Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson had returned to her snuggery, wearing a face that, had the lemons and other comforts about her included cream, must have turned it sour. That snuggery, it may be, still exists in the older part of the Low Wood Inn. In that event it should have a value. For to it Mr. Samuel Rogers, the rich London banker, would sometimes condescend from his apartments in the south gable; and with him Mr. Kirkpatrick Sharp, a particular gentleman who sniffed a little at the rum; or Sir James Mackintosh, who, rumour had it, enjoyed some reputation in London as a writer. At times, too, Mr. Southey, Poet Laureate elsewhere, but here Squire of Greta Hall, would stop on his way to visit his neighbour at Storrs—no such shorthorns in the world as Mr. Bolton’s at Storrs; and not seldom he brought with him a London gentleman, Mr. Brougham, whose vanity in opposing the Lowther interest at the late election had almost petrified Mrs. Gilson. Mr. Brougham called himself a Whig, but Mrs. Gilson held him little better than a Radical—a kind of cattle seldom seen in those days outside the dock of an assize court. Or sometimes the visitor was that queer, half-moithered Mr. Wordsworth at Rydal; or Mr. Wilson of Elleray with his great voice and his homespun jacket. He had a sort of name too; but if he did anything better than he fished, the head ostler was a Dutchman!
The visits of these great people, however—not that Mrs. Gilson blenched before them, she blenched before nobody short of Lord Lonsdale—had place in the summer. To-night the landlady’s sanctum, instead of its complement of favourite guests gathered to stare at Mr. Southey’s last order for “Horses on!” boasted but a single tenant. Even he sat where the landlady did not at once see him; and it was not until she had cast a log on the dogs with a violence which betrayed her feelings that he announced his presence by a cough.
“There’s the sign of a good house,” he said with approval. “Never unprepared!—never unprepared! Come late, come early—coach, chaise, or gig—it is all one to a good house.”
“Umph!”
“It is a pleasure to sit by”—he waved his pipe with unction—“and to see a thing done properly!”
“Ay, it’s a pleasure to many to sit by,” the landlady answered with withering sarcasm. “It’s an easy way of making a living—especially if you are waiting for what doesn’t come. Put a red waistcoat on old Sam the postboy, and he’d sit by and see as well as another!”
The man in the red waistcoat chuckled.
“I’m glad they don’t take you into council at Bow Street, ma’am!” he said.
“They might do worse.”
“They might do better,” he rejoined. “They might take you into the force! I warrant”—with a look of respectful admiration—“if they did there’s little would escape you. Now that young lady?” He indicated the upper regions with his pipe. “Postboys say she came from Lancaster. But from where before that?”