"I beg your pardon, Barbara: forgive me; and think, that if my mind sometimes takes a crooked turn, it is the fault of my damnable body!"
"Do not swear; it is the profaneness of your words, and, I fear me too truly, of your life also, that hurts me. Oh, Robin! do tell me who my father is, that I may find him, and have some heart to lean upon that will not always cause me tears. My lady is ever sad, and you are ever wayward and uncertain: I am a double orphan; and were it not for the consolation afforded me by better thoughts, should be most miserable."
"Forgive me, girl, forgive me; but every one alludes to this cursed deformity, and it is ill to bear—" said Robin, walking by her side.
"I never alluded to it, never even thought of it," replied Barbara, sobbing: "if the voice and the eye is kind, and, above all, if the face become familiar, it is one, all one, whether the features be formed according to beauty or otherwise. I never thought of looking into little Crisp's face, when he licked my hand but now; I only felt that the creature loved me."
"Crisp is no more a beauty than his master," observed Robin, patting the dog, who leaped to the caress: "but you cannot like him as well as black Blanche, or Bright-eye, your mistress's silken favourites, who show their teeth at the poor fellow whenever he approaches the entrance?"
"Bright-eye is a trifle conceited, I grant; but Blanche is like a lamb, only what can she do? Crisp comes gammocking up, wagging his tail, seeming in the best of good humours; poor Blanche receives him kindly, and sometimes walks before him to the buttery; then, all of a sudden, just as she is thinking how very glad she is to meet Crisp—thinking, too, that notwithstanding his shaggy coat and crooked legs, he is a thousand times more to be esteemed and liked than the fine and conceited Bright-eye—at that very time, and just as suddenly as you fly into your passions, Crisp stops, grins, twirls his tail, and will neither return her civility nor accept her invitation. What can poor Blanche do, Robin?"
This statement was made by the pretty Puritan with a mingling of simplicity and shrewdness, for which, to have looked in her innocent face, one would scarcely have given her credit. The tears of youth dry as quickly as the dews in summer; and the young heart rebounds from grief as swiftly as the arrow from the bow. Robin looked upon her with doubting, but with strong affection. He knew, though he struggled with hope against the conviction, that Dalton's friendship would hardly induce him to bestow his daughter upon such an unpropitious personage as himself; and he felt assured—or, at least, believed, in his more gloomy moments, that so it must be—no woman could, by any possibility, feel affection for him. He was also, at times, under the full assurance that Barbara only laughed at his addresses; and though she had more than once given him all reasonable encouragement, he most industriously placed it to the account of the universality of female coquetry, a theory in which he most conscientiously believed.
Without, therefore, any notice of her little fable, or the visible inference so easily drawn from the comparison between Crisp and himself, he started off from the subject nearest his heart, with an abrupt inquiry as to whether her mistress would be likely to go abroad that evening.
"I dare say she will come out in the twilight," replied Barbara, who had sufficient of the sensitiveness of her sex to feel deeply mortified at Robin's heedlessness of her delicate allusion, adding, "Good day; I cannot stay any longer with you; so give you good day;" and she added in a lower tone, "a more gentle humour when next we meet." Woman's pride impelled her footsteps with extraordinary alacrity; woman's affection, or curiosity, both of which are oftentimes at war with her reason, obliged her to look back as she entered the postern, and then she enjoyed the little triumph of observing that Robin remained on the same spot gazing after her.
"I don't think I said any thing very unkind to him," she thought while passing along the gallery. "I have a great mind to go back and ask him if he wanted to send any message to my lady; I did not give the poor fellow time to speak—I ought not to serve anyone so. What would good Mr. Fleetword say, if he knew I spoke so snappishly to any fellow-christian?—Keep your cold nose away from my hand, Master Bright-eye; you forget how you behaved to my friend Crisp yesterday."