“But dear me, Miss Price—as she is not even a relation!”
“A relation, what’s that? A girl that you’ve brought up is more than a relation,” cried the dressmaker, forgetting her manners. And she made up her patterns tremulously in a little bundle, and hurried out with the briefest leavetaking, which was not civil, Mrs. Pennithorne said indignantly. But Miss Price, in her way, was as important as the Vicar’s wife herself, being alone in her profession, and enjoying a monopoly. It is possible to be rude, when you are a monopolist, without damage to your trade; but this, to do her justice, was not the motive which actuated the little dressmaker, who, in her nature, was anxiously polite, and indisposed to offend any one; but the news she had heard was too much for all her little decorums. She made a long round out of her way to pass by the Castle, though she could scarcely tell why she did so—nor it was not the children that were most in her mind. Indeed she scarcely remembered them at all, in her excitement of pain and hot grief which took the shape of a kind of fiery resentment against life and nature. Children! what was the good of the children—helpless things that took a woman’s life, and made even the rest of death bitter to her, wringing her heart with misery to leave them after costing her her life! She was an old maid not by accident, but by nature; and what were a couple of miserable little children in exchange for the life of Lily! But when, not expecting to see them, not thinking of them save in this bitter way, Miss Price saw the two children at the door of the hall, another quick springing sensation rose suddenly in her hasty soul. She went slowly past, gazing at them, trying to say to herself that she hated the sight of them, Lily’s slayers! But her kind heart was too much for her quick temper, and as soon as they were out of sight, the little dressmaker sat down by the wayside and cried, sobbing like a child. Little dreadful creatures, who had worn their mother to death, and killed her in her prime! Poor little forlorn orphans, without a mother! She did not know which feeling was the warmest and strongest. But she reached home so shaken between the two emotions, that her present assistant, who filled the place to which Miss Price had hoped to train Lily, and who was a good girl with no nonsense in her head, fully intending to go through with the business, was frightened by the appearance of her principal, who stumbled into the little parlour all garlanded with paper patterns, with tremulous step and blanched cheeks, as if she had seen a ghost.
“Something’s to do!” cried the girl.
Miss Price made no immediate reply, but sank into a chair to get her breath.
“Oh nothing; nothing you know of,” she said at last, “nothing that need trouble you;” and then after a pause, “nothing that will warn you even, not one of you, silly things. You’d all do just the same to-morrow, though it was to cost you your lives.”
“I’ll run and get you a cup of tea,” said Sarah, which showed her to be a young woman of sense. Where lives the woman to whom this cordial, promptly and as it were accidentally administered, does not do good? Miss Price gradually recovered herself as she sipped the fragrant tea, and told her story with many sighs and lamentations, yet not without a certain melancholy pleasure.
“If girls would only think,” she said; “if they would take a warning; but ne’er a one of you will do that. You think it’s grand to marry a gentleman; but it would be far better to go through with the business like I’ve done, far better! though you’ll never think so.”
Sarah was respectfully sympathetic; she shook her head with a look of awe and melancholy acquiescence; but nevertheless she did not think so. She was only twenty, and thirty-seven was a good age. To marry a gentleman, even at the risk of dying at thirty-seven like Lily, was better than living till sixty like Miss Price; but she did not say so. She acquiesced, and even cried over the lost Lily, whom she had never seen, with the easy emotion of a girl. She herself meant sincerely to go through with the business; but anyhow Sarah was as much excited by the news as heart could desire. Miss Price was very determined that it should not be talked of, that the story should not be spread in the village. “Don’t let them say again it came from us,” she said; but however that might be, before the next morning it had spread through the parish, and beyond the parish. Such things get into the atmosphere. What can conceal a secret? It is the one thing certain to be found out, and which every one is bound to know. There was nothing else talked about in the cottages or when neighbours met, for some days. The men talked of it over their beer, even, in the public-houses. “She were a bonnie lass,” the elder ones said; and all the girls in the district felt that they individually might have been Lily, and felt sad for her. The children (who could not be hid) were followed by eager looks of curiosity when they appeared, and the resemblance of Lilias to her mother was too remarkable not to strike every one who had known her; and the entire story which had excited the district so deeply in its time, and which, with its mixture of all the sentiments which are most interesting to humanity, was almost as exciting still as ever, was retold, a hundred times over, for the benefit of the younger generation. In these lower regions, as was natural, the interest all centred in the beautiful girl, who, though “come of wild folk,” and not even an appropriate bride for a well-to-do hopeful of the village, had “the offer of” two gentlemen, one the young lord, and the other the young squire. Had such fortune ever come before to a lass from the fells? How she had been courted! not as the village lovers wooed with a sense of equality, at least, if not perhaps something more; but John Musgrave and young Lord Stanton had thought nobody in the world like her. And the young lord, poor fellow! had even broken his word for her, a sin which was but a glory the more to Lily in the eyes of the village critics—however bitterly it might have been condemned had his forsaken bride been a village maiden too. That this rivalry should have gone the length of blood, all for Lily’s sweet looks, was a thing the middle-aged narrators shook their heads over with many a moral, “You see what the like of that comes to, lasses,” they said. But the lasses only put their heads closer, and felt their hearts beat higher. To be fought for, to be died for! It was terrible, no doubt, but glorious. “Such things never happen nowadays” they said to themselves with a sigh.
And the news did not stop down below in the plain, but mounted with the winds and the clouds, and reached lone places in the fells, where it raised a wilder excitement still—at least in one melancholy and solitary place.