Miss Kingscote, who was apt to be in a muddle, and never ready for anything, was, as she described it, “slipping” into her best gown. Master Charles was out. “Oh, the dickens! the dickens! What ever is to be done?” cried Miss Kingscote to Mrs. Barlowe. “Run like a lovey, you are always as neat as though you’d been lifted out of a box, and wait on madam at the coach door. Say we’re main glad to see her, which we beant not yet awhile; but them’s the words. Help her out; take the child, and call it a pretty lamb. The mother won’t go and mind ceremony then. I wouldn’t for my life she did mind, ’cause of the mayor’s people. See the whole set to their rooms, Mrs. Barlowe. Swear the beds are aired, the fire will be lit as soon as we can say Jack Robinson, and we ain’t at the mercy of bugs. I’ll be there to bid madam make herself at home in a trice.”
Lady Bell went out in the early summer dusk, with a new moon coming out calm and sweet, and the blackbirds singing a late note to their mates in the nests among the orchard boughs, unwotting of the shots and snares which were in store for them. Here were a different night and place, with a very different major domo and chatelaine from what had greeted Lady Bell when she came to St. Bevis’s.
“I have been sent to bring you in, madam,” said the fresh young voice to the occupants of the chaise, who were only to be guessed at in its recesses; but the travellers must have thought that the voice spoke very delicately and gently, with a heartfelt sympathy in its liquid undertones. “You must be done up with fatigue, but rest and refreshment are at hand. Let me take the child, I shall be very careful.”
The lady within did not respond immediately. She sat arrested for a moment. Then she got out quickly, directed the nurse to carry the infant within doors from the dews, but declared that for herself, she desired a mouthful of fresh air, and a turn backwards and forwards after being so long shut up in the chaise, before she entered the house and sat down to supper. She took Lady Bell’s arm and drew her into the orchard instead of into the entrance-hall, while her maid and Miss Kingscote’s servants fraternised on the spot over the “whimsies” of fine ladies.
The two shipwrecked young creatures—the stranger in the wraps was only a few years older than Lady Bell—thus thrown together, stood in the twilight orchard discovered to each other, as they had been after the first moment of their meeting again, ready to make common cause as they had done ere now, to league together against their enemies and the whole world.
“Lady Bell Trevor,” said Mrs. Sundon—the voice had a jarred and broken tone, instead of its old full harmony—“I have found you at last. How did you come here? What are you doing here since—since Squire Trevor lost his election? You’ll never refuse to tell me, for I must be your best friend, with whom your secret is safe.”
But Lady Bell was overcome by identifying her old idol whom she had served to the utmost, in this figure whose pedestal was shattered and its companion figure gone for ever. Lady Bell gave way far more than the speaker had failed in composure, and sobbed and cried, “Oh, Mrs. Sundon, I thought you were happy, if anybody on earth was happy, and now to hear and see you like this!”
“Hush! hush!” enjoined Mrs. Sundon, with nervous firmness, as one who would not listen lest her own hardly-won calmness should be ruffled to its depths. “It is the common lot, like death, that we should be deceived and wronged; if there are exceptions, they are so rare, that what right had I, or my friends for me, to count on my forming one? I have not lost all when I have found you.”
On the couple’s repairing to the house, they gave no signs of any previous acquaintance, and Lady Bell was Mrs. Barlowe to Madam Sundon.
Miss Kingscote did not suspect any collusion; she was so easily blinded, that there was no credit in blinding her. She had made up her mind from the first that Madam Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe, in right of their common misfortunes as wives, would be, according to her own phrase, “as thick as peas,” she only congratulated herself on her penetration when her prophecy was fulfilled.