'Oh, have done, have done, my dear!' cried a wailing, tearful voice; and
Sir George, almost cowed by the girl's fierce words and the fiercer
execration that was on her lips, hailed the intervention with relief.
The woman whom he had seen on her knees had risen and now approached the
girl, showing a face wrinkled, worn, and plain, but not ignoble; and for
the time lifted above the commonplace by the tears that rained down it.
'Oh, my lovey, have done,' she cried. 'And let the gentleman go. To kill
another will not help him that is dead. Nor us that are left alone!'
'It will not help him!' the girl answered, shrilly and wildly; and her
eyes, leaving Soane, strayed round the room as if she were that moment
awakened and missed some one. 'No! But is he to be murdered, and no one
suffer? Is he to die and no one pay? He who had a smile for us, go in or
out, and never a harsh word or thought; who never did any man wrong or
wished any man ill? Yet he lies there! Oh, mother, mother,' she
continued, her voice broken on a sudden by a tremor of pain, 'we are
alone! We are alone! We shall never see him come in at that door again!'
The old woman sobbed helplessly and made no answer; on which the girl,
with a gesture as simple as it was beautiful, drew the grey head to her
shoulder. Then she looked at Sir George. 'Go,' she said; but he saw that
the tears were welling up in her eyes, and that her frame was beginning
to tremble. 'Go! I was not myself--a while ago--when I fetched you. Go,
sir, and leave us.' Moved by the abrupt change, as well as by her beauty, Sir George
lingered; muttering that perhaps he could help her in another way. But
she shook her head, once and again; and, instinctively respecting the
grief which had found at length its proper vent, he turned and, softly
lifting the latch, went out into the court.
The night air cooled his brow, and recalled him to sober earnest and the
eighteenth century. In the room which he had left, he had marked nothing
out of the common except the girl. The mother, the furniture, the very
bed on which the dead man lay, all were appropriate, and such as he
would expect to find in the house of his under-steward. But the girl?
The girl was gloriously handsome; and as eccentric as she was
beautiful. Sir George's head turned and his eyes glowed as he thought of
her. He considered what a story he could make of it at White's; and he
put up his spying-glass, and looked through it to see if the towers of
the cathedral still overhung the court. 'Gad, sir!' he said aloud,
rehearsing the story, as much to get rid of an unfashionable sensation
he had in his throat as in pure whimsy, 'I was surprised to find that it
was Oxford. It should have been Granada, or Bagdad, or Florence! I give
you my word, the houris that the Montagu saw in the Hammam at Stamboul
were nothing to her!' The persons through whom he had passed on his way to the door were still
standing before the house. Glancing back when he had reached the mouth
of the court, he saw that they were watching him; and, obeying a sudden
impulse of curiosity, he turned on his heel and signed to the nearest to
come to him. 'Here, my man,' he said, 'a word with you.'