Mrs. Dent seemed strangely changed and broken during her stay at the Hall. She had received a terrible shock, and it was not safe to move her back to her own house. For the first two or three nights, she would start from sleep again and again screaming for help and mercy and nothing would quiet her till she was wide awake and saw in the fire-light the curtained windows and the bolted door, and the kindly face of an old servant or Mistress Margaret with her beads in her hand. Isabel, who came up to see her two or three times, was both startled and affected by the change in her; and by the extraordinary mood of humility which seemed to have taken possession of the hard self-righteous Puritan.
“I begged pardon,” she whispered to the girl one evening, sitting up in bed and staring at her with wide, hard eyes, “I begged pardon of Lady Maxwell, though I am not fit to speak to her. Do you think she can ever forgive me? Do you think she can? It was I, you know, who wrought all the mischief, as I have wrought all the mischief in the village all these years. She said she did, and she kissed me, and said that our Saviour had forgiven her much more. But—but do you think she has forgiven me?” And then again, another night, a day or two before they left the place, she spoke to Isabel again.
“Look after the poor bodies,” she said, “teach them a little charity; I have taught them nought but bitterness and malice, so they have but given me my own back again. I have reaped what I have sown.”
So the Dents slipped off early one morning before the folk were up; and by the following Sunday, young Mr. Bodder, of whom the Bishop entertained a high opinion, occupied the little desk outside the chancel arch; and Great Keynes once more had to thank God and the diocesan that it possessed a proper minister of its own, and not a mere unordained reader, which was all that many parishes could obtain.
Towards the end of September further hints began to arrive, very much underlined, in the knight’s letters, of Mr. Stewart and his sufferings.
“You remember our friend,” Isabel read out one Saturday evening, “not Mr. Stewart.” (This puzzled the old ladies sorely till Isabel explained their lord’s artfulness.) “My dearest, I fear the worst for him. I do not mean apostacy, thank God. But I fear that these wolves have torn him sadly, in their dens.” Then followed the story of Mrs. Jakes, with all its horror, all the greater from the obscurity of the details.
Isabel put the paper down trembling, as she sat on the rug before the fire in the parlour upstairs, and thought of the bright-eyed, red-haired man with his steady mouth and low laugh whom Anthony had described to her.
Lady Maxwell posted upon the gatehouse:
“Sir Nicholas fears that a friend is in sore trouble; he hopes he may not yield.”
Then, after a few days more, a brief notice with a black-line drawn round it, that ran, in Mr. Bodder’s despite: