But the conclusion was arrived at by a third person. A lady, with her head enveloped in a night-cap, put it out of a door opening into the gallery, and declared promptly, “It is a piece of uncommon good luck. We cannot afford, for our child’s sake, to spend a shilling that we can spare—make the bargain,” and withdrew with as little loss of time as she had taken to present herself, and throw the weight of her authority into the scale.
“Ahem! you understand, madam, that the single seat in the post-chaise, with the advantage of our protection and society, is dirt cheap at a sovereign,” called down the gentleman from his gallery with an air of importance, and also with an evident eagerness to turn a penny, which savoured of possible impecuniosity in time past, and probable opulence, by dint of similar bargain driving, in time to come.
“I understand, and I agree,” answered Lady Bell, still standing in the yard below, awaiting the termination of the affair.
“Then you hold yourself in readiness to be called at six o’clock in the morning,” concluded the gentleman, with a flourishing bow, to which Lady Bell forced her stiffening knees to respond with a curtsey.
The little transaction was complete—even to witnesses provided in the chambermaid and the landlord, not over well-pleased to find his departing and arriving guests in league thus to free him of their company.
The second best bed at the Blue Bear, Dartwich, was not more comfortless than Lady Bell’s old closet at St. Bevis’s, or more devoid of domestic happiness and sympathy, than her room at Trevor Court. Her flight had prospered so far, alike beyond her expectations and her deserts; its farther progress was secured, and Lady Bell, with the strain on her forces relaxed, found herself more fairly and fully tired than she had ever been before in the whole course of her fifteen years of life. She said her prayers, dropping asleep between every sentence, but without the least sense of mockery in the act; on the contrary, with a pathetically delusive conviction at once of the rectitude and the inevitableness of her course. The moment she had finished, she sank into thorough insensibility, and was with difficulty aroused to keep her appointment in the hodden grey of an autumn morning.
When Lady Bell descended to the public room, which, at that hour, was the kitchen of the inn, she found the party to which she had attached herself already assembled in travelling gear, and engaged without ceremony at breakfast.
“Be quick, madam!” the lady in the mantle, with the baby in her lap, addressed her, in a tone of command, hardly looking at the person to whom she spoke, she was so full of her own affairs; “I must be at Thorpe before two o’clock, which, with the stoppage to bait, will take all our time. Besides, my child is ready to fall into his morning sleep, when he will travel with less hurt to him.”
Lady Bell stared and submitted, not only because of the exigencies of the case, but as submission must be natural to all who came in contact with this lady.
There was a natural, ineffaceable power, amounting to majesty, which did not suit ill with the woman, even at an anti-climax like this, when she was sitting on a wooden stool, in a common inn-kitchen, herself wrapped in a faded duffle mantle, and occupied, between the intervals of feeding the child, in supping heartily from a basin of bread and milk for her own breakfast.