“You forgot yourself, Margery, when you spoke just now to Mrs. Pain. I felt inclined to apologize to her for you.”
This was the climax. “Forgot myself!” echoed Margery, her face growing whiter. “No, ma’am, it’s because I did not forget myself that she’s gone out of the house without her ears tingling. I should have made ’em tingle if I had spoke out. Not that some folk’s ears can tingle,” added Margery, amending her proposition. “Hers is of the number, so I should have spent my words for nothing. If Mr. George had spent his words upon somebody else, it might be the better for us all now.”
“Margery!”
“I can’t help it, ma’am, I must have my say. Heaven knows I wouldn’t have opened my mouth to you; I’d have kept it closed for ever, though I died for it—and it’s not five minutes ago that I pretty well snapped Harriet’s nose off for daring to give out hints and to bring up your name—but it’s time you did know a little of what has been going on, to the scandal of Prior’s Ash. Meta up at Lady Godolphin’s Folly with that woman!”
“Margery!” again interrupted her mistress. But Margery’s words were as a torrent that bears down all before it.
“It has been the talk of the town; it has been the talk of the servants here; it has been the talk among the servants at Ashlydyat. If I thought you’d let the child go out with her in public again, I’d pray that I might first follow her to the grave in her little coffin.”
Maria’s face had turned as white as Margery’s. She sat as a statue, gazing at the woman with eyes in which there shone a strange kind of fear.
“I—don’t—know—what—it—is—you—mean,” she said, the words coming out disjointedly.
“It means, ma’am, that you have lived with a mist before your eyes. You have thought my master a saint and a paragon, and he was neither the one nor the other. And now I hope you’ll pardon me for saying to your face what others have been long saying behind your back.”
She turned sharply off as she concluded, and quitted the room abruptly as she had entered it, leaving Maria motionless, her breath coming in gasps, and the dewdrops cold on her brow.