“I fear that is too true,” the lady answered, looking straight at him. “We find things always growing worse, as we ourselves grow wiser. But come now, and sit in this chair, and tell me, if you please, Sir Remnant, how the poor things are getting on—your captain and my poor grandchild.”
“Well, madam, I need not tell a lady of your high breeding and experience; the maids of the present day are not at all the same thing as they used to be. But, thank the Lord, they get on, on the whole as well as can be expected. But Sir Roland will not help us; and the young maid flies and flickers, and don’t seem to come to know her own mind. You know, my lady, the Lord in heaven scarce knows what to make of them. They will have this, and they won’t have that; and they hates to look at anything but their swinging-glasses.”
“Oh, sir, you have not been at court for nothing. You have come to a very sad view of the ladies. But they deserve a great deal more than that. If you were to hear what even I, at this great distance, know of them—but I will say no more; it is always best, and charitable, not to speak of them. So let us go back, if you please, Sir Remnant; I have my own ways of considering things. Indeed, I am obliged to have them, in a manner now scarcely understood. But, I hear a noise—is it a mouse, or a rat, do you think?”
It was neither mouse nor rat; as Lady Valeria knew quite well. It was simply poor Sir Remnant tapping on the floor with his walking-stick; which of course he had no right to do, while the lady was addressing him.
“It sounds like a very little mouse,” he said; “or perhaps it was the death-tick. It often comes in these old rooms, when any of the people are going to die.”
The old gentleman had not been at Court for nothing (as the old lady had told him); he knew how timid and superstitious were the brave women of the fine old time.
“Now, sir, are you sure that you never made a tap?” asked Lady Valeria, anxiously.
“Not a quarter of a tap, as I hope to be saved,” the old reprobate answered, below his breath; “I pay no heed to nonsense; but a thing of this sort must mean something.”
“There have been a great many signs of late,” said the old lady, after listening with her keener ear brought round, and the misty lace of her beautiful cap quivering like a spider’s web: “there seems to have been a great many signs of bad things coming, in their proper time.”