“He’s where he went,” lucidly explained Mrs. Bond. “It were the lady up at t’other end o’ the town, beyond the parson’s, what bought him, ma’am. Leastways her daughter did: sister to her what was once to have married Mr. Godolphin. It’s a white house.”
“Lady Sarah Grame’s,” said Maria. “Did she buy the parrot?”
“Miss did: that cross-looking daughter of her’n. She see him as she was going by my door one day, ma’am, and she stopped and looked at him, and asked me what I’d sell him for. Well, on the spur o’ the moment I said five shilling; for I’d not a halfpenny in the place to buy him food, and for days and days he had had only what the neighbours brought him; but it warn’t half his worth. And miss was all wild to buy him, but her mother wasn’t. She didn’t want screeching birds in her house, she said, and they had a desperate quarrel in my kitchen before they went away. Didn’t she call her mother names! She’s a vixen that daughter, if ever there were one. But she got her will, for an hour or two after that, a young woman come down for the parrot with the five shilling in her hand. And there’s where he is.”
“I shall have twenty parrots when I go to India,” struck in Meta.
“What a sight of food they’ll eat!” ejaculated Mrs. Bond. “That there one o’ mine eats his fill now. I made bold one day to go up and ask after him, and the two young women in the kitchen took me to the room to see him, the ladies being out, and he had his tin stuffed full o’ seed. He knowed me again, he did, and screeched out to be heerd a mile off. The young women said that what with his screeching and the two ladies quarrelling, the house weren’t bearable sometimes.”
Meta’s large eyes were open in wondering speculation. “Why do they quarrel?” she asked.
“’Cause it’s their natur’,” returned Mrs. Bond. “The one what had the sweet natur’ was took, and the two fretful ones was left. Them young women said that miss a’most drove my lady mad with her temper, and they expect nothing less but there’d be blows some day. A fine disgraceful thing to say of born ladies, ain’t it, ma’am?”
Maria, in her delicacy of feeling, would not endorse the remark of Dame Bond. But the state of things at Lady Sarah Grame’s was perfectly well known at Prior’s Ash. Sarah Anne Grame had become her mother’s bane, as Mr. Snow had once said she would be. A very terrible bane; to herself, to her mother, to all about her. And the “screeching” parrot had only added a little more noise to an already too noisy house.
Mrs. Bond curtsied herself out. She met Margery in the passage, and stopped to whisper.
“I say! how ill she do look!”