Chapter 55 - Page 2

from a baby!”

The old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls, all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him, down at Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people, who had been angry with him, forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends under its load of affectionate distress.

Mrs Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while — not without passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes — and presently chirps up in her cheery manner:

“So I says to George when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s because I am melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.’ ‘What have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs Bagnet,’ says George, shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to heaven it won’t be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no more.’ Now, ma’am, when George says to me that it’s best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain before him; and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets himself, and paints her picter to me as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me it’s Mrs Rouncewell, house-keeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me before that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night, ‘Lignum, that’s his mother for five and for-ty pound!’”

All this Mrs Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least within the last four hours. Trilling it out, like a kind of bird; with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the hum of the wheels.

“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs Rouncewell. “Bless you, and thank you, my worthy soul!”