To Lady Bell’s unbounded relief the scream brought a champion to her aid without a moment’s delay.
A gentleman, who must have been walking behind her, ran forward, shouting, “Leave alone the lady!” then, as a recognition ensued, he vociferated, “Be off with you, Will Cholmondely; I have screened you as a fallen gentleman in distress, before now, but if it has come to this, that you are to fright and prey on ladies in public places, I’ll have nothing more to say to you. I’ll have you up to justice myself.”
Cholmondely growled something, half inaudibly, of not designing the young lady any harm, of having as good a right to be there as any Bully Trevor, of Trevor Court, among them. He slunk away, nevertheless, and left Lady Bell to her deliverer.
This gentleman, so well met, ought to have been long of wind as of leg, befitting the young prince come to the rescue of the young princess. On the contrary, however, he was finding as much difficulty, though the impeding cause was different, in recovering his breath, as Lady Bell was finding in recovering hers.
He was a stout florid man of sixty, bull-necked, short if firm on the legs, and wearing the brown coat and scarlet vest, which in one style of man preceded the blue coat and yellow vest identified with American republicanism and Charles James Fox. He was not an altogether uncomely, elderly gentleman, but he was narrow-browed and heavy-jowled, and showed himself at once extremely choleric. Even while complying with the form of standing with his hat in his hand he was rating Lady Bell soundly for getting him out of breath and into collision with a scamp.
“What were you doing at an affair of this sort all alone, ma’am? Han’t you been told of the villain Hackman shooting Miss Rae at the door of Covent Garden Theatre?”
After he was a little mollified by the evident inexperience of the culprit, by the dewy freshness of the weeping eyes and the child-like pout of the quivering lips, he still scolded, though he extended his scolding, causing it to fall less heavily on the individual head.
“Bless my soul, you’re a very young lady; somebody ought to be taking charge of you. Whom do you belong to?”
Lady Bell was affronted in the middle of her gratitude, for she was Lady Bell Etheredge—she was not likely to forget that, though she had suffered humiliation; in fact, the more she was humbled the more she clung to the remembrance of how, until she had come to St. Bevis’s, she had been treated with the respect due to her rank.
But she bethought herself that doubtless this imperious old gentleman had daughters of her age whom he was in the habit of hectoring over, that thus it was by a not unfriendly, fatherly forgetfulness he took her to task; so, in place of letting herself grow indignant, she looked up in his face with a disarming confidingness in her dark eyes, and spoke out her thoughts frankly: “I dare say, sir, if I had been a daughter of yours, I should not have been suffered to expose myself. But I am Lady Bell Etheredge, and as my father and mother and Lady Lucie Penruddock are all dead, I am staying with Squire Godwin.”