“What good can we do by staying here, hey? You should be grateful that I have the moral courage to go.”
Before she departed the Lady Letitia wrote an affectionate note to her nephew, addressing him as “Mon beau Richard, mon cher neveu,” praying for his speedy recovery, and explaining that nothing but the extreme delicacy of her health persuaded her to leave him at such a crisis. Shortly after noon the dowager’s coach rolled away from the priory porch, with Peter Gladden bowing stiffly on the threshold, and staring a contemptuous farewell at Mr. Parsons on the back seat, who was looking to his pistols. Richard, half delirious in his room above, heard the grinding of the wheels and the rattling of the harness. He understood dimly that his aunt was deserting him with his guineas under her petticoat. And thus the small-pox drove the old lady out of Rodenham, and the sick man was left to Peter Gladden and Surgeon Stott.
XX
It was on the night of Tuesday that Isaac came to Ursula’s cottage and seated himself on the oak settle before the fire. Old Ursula was in the ingle-nook with a pile of stockings in her lap, Bess on a stool beside the fender, her hands clasped about her knees, her eyes full of the thought of Jeffray. She had opened the door to the patriarch, greeted him somewhat sullenly, and shot the bolts after him for fear that Dan should be lurking outside the cottage. Isaac Grimshaw’s smooth face suggested that he was in the most sociable of moods. He persuaded his sister to brew a bowl of rum punch, and, drawing out a short pipe and a tobacco-box from the tail-pocket of his coat, sat smoking before the fire. Bess, on her stool, was watching the old man suspiciously, and wondering what thoughts were passing in his mind. She always distrusted Isaac’s good-humor, and preferred a frown from him to a smile.
Isaac began to prattle on all manner of matters, poking fun at old Ursula and looking as simple and jolly an old fellow as ever sniffed the odors of lemon and rum, cloves and cinnamon. He talked of Rookhurst Fair, and promised to buy a bunch of ribbons for Ursula, and a pair of red shoes for her to wear on May-day.
Bess grew very mistrustful of the old man’s mood as he sat there shaking his silvery hair in the firelight, thrusting out his lower lip, and watching her with his keen, gray eyes. She would take none of his punch, though he pressed her often, noticing that Ursula was growing drowsy after she had drunk of it more than once. She felt instinctively that there was something false in the old man’s hilarity. Often Bess fancied that Isaac was listening for some sound he intended that she should not hear. She concealed her suspicions from him, humored his gayety, and kept her wits alert lest there might be treachery afoot against herself. Isaac still ladled out the punch, winking at Bess as old Ursula waxed sleepy in the ingle-nook. He began to tell the women of Rookhurst Fair in the old days, when he could handle a cudgel with any youngster in the country. His shrill yet melodious voice flowed on without ceasing, as though he were endeavoring to drown the silence with a perpetual plash of words.
“Ah, dame,” he said, “I can remember when Jeremy brought ye your wedding-ribbons and a ring at Rookhurst. You were a merry bit of mutton then. Do you call to mind old Stumpy Job, the Jew who used to have his stall in the corner of the market before Surgeon Stott’s door? It was John Stott in those days, and, deuce take me, he was a rough devil; he’d bleed you half dead and blister your back till there wasn’t a sound bit of skin over your kidneys. Well, Stumpy Job, he was about the cleverest knave as ever I knew. Half the smugglers in the Channel had dealings with him, and if ‘my lady’ wanted French lace or silks, she had but to let Stumpy know, and a pack load of finery would drop over the garden-wall one quiet night. Yes, Stumpy was a neat rogue, but too greedy on the main chance, and they stretched his neck for him at the end of it. They hanged him on Dardan Heath for shooting an exciseman, and he showed the white-feather terrible at the end. I did hear that he promised to pay ’em all a powerful lot of money if they’d let him run and cross the water. His guineas were buried somewhere down Chichester way, and they do say that a flash dame who kept an inn there had it, for Stumpy was always hot on the women.”
Bess had been sitting motionless all through the old man’s monologue, her brows contracted, and an expression of alertness on her face. Her eyes were fixed upon the door opening upon the stairs, though she cast rapid glances ever and again at Isaac’s countenance shining in the firelight under his silvery hair. Ursula was half asleep in the ingle-nook, nodding her head mechanically over her brother’s reminiscences. Bess had caught a vague and indefinite sound that had quickened her pulses and deepened her distrust. She rose up very quietly from her stool, yawned, and reached for the brass candlestick upon the mantle-shelf.
Old Isaac, wide-awake on the instant, turned on the settle and looked at her suspiciously.
“What’s amiss, lass?” he asked her, with a smile.