“What is it, Aunt Gainor?”
She did not pause in her walk or look up, and only motioned me to a seat, saying, “Sit down. I must think; I must think.”
It was unlike her. Generally, no matter how serious the thing on her mind, she was apt to come at it through some trivial chat; but now her long absence of speech troubled me.
I sat at least ten minutes, and then, uneasy, said, “Aunt Gainor, is it Darthea?”
“No, you fool!” And she went on her wandering way among the crackled gods. “Now I will talk, Hugh, and do not interrupt me. You always do;” but, as Jack Warder says, no one ever did successfully interrupt Miss Wynne except Miss Wynne.
She sat down, crossed one leg over the other, as men do when alone with men, and went on, as I recall it, to this effect, and quite in her ordinary manner: “When the British were still here, late in May I had a note through the lines from Mr. Warder as to the confusion in my house, and some other matters. He got for me a pass to come in and attend to these things. I stayed three days with Mrs. Peniston and Darthea. While here the second day I was bid to sup at Parson Duche’s, and though I hated the lot of them, I had had no news nor so much as a game of cards for an age, and so I went. Now don’t grin at me.
“When I was to leave no coach came, as I had ordered, and no chair, either. There was Mrs. Ferguson had set up a chaise. She must offer me to be set down at home. I said my two legs were as good as her horses’, and one of them—I mean of hers—has a fine spavin; as to Mrs. Mischief’s own legs, they are so thin her garters will not stay above her ankles.
“I walked from Third street over Society Hill, thinking to see your father, and to find a big stick for company across the bridges.”
She was given to going at night where she had need to go, with a great stick for privateersmen, the vagabond, drunken Hessians, and other street pirates. I can see her now, shod with goloe-shoes against mud or snow, with her manlike walk and independent air, quite too formidable to suggest attack.
“I went in at the back way,” she continued; “not a servant about but Tom, sound asleep at the kitchen fire. I went by him, and from the hall saw your father, also in deep slumber in his arm-chair. I got me a candle and went upstairs to look how things were. The house was in vile disorder, and dirty past belief. As to your own chamber, where that scamp Arthur slept, it was—well, no matter.