"To be sure they did, Miss, and they found such curious things there! A lovely thing all set with jewels, they said, a baggonet fit for the Duke of Wellington, and plaster shapes like a cobbler's last, and coloured paper with queer letters on it, and a piece of long black hair, and a plan with distances on it--Lor, Miss, what on earth is the matter? Water! water! You're like death--Balaam! Balak!"
"Stop, Mrs. Shelfer"--I had fallen on the bed--"I would not for ten thousand pounds have had that box exposed to those low ruffians, ransacked, and even catalogued. If I can punish them I will; and you too, you low, miserly, meddling, inquisitive old crone."
She cared for nothing--though afterwards she told me she never saw such eyes in her life--until I luckily called her an "old crone." At that, she fell back upon the towel-horse, and sobbed with both hands over her eyes, as if her heart would break. I had pierced her in the tenderest point--her age.
I did not feel sorry for her at all for at least two minutes, but let her cry away. "Serves her right," I thought. Even if she could not have stopped them from opening that box of mine, at any rate she had no right to gossip about it, and enjoy it all, as she evidently had done. Furthermore, I knew well that she had always been on the tingle to learn the contents of that box, and many a time I had baffled her. Now she had triumphed thoroughly, and I should not have been female if I had calmly allowed it. But seeing her great distress (through all of which she talked, with sobs for affirmations), I began to think what a pity it was; then to wonder whether she deserved it all; next, to believe that she had done no harm; lastly, to feel that I had been a brute. Thereupon I rushed to coax and kiss her, wiped away her tears with my own lawn handkerchief--the feel of which consoled her, for the edge was lace--and begged her pardon fifty times in a thousand foolish words. Finally she was quite set up again by this:
"I tell you, my dear Patty, when I come to your age, when I am five and thirty"--she was fifty-two at least--"I shall fully deserve to be called an old woman for this; and much older I shall look, there is no doubt, than you do."
"Right, my good friend, you are quite right there"--this expression showed me that she herself was right.--"Why the young man from the butcher's, he said to me this morning, and beautiful black hair reminded me of yours, Miss, all stuck together with the fat from off the kidneys--"
"Come, Mrs. Shelfer, let me see about my box."
"To be sure, to be sure, my dear Miss Vaughan; but what do you think he said? 'Now, William John,' says I, 'a good steak mind, a tender juicy steak, for the gentleman visitors here'--Balaam, Miss, and Balak, if you please,--'does like good juicy meat.' 'Mrs. Shelfer, ma'am,' he says, a bowing with his tray like that, 'you shall have a steak, ma'am, as fresh and as juicy as yourself.' Now wasn't that pretty, my good friend?"
"Beautiful, Mrs. Shelfer. But see about my box."
"Surely, surely, Miss Vaughan. But it was very pretty, like a valentine, don't you think it was now?"