“Our air is as sweet as a nut,” Miss Kingscote animadverted in her satisfaction, “as your colour may show. When you came first I could compare you to nought for wanness but the puling white July flower, and now you are getting that rosy you’ll soon match its red brother and sister.”
Only one word of the news kept tingling in Lady Bell’s ears, “Lon’on!” Could this lady be high enough in rank to know any member of Lady Lucie’s old set? Might the stranger, after they had been several weeks together, be induced to favour and help Lady Bell, if she revealed her identity and appealed to the new-comer’s benevolence?
She knew that she could not live at Nutfield always. Nay, she was determined against remaining there for any length of time. However hazardous a farther encounter with the world, she would face it, rather than sink into slothful apathy and degeneracy, and be dragged down at last to Miss Kingscote’s clownish level.
The next information was brought by Miss Kingscote after she had been to Lumley and seen the mayor’s wife. It struck more home where Lady Bell was concerned.
“Murder! how comes it,” cried Miss Kingscote, not waiting to divest herself of her yellow pelisse and her hat tied down over her lappets, but sitting brandishing a whip, to the danger of Lady Bell’s eyes, on the first chair which Miss Kingscote could drop into after coming back to her own parlour, “that Nutfield should be a refuge for distressed wives? Sure Master Charles and me is neither husband nor wife, that we should draw such a lot, like honey draws flies. Our lodger to be, is parted from her husband too! though they do say it is by her own doing. She were a great fortune, and he were a grand beau, and they pulled together none so amiss for a time. But he ran mad for play, as the Lord deliver Master Charles from running, which led him into all sorts of evil courses.”
“Ah, well-a-day. And was there no remedy?” besought Lady Bell, greatly interested.
“Ne’er a one. For a few weeks gone, just afore the child came into this weary world, when its father’s heart might have been tender, he clean kicked over the traces. He had vowed and swore Bible oaths that he would leave off play, more by token her fortune were none of his; but he went and staked a part on’t with a Warwickshire gentleman, a known gambler and cheat—I’se warrant on his last legs, one Squire Godwin.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Lady Bell again, more shrilly this time; but Miss Kingscote took no notice of the peculiar cadence of the voice, or only attributed it to her own eloquence and the pathos of her story.
“Our madam’s man lost; serve him right. She went and paid his debt, but she would have nothing more to say to him. She broke with him from that hour. High time when the last of her fine fortune would have gone like so much leavings to the dogs, and she and her child would have been drove to work or beg for a bite and sup, if they had stayed on with the slippery ne’er-do-well. But she must be hard in the head and mortal stern in the will to cut the scamp, for they do say she married him against the will of her friends, and was as dead set on him once on a day, as she is now set again him.”
“Poor young madam!” lamented Lady Bell in her old-fashioned abstracted fashion, “so she, also, became exposed, through her husband, to the inhuman selfishness of Squire Godwin. Can you tell me her name, Miss Kingscote?”