Henrietta heard no more. She had shrunk from the uproar and fled quickly to her room. With a bursting heart and a new humility she drew the key from the wards of the lock and set it on the outside, hoping—though the hope was slender—to avoid further words with the landlady. The hope came nearer fulfilment, however, than she expected; for Mrs. Gilson, after panting upstairs, only cried through the door that she would send her up supper, and then went down again—perhaps with a view to catching Bess Hinkson in a fresh trespass.
Bess was gone, however. But adventures are for the brave, and not ten minutes passed before the landlady was at issue with a fresh adversary. She found the coach-office full, so full that it overflowed into the hall. Modest Ann, called this way and that, had need of four hands to meet the demands made upon her; so furious were the calls for the lemons and rum and Old Geneva, the grateful perfume of which greeted Mrs. Gilson as she descended. Alas, something else greeted her: and that was a voice, never a favourite with her, but now raised in accents particularly distasteful. Tyson, the Troutbeck apothecary—a flashy, hard-faced young man in pepper-and-salt, and Bedford cords—had seized the command and the ear of the company in the coach-office, and was roasting Long Tom Gilson upon his own hearth.
“Not know who she is?” he was saying in the bullying tone which made him hated of the pauper class. “You don’t ask me to believe that, Tom? Come! Come!”
“It’s what I say,” Gilson answered.
He sat opposite the other, his hands on his knees, his face red and sulky. He did not like to be baited.
“And you go bail for her?” Tyson cried. “You have gone bail for her?”
“Well?”
“And don’t know her name?”
“Well—no.”
The doctor sat back in his chair, his glass in his hand, and looked round for approbation.