CHAPTER IV.

MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS.

Mrs. Die was a tall, gaunt, scarecrow of a woman, with wild black eyes which looked immense in size, and gleamed like coals of fire in their hollow sockets. Her face, which in youth had been handsome—the Godwins had been a handsome family—was become the typical face of Queen Elizabeth,—of an old Jewess,—or of a witch before her time. Her dress was an open gown and petticoat of Indian cotton, the pattern representing huge birds of every hue. Her grizzled hair was drawn tightly back from her dark bony face, and rolled over its cushions behind and before, while it was crowned by such an out-of-date fly cap as Lady Bell had never seen.

“Good heavens! Mrs. Die, what are you doing here at this time of the day?” demanded Mrs. Kitty, with a directness and energy which, while Lady Bell could not explain the tone, served as a slight salve to her own sore pride,—“you’ll have the spasms or a swoon before you are an hour older.”

“Never mind, Kitty,” declared Mrs. Die in a high harsh key, “I’ve business before me to-day. So this is Bell Etheredge,” she broke off abruptly, and, as if it were only at that moment that she remembered and observed her niece,—“never mind paying your duty to me, child,” as Lady Bell was venturing to approach her. “What a shabby little body it is, and how we’ve fallen off for certain!” she said in a loud voice, aside to Mrs. Kitty, and then she went on, turning to Lady Bell again, while Mrs. Die stood like a man with her feet apart, and her back to the fire, toasting her hands held behind her to the warmth. “What do you think that we’re to make of you, girl, eh? Do you know that you’ve come to a ruined house? St. Bevis’s has stood half built for five-and-thirty years, since my father’s time; it will never be finished now, but will serve as a monument of pride and vanity, drinking and dicing. My brother, your uncle, owes fifty thousand pounds of gambling debts, which only lie over because you can take no more than the skin from the cat, and so long as the cat lives, he may win a race, or a match with the cocks, or a game of hazard occasionally, to pay off an instalment of his debt and his servants’ wages. That’s how we live; but there were four executions in the house last year, which have stripped us pretty bare, as even your baby eyes may tell you. We are more utterly at the dogs than your father the earl was, and he left you a beggar.”

“I wish I had never come to beg from you, Aunt Die,” protested Lady Bell, unable to restrain a sob, while she covered her face with her trembling hands and shrank back and down as if she had received a blow. The instinctive cry and action softened her fierce examiner a little.

“It is better you should learn the worst at once, Bell Etheredge,” Mrs. Die continued more gently; “I did not say that you could help it; I think none of us can help anything in our miserable lives. What are you to make of yourself here?”

“I’ll not be in your way,” asserted Lady Bell in her youthful desperation. “I’ll not eat grudged bits, which you do not have to give. I did not know that Uncle Godwin was ruined, or that you would hate the sight of me. I’ll go elsewhere. Oh! why did you let the chaise go back without me?”

“What a prodigious fool you are, sure,” exclaimed Mrs. Die contemptuously, “as if I had hate to spare for a child like you,—I have more to do with my hate; and where would you run to? Don’t you know since the old dragon, Lady Lucie, who might have found you an establishment if she had really had the liking which she professed for you——”

“Lady Lucie was my dearest, best friend,” interrupted Lady Bell passionately.

“Who has died and done nothing for you, any more than for her pug, if she had one,” went on Mrs. Die in cool derision; “so that we are all in the same boat, whether we like it or not, and must sink or swim together. There, girl, go work at your ruffles, or some other of your fiddle-faddle acquirements, to pass the time till some change offer. You are young yet; perhaps a change will come to you. As for me, I am sick of the discussion. I have more in my head. Kitty, he was seen again last night—you need not deny it.” She turned to Mrs. Kitty with an appeal which was almost a threat.

Mrs. Kitty, however surprised by Mrs. Die’s unusual appearance, was improving the time in washing up the breakfast china, having brought out from a cupboard a little hand-tub for the purpose. The prosaic proceeding was oddly at variance with all that was extraordinary and violent in Mrs. Die’s looks and conversation.

“I warrant he’s staying at the Cross Whips,” admitted Mrs. Kitty, with evident unwillingness; “but he may be there without seeking to get at you.”

“That’s a credible story, seeing what St. Bevis’s did for him, as if hell on earth could attract a man.” Mrs. Die rejected the suggestion, her great eyes blazing with fire and scorn. “I tell you what, Kitty, I’m going to ride over to the quarter sessions again, to show him up, and to force that hypocrite of a cousin of his, who could not save his own kinsman, and don’t care that I am left to suffer from his base degradation, to bind over Cholmondely to keep the peace, and to cease to persecute me,” she ended, with a terrible intensity of aversion and disgust in her calmness.

“Inform the Squire—take counsel with him,” advised Mrs. Kitty doubtfully.

“Never!” screamed Mrs. Die, clapping her hands together. “What! to be twitted by him with the past? to be reminded that he did it? that a fine Lon’on gentleman like my brother is a fiend incarnate compared to a poor sold and sunk sot? I’ll take it into my own hands. I’ll ride over to the quarter sessions this very day, and what’s more, I’ll carry this midge of a niece, Bell Etheredge, with me, to give her a little lesson in men and manners.”

“You’ll let me go with you also, after you have changed your dress, and got on your habit?”

Mrs. Kitty addressed her mistress soothingly.

“Well, yes, I suppose I may want you,” granted Mrs. Die, calming down and considering. “Come, find my toggery, Kitty, and put it on; and you, miss,—Lady Bell, whatever they call you,—make ready, and I’ll be better than my word,” she grinned ironically. “I’ll be extreme kind, a doting aunt, taking you junketing, and showing you life, on your very first day too.”

Lady Bell, overlooked and forgotten, had stood aside during the late colloquy. In the girl’s eyes she had obtained proof positive that her aunt, Mrs. Die, was not only as wild but as mad as any inmate of Bedlam. Was it not sufficient that the wretched woman, older than Lady Bell’s mother would have been had she been alive, believed that she was the object of an unscrupulous passion?

Doubtless, Mrs. Kitty made a feint of agreeing with Mrs. Die, to flatter and coax her, as mad people, who were not locked up and chained, were coaxed.

“For certain, Mrs. Die looks as old and as horrid as the hills,” reflected Lady Bell hastily, “with those sticking-out bones and ploughed furrows in her cheeks. She must be many a long day past love and lovers. But I must humour her too,” she considered anxiously, “lest she should conceive a fresh access of ill-will,—I think she was minded to let me alone after the attack,—and seek to poison or throttle me. Mrs. Kitty will never permit that,” she decided, in great trepidation, “though I’ve annoyed her; but she is in her senses, and looks to be Mrs. Die’s keeper. My uncle could not know me in bodily peril, and sit and lean back in his chair, and look into the air above my head.”

Thrilling with this new, outrageous apprehension, which, yet in its panic, served to divert the young mind from its desolation, Lady Bell did Mrs. Die’s bidding with the utmost dispatch, put on her hat and habit, and hurried back to the parlour.

Mrs. Die, in her hat and habit, was not so crazy looking, and was more like a lady of birth and breeding, than she had been in her morning gown. She directed the horses—there was usually no lack of horses at St. Bevis’s—to be brought to the door, and ascertained that Lady Bell was fit to guide the pony allotted to her, while Mrs. Kitty was mounted double behind a groom.

“Sneyd may come with us if he likes, and is not frightened for his master; or Greenwood may attend,” Mrs. Die said condescendingly.

“It is a mighty queer expedition, just like Mrs. Die,” murmured the last—the chaplain, who had come out under the colonnade to see the party start; “but I’ll ride after you to see that justice is done, and for the sake of the young lady,” he whispered to Mrs. Kitty.

“If you don’t come for the sake of the old one, I think you had better let it alone, sir,” Mrs. Kitty rebuffed him shortly.

It was a ride of an hour and a half for the party, with half-a-dozen dogs at their heels, to reach the country town where the quarter sessions were held. Mrs. Die gave no sign of knowing anybody, either among the country people in great coats trudging to market, or the smarter townspeople lounging by the low-browed shops and tall brick houses, though countrymen and tradesmen, with their womenkind, saluted and turned to stare at the group.

Mrs. Die rode straight with her friends to the court-room door, and having alighted, walked in, and up to the table round which the gentlemen in drab, purple, and green coats, and muddy boots and tops, were sitting with their papers before them.

A case of horse-stealing had just been disposed of, and a miserable man was being led out, marching along by the turnkeys, while his friends, in the shape of sullen men and weeping women, were pressing round him.

Mrs. Die tapped on the table with her riding-whip.

“I have come to demand your protection, gentlemen,” she said, with a raised voice, “from a man, one William Cholmondely, who persecutes me with his addresses.”

One gentleman, in a coat of a precise cut, with a plain cravat and a severe cast of face above it, winced and reddened.

The other men roused themselves, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, dug their thumbs into their own or their neighbours’ sides, and looked as if they expected something peculiarly interesting and enlivening, out of the course of regular business.

One of the elder men present took snuff, and whispered to his next neighbour that he remembered that woman as the handsomest jade in England.

“Zounds! a lady shall not demand protection and be refused it, you may depend upon that, Mrs. Die,” said a free-and-easy, out-spoken gentleman, who loved a row. “What does this rapscallion Cholmondely do to molest you?”

“He waylays me and my housekeeper; he drops me letters continually; he threatens to do both for me and himself, if I don’t pay him money to stop his vile tongue and pen,” answered Mrs. Die furiously.

“Mrs. Die Godwin,” interrupted the gentleman in the precise cut coat, speaking sternly, “permit me one question. Were you not at one time affianced to this William Cholmondely?”

“Yes; I was promised to him in marriage twenty years or more ago,” replied Mrs. Die disdainfully; “before this girl, my niece, was born;” and at the words, eye-glasses, which had already been roaming curiously over Lady Bell, were arrested and fixed upon her with keen criticism.

“And was not the marriage broken off,” Mrs. Die’s antagonist continued indignantly, “because your brother, Squire Godwin, engaged Cholmondely in a sporting transaction (I shall not stop to say of what nature), the brunt of which, falling on this wretched fellow, not only stripped him of every acre and guinea he possessed, but blackened his reputation beyond redemption, compelled him to flee the country for a season, and reduced him to associate with the very dregs of society on his return? Is not that a correct statement of facts, madam?”

“Perfectly correct, sir,” assented Mrs. Die promptly, making him a superb curtsey. “But you have given no reason why the hound should lie in wait to yelp and snarl at me.”

The result of the complaint was that the quarter sessions granted Mrs. Die Godwin the protection which she claimed, binding over William Cholmondely, late of Thornhurst, to keep the peace under a penalty of one thousand pounds.

Lady Bell’s bewildered, appalled young eyes read a few lines of a strange page of life.