“I hope I try to be worthy of him, my dear.”
It was a quaint sight to see Mary Sugg with her awkward little body and her ugly face mothering Bess, who could have carried her in her arms like a child. Bess seemed to become strangely sweet and gentle. Her heart had gone out to this faded, shrivelled little person with the quiet face and the pale, short-sighted eyes. She was soon talking to Mary of her life in Pevensel, and Miss Sugg’s shocked face was a study in pained propriety when she heard of Dan’s brutality. Yet Mary Sugg was a very simple and untainted young woman for all her primness, and there was a certain inevitable ardor in Bess’s personality that appealed to good women and to children.
Mary took the girl into the kitchen, brewed her some coffee, and saw that she ate an honest meal. Then she showed her the whole house—the attic that was to be her bedroom, the press where the clean linen was kept, the closet where the pans and brushes were. She gave Bess one of her own aprons, an old pair of house shoes, and a cap. Bess had much of the practical in her constitution, and, moreover, she was burning to prove her gratitude to her friends. There was to be a leg of mutton for Dr. Sugg’s dinner that day. Bess bared her brown forearms, fastened on her apron, and blessed old Ursula for having taught her to be useful. Dr. Sugg was delighted with her cooking and with the quiet and graceful way she waited at table. Mary, a perfect housewife herself, congratulated her father on their refugee’s success.
“The girl looks quite a lady,” she said. “I must say I am in love with her, though she has only been with us half a day. I trust her terrible kinsfolk will not trouble her here.”
Dr. Sugg frowned and looked bellicose.
“The authority of this house,” he answered, “is sufficient to awe the rascals. My sympathies are wholly with the girl, my dear, and I shall protect her to the best of my ability.”
XXII
The old parsonage house, with its sombre atmosphere and its silence broken only by the ticking of the great Dutch clock in the parlor, seemed to Bess a secluded hermitage where she would be safe from her kinsfolk and from the savagery of her forest lover. The kitchen was in the wing at the back of the house, shut off from the fields by Dr. Sugg’s orchard and a holly hedge, and parted on the west from the church-yard by the garden and a high stone-wall. The very consciousness of her nearness to Jeffray filled her with contentment. She flitted about the brick-paved kitchen singing to herself at times, and thinking of Jeffray as she did her work. There was the cow to be called in from the parsonage meadow and milked at dawn and sunset. Mary Sugg herself answered the kitchen door so that Bess’s presence should be kept as secret as possible. Dr. Sugg alone went into Rodenham village, for since the breaking out of the small-pox his daughter had kept to the house and garden, leaving such business as lay outside the rectory to her father. Bess served her new friends with all the ardor of her nature. She brushed Dr. Sugg’s coat for him, buckled on his shoes, and warmed his slippers. As for Miss Mary, she had fallen coyly in love with their handsome handmaid, and treated her more as a friend than as a servant.
Each day Dr. Sugg would trudge up to the priory and make inquiries after Richard Jeffray’s health. For Bess it was the culminating moment in the day when she unlocked the front-door for the rector—for they kept the door locked—saw him hang his hat in the hall, and heard him remark with a twinkle that “Mr. Jeffray was doing very well.” Bess would turn back, in her red petticoat, white cap and apron, into the kitchen and sing softly to herself as she turned the joint on the spit, polished the pewter, or peeled apples for a tart. As yet she knew nothing of Jeffray’s betrothal to Miss Hardacre, and in her simple and passionate way she let her imagination roam at will. It was more a rare and sensuous dream with the girl, a passing and repassing of mysterious and alluring visions. Practical as she was in the trivialities of life, she became a desirous-eyed child of nature when love opened the gates of the sunset and of the dawn.
As for Miss Mary Sugg, she was a very modest creature, and had grown to regard the passionate intoxications of life as bordering on indecency. Like many inevitable spinsters, she had become ashamed, as it were, of her own sex, and the very reading of the banns in church made her mouth straighten primly and her hands clasp each other more chastely in her lap. The parson’s daughter appeared sincerely disturbed when Bess spoke to her of her life in Pevensel. Prudence and propriety! The very thought of such savagery as Dan’s sent a pious shiver through Miss Sugg’s frame. She admired Bess for her courage, and even looked up to her with some sort of awe as to one who had survived terrible temptings of the devil. Bess grew to trust the prim, kindly little creature in the course of a few days. She felt greatly moved to pet Miss Sugg, to stroke her gentle face, and caress her as a child might caress some smiling and delightful grandmother. Poor Mary took Bess’s attentions with blushes and a secret sense of pleasure. It had been her lot to be one of the odd women in the world, slighted by every one with the exception of Richard Jeffray and her father.