Her world, the world of her whole life up to daybreak of this day, was gone forever. In its place she had only this bare room with its small-paned casement and its dimity hangings and its clean scent. Of course he was below, and he was the world to her, and would make up a hundredfold what she had resigned for him. But he was below, he was absent; and meantime her ear and her heart ached for a tender word, a kind voice, a look of love. At least, she thought, he might have come under her window, and whistled the air that had been the dear signal for their meetings. Or he might have stood a while and chatted with her, and shown her that he was not offended. The severest prude, even that dreadful woman who had insulted her, could not object to that!
But he did not come. Of course he was supping-what things men were! And then, out of sheer loneliness, her eyes filled, and her thoughts of him grew tender and more humble. She dwelt on him no longer as her conquest, her admirer, the prize of her bow and spear, subject to her lightest whim and her most foolish caprice; but as her all, the one to whom she must cling and on whom she must depend. She thought of him as for a brief while she had thought of him in the chaise. And she wondered with a chill of fear if she would be left after marriage as she was left now. She had heard of such things, but in the pride of her beauty, and his subjection, she had not thought that they could happen to her. Now- But instead of dwelling on a possibility which frightened her, she vowed to be very good to him-good and tender and loyal, and a true wife. They were resolutions that a trifling temptation, an hour's neglect or a cross word, might have overcome. But they were honest, they were sincere, they were made in the soberest moment that her young life had ever known; and they marked a step in development, a point in that progress from girlhood to womanhood which so few hours might see complete.
Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson had returned to her snuggery, wearing a face that, had the lemons and other comforts about her included cream, must have turned it sour. That snuggery, it may be, still exists in the older part of the Low Wood Inn. In that event it should have a value. For to it Mr. Samuel Rogers, the rich London banker, would sometimes condescend from his apartments in the south gable; and with him Mr. Kirkpatrick Sharp, a particular gentleman who sniffed a little at the rum; or Sir James Mackintosh, who, rumour had it, enjoyed some reputation in London as a writer. At times, too, Mr. Southey, Poet Laureate elsewhere, but here Squire of Greta Hall, would stop on his way to visit his neighbour at Storrs-no such shorthorns in the world as Mr. Bolton's at Storrs; and not seldom he brought with him a London gentleman, Mr. Brougham, whose vanity in opposing the Lowther interest at the late election had almost petrified Mrs. Gilson. Mr. Brougham called himself a Whig, but Mrs. Gilson held him little better than a Radical-a kind of cattle seldom seen in those days outside the dock of an assize court. Or sometimes the visitor was that queer, half-moithered Mr. Wordsworth at Rydal; or Mr. Wilson of Elleray with his great voice and his homespun jacket. He had a sort of name too; but if he did anything better than he fished, the head ostler was a Dutchman!
The visits of these great people, however-not that Mrs. Gilson blenched before them, she blenched before nobody short of Lord Lonsdale-had place in the summer. To-night the landlady's sanctum, instead of its complement of favourite guests gathered to stare at Mr. Southey's last order for "Horses on!" boasted but a single tenant. Even he sat where the landlady did not at once see him; and it was not until she had cast a log on the dogs with a violence which betrayed her feelings that he announced his presence by a cough.
"There's the sign of a good house," he said with approval. "Never unprepared! – never unprepared! Come late, come early-coach, chaise, or gig-it is all one to a good house."
"Umph!"
"It is a pleasure to sit by" – he waved his pipe with unction-"and to see a thing done properly!"
"Ay, it's a pleasure to many to sit by," the landlady answered with withering sarcasm. "It's an easy way of making a living-especially if you are waiting for what doesn't come. Put a red waistcoat on old Sam the postboy, and he'd sit by and see as well as another!"
The man in the red waistcoat chuckled.
"I'm glad they don't take you into council at Bow Street, ma'am!" he said.
"They might do worse."
"They might do better," he rejoined. "They might take you into the force! I warrant" – with a look of respectful admiration-"if they did there's little would escape you. Now that young lady?" He indicated the upper regions with his pipe. "Postboys say she came from Lancaster. But from where before that?"
"Wherever she's from, she did not tell me!" Mrs. Gilson snapped.
"Ah!"
"And what is more, if she had, I shouldn't tell you."
"Oh, come, come, ma'am!" Mr. Bishop was mildly shocked. "Oh, come, ma'am! That is not like you. Think of the King and his royal prerogative!"
"Fiddlesticks!"
Mr. Bishop looked quite staggered.
"You don't mean it," he said-"you don't indeed. You would not have the Radicals and Jacobins ramping over the country, shooting honest men in their shops and burning and ravaging, and-and generally playing the devil?"
"I suppose you think it is you that stops them?"
"No, ma'am, no," with a modest smile. "I don't stop them. I leave that to the yeomanry-old England's bulwark and their country's pride! But when the yeomanry 've done their part, I take them, and the law passes upon them. And when they have been hung or transported and an example made, then you sleep comfortably in your beds. That is what I do. And I think I may say that next to Mr. Nadin of Manchester, who is the greatest man in our line out of London, I have done as much in that way as another."
Mrs. Gilson sniffed contemptuously.
"Well," she said, "if you have never done more than you've done since you've been here, it's a wonder the roof's on! Though what you expected to do, except keep a whole skin, passes me! There's the Chronicle in today, and such talks of riots at Glasgow and Paisley, and such meetings here and alarms there, it is a wonder to me" – with sarcasm-"they can do without you! To judge by what I hear, Lancashire way is just a kettle of troubles and boiling over, and bread that price everybody is wanting to take the old King's crown off his head."
"And his head off his body, ma'am!" Mr. Bishop added solemnly.
"So that it's little good you and your yeomanry seem to have done at Manchester, except get yourselves abused!"
"Ma'am, the King's crown is on his head," Mr. Bishop retorted, "and his head is on his body!"
"Well? Not that his head is much good to him, poor mad gentleman!"
"And King Louis, ma'am, years ago-what of him? The King of France, ma'am? Crown gone, head gone-all gone! And why? Because there was not a good blow struck in time, ma'am! Because, poor, foolish foreigner, he had no yeomanry and no Bow Street, ma'am! But the Government, the British Government, is wiser. They are brave men-brave noblemen, I should say," Mr. Bishop amended with respect, – "but with treason and misprision of treason stalking the land, with the lower orders, that should behave themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters, turned to ramping, roaring Jacobins seeking whom they may devour, and whose machine they may break, my lords would not sleep in their beds-no, not they, brave men as they are-if it were not for the yeomanry and the runners." He had to pause for breath.
Mrs. Gilson coughed dryly.
"Leather's a fine thing," she said, "if you believe the cobbler."
"Well," Mr. Bishop answered, nodding his head confidently, "it's so far true you'd do ill without it."
But Mrs. Gilson was equal to the situation.
"Ay, underfoot," she said. "But everything in its place. My man, he be mad upon tod-hunting; but I never knew him go to Manchester 'Change to seek one."
"No?" Mr. Bishop held his pipe at arm's length, and smiled at it mysteriously. "Yet I've seen one there," he continued, "or in such another place."
"Where?"
"Common Garden, London."
"It was in a box, then."
"It was, ma'am," Mr. Bishop replied, with smiling emphasis. "It was in a box-'safe bind, safe find,' ma'am. That's the motto