”