“Good heavens! Mrs. Die, what are you doing here at this time of the day?” demanded Mrs. Kitty, with a directness and energy which, while Lady Bell could not explain the tone, served as a slight salve to her own sore pride,—“you’ll have the spasms or a swoon before you are an hour older.”
“Never mind, Kitty,” declared Mrs. Die in a high harsh key, “I’ve business before me to-day. So this is Bell Etheredge,” she broke off abruptly, and, as if it were only at that moment that she remembered and observed her niece,—“never mind paying your duty to me, child,” as Lady Bell was venturing to approach her. “What a shabby little body it is, and how we’ve fallen off for certain!” she said in a loud voice, aside to Mrs. Kitty, and then she went on, turning to Lady Bell again, while Mrs. Die stood like a man with her feet apart, and her back to the fire, toasting her hands held behind her to the warmth. “What do you think that we’re to make of you, girl, eh? Do you know that you’ve come to a ruined house? St. Bevis’s has stood half built for five-and-thirty years, since my father’s time; it will never be finished now, but will serve as a monument of pride and vanity, drinking and dicing. My brother, your uncle, owes fifty thousand pounds of gambling debts, which only lie over because you can take no more than the skin from the cat, and so long as the cat lives, he may win a race, or a match with the cocks, or a game of hazard occasionally, to pay off an instalment of his debt and his servants’ wages. That’s how we live; but there were four executions in the house last year, which have stripped us pretty bare, as even your baby eyes may tell you. We are more utterly at the dogs than your father the earl was, and he left you a beggar.”
“I wish I had never come to beg from you, Aunt Die,” protested Lady Bell, unable to restrain a sob, while she covered her face with her trembling hands and shrank back and down as if she had received a blow. The instinctive cry and action softened her fierce examiner a little.
“It is better you should learn the worst at once, Bell Etheredge,” Mrs. Die continued more gently; “I did not say that you could help it; I think none of us can help anything in our miserable lives. What are you to make of yourself here?”
“I’ll not be in your way,” asserted Lady Bell in her youthful desperation. “I’ll not eat grudged bits, which you do not have to give. I did not know that Uncle Godwin was ruined, or that you would hate the sight of me. I’ll go elsewhere. Oh! why did you let the chaise go back without me?”
“What a prodigious fool you are, sure,” exclaimed Mrs. Die contemptuously, “as if I had hate to spare for a child like you,—I have more to do with my hate; and where would you run to? Don’t you know since the old dragon, Lady Lucie, who might have found you an establishment if she had really had the liking which she professed for you——”
“Lady Lucie was my dearest, best friend,” interrupted Lady Bell passionately.
“Who has died and done nothing for you, any more than for her pug, if she had one,” went on Mrs. Die in cool derision; “so that we are all in the same boat, whether we like it or not, and must sink or swim together. There, girl, go work at your ruffles, or some other of your fiddle-faddle acquirements, to pass the time till some change offer. You are young yet; perhaps a change will come to you. As for me, I am sick of the discussion. I have more in my head. Kitty, he was seen again last night—you need not deny it.” She turned to Mrs. Kitty with an appeal which was almost a threat.
Mrs. Kitty, however surprised by Mrs. Die’s unusual appearance, was improving the time in washing up the breakfast china, having brought out from a cupboard a little hand-tub for the purpose. The prosaic proceeding was oddly at variance with all that was extraordinary and violent in Mrs. Die’s looks and conversation.
“I warrant he’s staying at the Cross Whips,” admitted Mrs. Kitty, with evident unwillingness; “but he may be there without seeking to get at you.”