"Goodness, Jane, I wish you"d exercise your common sense," cried Mrs.
Coney, losing patience. "I tell you she _is_ an outcast, and has forfeited home and friends. She has been a great sinner."
"Mother, if she had a home and friends, there would be no need to succour her. As to sin--perhaps we can save her from that for the future. My grat.i.tude for the mercy shown to _me_ is such that I feel as if I could take her to my bosom; it seems to my mind that I ought to do something for her, that she has been thrown in my way that I should do it. Mother, it is my last pet.i.tion to you: see after her a little for me until we come back again."
"Very well, dear; as you make this point of it," concluded Mrs. Coney, relenting just a little. And then Jane began to cry hysterically; and Tom Coney knocked at the door, saying time was up.
Mrs. Coney was not a hard-hearted woman, just the opposite: but only those who live in rural parts of the country can imagine the tricks and turns of regular tramps, and what a bad lot some of them are. They deceive you with no end of a plausible tale, and stare pitifully in your face whilst they tell it. Not long before this, a case had happened where both our house and the Coneys" had been taken in. A woman in jagged widows" garments presented herself at the door of Crabb Cot and asked to see the Squire. Her shoes wanted mending, and one side of her face was bandaged up. Mrs. Todhetley went to her. Of all pitiable tales that poor woman told the most: it would have melted a heart of stone.
She came from near Droitwich, she said: her husband had worked under Sir John Pakington; that is, had been a labourer on part of his estate, Westwood Park. She lost her husband and grown-up son the past autumn with fever; she caught it herself, and was reduced to a skeleton, lost her cottage home through the things being seized for rent, and went to live with a married daughter in Oxfordshire. Cancer had appeared in her cheek, the daughter could not keep her, for she and all her children were down with sickness, and the husband had no work--and she, the widow, was making her way by easy walking-stages to Worcester, there to try and get into the infirmary. What she wanted at Crabb Cot was--not to beg, either money or food: money she could do without, food she could not eat--but to implore the gentleman (meaning the Squire) to give her a letter to the infirmary doctors, so that they might take her in.
I can tell you that she took _us_ in--every one of us. The Squire, coming up during the conference, surrendered without fight. Questions were put to her about Droitwich and Ombersley, which she answered at once. There could be no mistaking that she knew all the neighbourhood about there well, and Sir John and Lady Pakington into the bargain. I think it was that that threw us off our guard. Mrs. Todhetley, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with compa.s.sion, offered her some light refreshment, broth or milk.
She said she could not swallow either, "it went against her," but she"d be thankful for a drink of water. Molly, the greatest termagant to tramps and beggars in general, brought out a half-pint bottle of store cordial, made by her own hands, of sweetened blackberry juice and spice, for the woman to put in her pocket and sip, on her journey to Worcester.
Mrs. Todhetley gave her a pair of good shoes and some shillings, and two old linen handkerchiefs for the face; and the Squire, putting on his writing spectacles, wrote a letter to Mr. Carden, begging him to see if anything, in the shape of medical aid, could be done for the bearer. The woman burst into tears of thankfulness, and went away with her presents, including the letter, Molly the cross-grained actually going out to open the back-gate for her.
And now would anybody _believe_ that this woman had only then come out of the Coneys" house--where she had been with the same tale and request, and had received nearly the same relief? We never saw or heard of her again. The note did not reach Mr. Carden; no such patient applied to the infirmary. She was a clever impostor; and we got to think that the cheek had only been rubbed up with a little blistering-salve. Many another similar thing I could tell of--and every one of them true. So you must not wonder at Mrs. Coney"s unwillingness to interfere with this latest edition in the tramp line.
But she had given her promise: perhaps, as Jane put it, she could not do otherwise. And on the morning after the wedding she went over to Timberdale. I was sliding in the Ravine--for there was ice still in that covered spot, though the frost had nearly disappeared elsewhere--when I saw Mrs. Coney come down the zigzag by the help of her umbrella, and her everyday brown silk gown on.
"Are you here, Johnny! Shall I be able to get along?"
"If I help you, you will, Mrs. Coney."
"Take care. I had no idea it would be slippery here. But it is a long way round to walk by the road, and the master has taken out the pony-chaise."
"What wind is blowing you to Timberdale to-day?"
"An errand that I"m not at all pleased to go upon, Johnny; only Jane made a fuss about it before leaving yesterday. If I told the master he would be in a fine way. I am going to see the woman that you boys found in the shed."
"I fancied Jane seemed to think a good deal about her."
"Jane did think a good deal about her," returned Mrs. Coney. "She has not had the experience of this sort of people that I have, Johnny; and girls" sympathies are so easily aroused."
"There was a romance about it, you see."
"Romance, indeed!" wrathfully cried Mrs. Coney. "That"s what leads girls" heads away: I wish they"d think of good plain sense instead. It was nothing but romance that led poor Lucy Ashton to marry that awful man, Bird."
"Why does Lucy not leave him?"
"Ah! it"s easier to talk about leaving a man than to do it, once he"s your husband. You don"t understand it yet, Johnny."
"And shall not, I suppose, until I am married myself. But Lucy has never talked of leaving Bird."
"She won"t leave him. Robert has offered her---- Goodness me, Johnny, don"t hurry along like that! It"s nothing but ice here. If I were to get a tumble, I might be lamed for life."
"Nonsense, Mrs. Coney! It would be only a Christmas gambol."
"It"s all very well to laugh, Johnny. Christmas gambols mean fun to you young fellows with your supple limbs; but to us fifty-year-old people they may be something else. I wish I had tied some list round my boots."
We left the ice in the Ravine, and she came up the zigzag path easily to the smooth road. I offered to take the umbrella.
"Thank you, Johnny; but I"d rather carry it myself. It"s my best silk one, and you might break it. I never dare trust my umbrellas to Tom: he drives them straight out against trees and posts, and snaps the sticks."
She turned into Timberdale Court, and asked to see Mrs. Broom. Mrs.
Broom appeared in the parlour with her sleeves turned up to the elbow, and her hands floury. She had been housekeeper during old Mr. Ashton"s time.
"Look here," said Mrs. Coney, dropping her voice a little: "I"ve come to ask a word or two about that woman--from the shed, you know. Who is she?--and what is she?"
But the dropping of Mrs. Coney"s voice was as nothing to the dropping of the housekeeper"s face. The questions put her out uncommonly.
"I wish to my very heart, ma"am, that the woman--she"s but a poor young thing at best!--had chosen any part to fall ill in but this! It"s like a Fate."
"Like a what?" cried Mrs. Coney.
"And so it is. A Fate for this house. "Tis nothing less."
"Why, what do you mean, Broom?"
Mother Broom bent her head forward, and said a word or two in Mrs.
Coney"s ear. Louder, I suppose, than she thought for, if she had intended me not to hear.
"Raves about Captain Bird!" repeated Mrs. Coney.
"He is all her talk, ma"am--George Bird. And considering that George Bird, blackleg though he has turned out to be, married the young lady of this house, Miss Lucy Ashton, why, it goes against the grain for me to hear it."
Mrs. Coney sat down in a sort of bewilderment, and gave me the silk umbrella. Folding her hands, she stared at Mother Broom.
"It seems as though we were always hearing fresh news about that man, Broom; each time it is something worse than the last. If he took all the young women within his reach, and--and--cut their heads off, it would be only like him."
""George!" she moans out in her sleep. That is, in her dreaming, or her fever, or whatever it is. "George, you ought not to have left me; you should have taken care of me." And then, ma"am, she"ll be quiet a bit, save for turning her head about; and begin again, "Where"s my baby?
where"s my baby?" Goodness knows "twould be sad enough to hear her if it was anybody"s name but Bird"s."
"There might be worse names than his, in the matter of giving us pain,"
spoke Mrs. Coney. "As to poor Lucy--it is only another cross in her sad life."
"I"ve not told this to anybody," went on Mother Broom. "Jael Batty"s three parts deaf, as the parish knows, and may not have caught Bird"s name. It will vex my master frightfully for Miss Lucy"s sake. The baby is to be buried to-day. Mr. Charles has stayed to do it."
"Oh, indeed!" snapped Mrs. Coney, and got up, for the baby appeared to be a sore subject with her. "I suppose the girl was coming across the country in search of Bird?"
Broom tossed her head. "Whether she was or not, it"s an odd thing that this house should be the one to have to succour her."
"I am going," said Mrs. Coney, "and I half wish I had never come in.
Broom, I am sorry to have hindered you. You are busy."
"I am making my raised pies," said Broom. "It"s the second batch. What with master"s coming marriage, and one thing and another, I did not get "em done before the new year. Your Molly says hers beat mine, Master Ludlow; but I don"t believe it."
"She does, does she! It"s just like her boasting. Mrs. Todhetley often makes the pork-pies herself."
"Johnny," said Mrs. Coney, as we went along, she in deep thought: "that poor Lucy Bird might keep a stick for cutting notches--as it is said some prisoners used to do, to mark their days--and notch off her dreadful cares, that are ever recurring. Why, Johnny, what"s that crowd for?"