CHAPTER XVII.
The parlor at Grocombe Vicarage was but a small room and a shabby one. There was a drawing-room which was the admiration of the parish into which all visitors were shown, but Mrs. Hill and her daughters had too much respect for it to use it commonly; and the centre of their domestic life was the parlor, where all their makings and mendings were done, and where Agnes did not disdain to boil the eggs in the morning and make the toast for tea, both of which operations were so much better done, she thought, when “you did them yourself.” She had been making a dress for her mother; indeed, the very dress in which Mrs. Hill intended to appear “at the ceremony,” and the large old sofa which stood between the door and the window was rendered unavailable for all the ordinary uses of a sofa by having the materials of this dress stretched out upon it. Mary was in a chair by the fire with a white knitted shawl wrapped round her, much oppressed with her cold. There was a little tea kettle upon the old-fashioned hob of the grate. It may be supposed with what a start of discomposure and vexation the invalid of the moment started up when the door of this sanctuary was flung open and the visitors appeared. Fearful under any circumstances would have been the sight of Letitia to Mary at this moment, but in the drawing-room she might at least have been kept at arm’s length. She stumbled to her feet with a cry; her nose was red, her eyes were streaming, and the feverish misery of her cold depressed any spirit with which she might have met this invasion. Letitia on the other hand swept in like an army, her head high, her hazel eyes blazing like fire, full of the energy of wrath. She was a small woman, but she might have been a giantess for the effect she produced. After her there came a personage really large enough to fill the little parlor, but who produced no such effect as Letitia, notwithstanding that she swept down a rickety table with the wind of her going as she hobbled and halted in. But Mary recognized with another thrill of alarm the Dowager Lady Frogmore, and felt as if her last day had come.
Letitia swept in and did not say a word till she had reached the chair which Mary had hurriedly vacated. She had the air of bearing down upon her unfortunate friend, who retreated towards the only window which filled the little room with cold wintry light. “Well!” Mrs. Parke cried, as she came to a sudden pause, facing Mary with a threatening look. “Well!” But it was ill she meant.
“Well,—Letitia,” cried poor Mary, faintly.
“I have come to know if it was you that wrote me that disgraceful letter. Could it be you? Tell me, Mary, it’s all some terrible mistake, and that I have not lost my friend.”
“Oh, Letitia! You have lost no friend. I—I hope—we shall always be friends.”
“Did you write that letter?” said Letitia, coming a step nearer. “You—that I trusted in with my whole heart—that I took out of this wretched place where you were starving, and made you as happy as the day is long. Was it you—that wrote to me like that, Mary Hill?”
Mary was capable of no response. She fell back upon the window, and stood leaning against it, nervously twisting and untwisting her shawl.
“Letitia,” said the dowager, from behind, “don’t agitate yourself—and me: tell this person that it can’t go any further: we won’t allow it, and that’s enough. We’ve come here to put a stop to it.” Lady Frogmore emphasized what she said with the stamp of a large foot upon the floor. Her voice was husky and hoarse by nature, and she was out of breath either with fretting or with the unusual rapidity of motion, which had brought her in like a heavy barge, tugged in the wake of a little bustling steamboat. She cast a glance round to see if there was a comfortable chair, and dropped heavily into that which was sacred to the vicar on the other side of the fire, from which she looked round, contemplating the shabby parlor and the figure of Mary in her shawl against the window. “We’ve come—— to put a stop to it,” she repeated in her deep voice.
Now Mary, though held by many bonds to Letitia, had at the bottom of her mild nature a spark of spirit—and it flashed through her mind involuntarily that it was she who would soon be Lady Frogmore, and that this large disagreeable woman was only the dowager. She put a stop to it! So impudent a threat gave Mary courage. “I don’t know,” she said, “who has any business to interfere; and I don’t think there is anyone who has any right. I don’t say that to you, Letitia. You are not like anyone else. I very much wish—oh, if you would only let me! to explain everything to you.”