The girl, a shade whiter than before, did not answer. And he thought her, for so pretty a wench, “a right unfeelin’ un!”
Not so the Frenchman. “I count him a very locky man!” he said obscurely. “A very locky man.”
“Well,” the coachman answered with a grunt, “if you call that lucky——”
“Vraiment! Vraiment! But I—alas!” the Frenchman answered with an eloquent gesture, “I have lost my all, and the good fortunes are no longer for me!”
“Fortunes!” the coachman muttered, looking askance at him. “A fine fortune, to have your hand flayed! But where’s”—recollecting himself—“where’s that there fool that caused the trouble! D—n me, if he shall go any further on my coach. I’d like to double-thong him, and it’d serve him right!”
So when the ex-M.P. presently appeared, Sammy let go his tongue to such purpose that the political gentleman; finding himself in a minority of one, retired into the house and, with many threats of what he would do when he saw the management, declined to go on.
“And a good riddance of a d—d Tory!” the coachman muttered. “Think all the world’s made for them! Fifteen minutes he’s cost us already! Take your seats, gents, take your seats! I’m off!”
Vaughan, with his hand hastily bandaged, was the last to come out. He climbed as quickly as he could to his place, and, without looking at his neighbour, he said some common-place word. She did not reply, and they swept under the arch. For a moment the sight of the thronged marketplace diverted him. Then he looked at her, and he saw that she was trembling.
If he was not quite so wise as the Frenchman, having had no bonnes fortunes to speak of, he had, nevertheless, keen perceptions. And he guessed that the girl, between her maiden shyness and her womanly gratitude, was painfully placed. It could not be otherwise. A girl who had spent her years, since childhood, within the walls of a school at Clapham, first as genteel apprentice, and then as assistant; who had been taught to consider young men as roaring lions with whom her own life could have nothing in common, and from whom it was her duty to guard the more giddy of her flock; who had to struggle at once with the shyness of youth, the modesty of her sex, and her inexperience—above all, perhaps with that dread of insult which becomes the instinct of lowly beauty—how was she to carry herself in circumstances so different from any which she had ever imagined? How was she to express a tithe of the feelings with which her heart was bursting, and which overwhelmed her as often as she thought of the hideous death from which he had snatched her?
She could not; and with inborn good taste she refrained from the commonplace word, the bald acknowledgment, in which a shallow nature might have taken refuge. On his side, he guessed some part of this, and discerned that if he would relieve her he must himself speak. Accordingly, when they had left the streets behind them and were swinging merrily along the Newbury Road, he leant towards her.