"I assure you, I always find the children well and happy, and it is very
unfair on the matron to be angry with her for being bound by rules, to
which she must submit, or she would transgress the regulations under
which we have laid her! It is not her choice to exclude you, but her
duty."
"Please, ma'am, was it her duty to be coming out of the house in a
'genta coloured silk dress, and a drab bonnet with a pink feather in
it?" said Mrs. Kelland, with a certain, air of simplicity, that provoked
Rachel to answer sharply-"You don't know what you are talking about, Mrs. Kelland."
"Well, ma'am, it was a very decent woman as told me, an old lady of the
name of Drinkwater, as keeps a baker's shop on the other side of the
way, and she never sees bread enough go in for a cat to make use of,
let alone three poor hungry children. She says all is not right there,
ma'am."
"Oh, that must be mere gossip and spite at not having the custom. It
quite accounts for what she may say, and indeed you brought it all on
yourself by not having asked me for a note. You must restrain yourself.
What you may say to me is of no importance, but you must not go and
attack those who are doing the very best for your niece."
Rachel made a dignified exit, but before she had gone many steps, she
was assailed by tearful Mrs. Morris: "Oh, Miss Rachel, if it would not
be displeasing to you, would you give me an order for my child to come
home. Ours is a poor place, but I would rather make any shift for us to
live than that she should be sent away to some place beyond sea."
"Some place beyond sea!"
"Yes, ma'am. I beg your pardon, ma'am, but they do say that Mr.
Maw-and-liver is a kidnapper, ma'am, and that he gets them poor
children to send out to Botany Bay to be wives to the convicts as are
transported, Miss Rachel, if you'll excuse it. They say there's a whole
shipload of them at Plymouth, and I'd rather my poor Mary came to the
Union at home than to the like of that, Miss Rachel."
This alarm, being less reasonable, was even more difficult to talk
down than Mrs. Kelland's, and Rachel felt as if there wore a general
conspiracy to drive her distracted, when on going home she found the
drawing-room occupied by a pair of plump, paddy-looking old friends, who
had evidently talked her mother into a state of nervous alarm. On her
entrance, Mrs. Curtis begged the gentleman to tell dear Rachel what
he had been saying, but this he contrived to avoid, and only on his
departure was Rachel made aware that he and his wife had come, fraught
with tidings that she was fostering a Jesuit in disguise, that Mrs.
Rawlins was a lady abbess of a new order, Rachel herself in danger of
being entrapped, and the whole family likely to be entangled in the
mysterious meshes, which, as good Mrs. Curtis more than once repeated,
would be "such a dreadful thing for poor Fanny and the boys."