“Since you have brought no maid with you that I have heard tell of, Lady Bell,” stated Mrs. Kitty, with covert but evident depreciation, “you had as lief see to your own unpacking,” she suggested nonchalantly. “The fool of a woman who came with you is gone back with the man and the chaise. Bless us! what a fuss and cost,” protested Mrs. Kitty scornfully, “as if our pockets were lined with silver pennies, when the stage-coach comes once a week as nigh as within six miles, and the cross road is none so bad for a seat on a pillion. I had best tell you at once, that I can’t lend you a hand with your unpacking, neither can I let you have one of the girls. There is a deal to do in this house, and few enough to do it, if beds are to be made, and meals cooked, not to say floors scrubbed, and clothes scoured. We want no additional peck of troubles—of that I can assure you.”
“I did not suppose anybody wanted troubles,” corrected Lady Bell, a little impertinently.
“You mayn’t have seen so fine a place before,” continued Mrs. Kitty, looking Lady Bell hard in the face, “or such a heap of servants; but the last is mostly for the horses and dogs which the Squire keeps to race and run with. The family coach is not out once in three months, so you had as well not pine for an airing; and you had need to walk precious seldom, if anybody is to be spared to walk with you.”
Mrs. Kitty now felt she had gone some way in distancing and discomfiting an interloper like Lady Bell.
Lady Bell clung to her single refuge; she did not attempt to put down Mrs. Kitty this time; she took no further notice of her challenge, she only asked—
“When am I to be taken to my aunt, Mrs. Die?”
“When she sends for you, Lady Bell; and that may not be to-day nor to-morrow neither.”
At the very moment that Mrs. Kitty ended, the door opened, and Mrs. Die gave a flat contradiction to her subordinate’s words by walking into the room.
CHAPTER IV.
MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS.
Mrs. Die was a tall, gaunt, scarecrow of a woman, with wild black eyes which looked immense in size, and gleamed like coals of fire in their hollow sockets. Her face, which in youth had been handsome—the Godwins had been a handsome family—was become the typical face of Queen Elizabeth,—of an old Jewess,—or of a witch before her time. Her dress was an open gown and petticoat of Indian cotton, the pattern representing huge birds of every hue. Her grizzled hair was drawn tightly back from her dark bony face, and rolled over its cushions behind and before, while it was crowned by such an out-of-date fly cap as Lady Bell had never seen.