“He’s out,” answered Jane Anne. “She’s upstairs!”
“Now, who and what is she?” asked the other, in the tone of decent curiosity. “I asked your aunt, but she says she knows nothing, and doesn’t care.”
“Aunt’s fulish!”
“I told her she’d care fast enough if her inn were to lose its character, as it’s in a very fine way to do with all this. Mr. Popham and I have been talking about it only to-day. Everybody is talking about it!” Mrs. Popham spoke as if Rokeby were a centre of civilization. “Several people saw Mr. Rivers carrying her back across the fields, the day of her accident, and we all wonder what her relationship to him can be! Frick is a foreign name. Is she a foreigner?”
“Nay, she’s right English!” Jane Anne replied, with conviction, forgetting, in her excitement, to mince her words as usual. “And Frick is not her name, neither!”
“How do you know that? Then I am right and my husband is wrong. He is for taking the most charitable view of her, as indeed he does of everyone—but I told him that I was perfectly convinced, in my own mind, that the woman is an adventuress of the most disreputable kind! Everything proves it!”
“Can you tell me what is meant precisely by an adventuress, Ma’am?” her favourite Sunday-school teacher enquired, pedantically.
“People mean by an adventuress,” Mrs. Popham replied, “an unclassed creature, a person with no visible means of subsistence or regular occupation. They go about the country seeing whom they can make fools of. There are plenty of them about, I am told. Russian spies, some of them, who worm themselves into families as governesses, and so on, in order to surprise secrets. What this one can possibly want with Mr. Rivers, I can’t tell, but no good, I am sure!”
“Him to marry her!” said Jane Anne sombrely, as one who had thought out thoroughly all the tragic issues of the case.
“It is possible,” said Mrs. Popham, “and he is so good, so trusting, that anybody could take him in who set herself to do it, as this creature is probably doing. I can’t tell you how it distresses me that such a nice man should be made a prey of! It must really be put a stop to, Jane Anne!”