"Perhaps you could lend me your cloak, sir?" she said. "Until I can get something."
He handed it to her. "To be sure, to be sure," he answered. And then, "In your carriage?" he continued. "Dear, dear, and had you any one with you, ma'am?"
"My friend escaped," she explained, "with--with some jewels I had. The postboys had been sent ahead to Lewes to get fresh horses. Watkyns, one of the servants, had returned towards Fletching, to see if he could get help in that quarter. My woman was so frightened that she was useless, and the two grooms had been made drunk on the road, and were useless also!"
She did not notice, that with each item in her catalogue, the old clergyman's eyes grew wider and wider; nor that towards the end surprise began to give place to incredulity. This talk of horses, and grooms, and servants, and maids, and postboys in the mouth of a girl found hatless and shoeless by the roadside--a creature with tumbled hair, without a gown, and in petticoats soaked with water, and stained with dust and dirt, over-stepped the bounds of reason. Unfortunately, a little before this a young woman had appeared in a town not far off, in the guise of a countess; and with all the apparatus of the rank had taken in no less worshipful a body than the mayor and corporation of the place, who in the issue had been left to bewail their credulity. The tale was rife along the country-side; the old clergyman knew it, and being by nature a simple soul--as his wife often told him--had the cunning of simplicity. He bade himself be cautious--be cautious; and as he listened bethought him of a test. "Your carriage should be there, then?" he said. "Where you left it, ma'am?"
"I have not dared to return and see," she answered. "We might do so now, if you will be kind enough to accompany me."
"To be sure, to be sure. Let us go, child."
But when they had crossed the ridge--keeping as far as they could from the door of the plague-stricken house--he was no whit surprised to find no carriage, no servants, no maid. From the brow of the hill they could trace with their eyes the desolate valley and the road by which she had come; but nowhere on the road, or beside it, was any sign of life. Sophia had been so much shaken by the events of the night that she had forgotten the possibility of rescue at the hands of her own people. Now that the notion was suggested to her, she found the absence of the carriage, of Watkyns, of the grooms, inexplicable. And she said so; but the very expression of her astonishment, following abruptly on his suggestion that the carriage should be there, did but deepen the good parson's doubts. She had spun her tale, he thought, without providing for this point, and now sought to cover the blot by exclamations of surprise.
He had not the heart, however, good honest soul as he was, to unmask her; on the contrary, he suffered as great embarrassment as if the deceit had been his own. He found himself constrained to ask in what way he could help her; and when she suggested that she should rest at his house, he assented. But with little spirit.
"If it be not too far?" she said; struck by his tone, and with a thought also for her unshod feet.
"It's--it's about a mile," he answered.