Henry Wood - The Shadow of Ashlydyat

Charlotte Pain stood at the door, watching as they approached, her rich cheek glowing, her eye flashing. Never had she looked more beautiful, and she bent her sweetest smile upon Mr. George, who had the camp-stool swinging on his back. Lady Godolphin had gone up to the invalid. Maria, quite herself again, came forward.

“No luck,” said George. “I meant to have secured the fellow and put him under a glass case as a memento: but he has been too cunning. Here’s your sketch, Maria; undamaged. And here are the other rattletraps.”

She bent over the drawing quite fondly. “I am glad I had finished it,” she said. “I can do the filling-in later. I should not have had courage to sit in that place again.”

“Well, old lady,” cried George in his free-and-easy manner, as he stood by the Welshwoman, and looked down at her nimble fingers, “so you have come all the way from Wales on foot, I hear! You put some of us to shame.”

She looked up and smiled pleasantly. She understood English better than she could speak it.

“Not on foot all the way,” she managed to explain. “On foot to the great steamer, and then on foot again after the steamer landed her in Scotland. Not less than a hundred miles of land, taking both ways together.”

“Oh, I see!” said George, perceiving that Margery had taken up a wrong impression. “But you must have been a good time doing that?”

“She had the time before her,” she answered, more by signs than words, “and her legs were used to the roads. In her husband’s lifetime she had oftentimes accompanied him on foot to different parts of England, when he went there with his droves of cattle. It was in those journeys that she learnt to talk English.”

George laughed at her idea of talking English. “Did you learn the use of the pipe also in the journeys, old lady?”

She certainly had; for she nodded fifty times in answer, and looked delighted at his divination. “But she was obliged to put up with cheap tobacco now,” she said: “and had a trouble to get that!”

George pulled out a supply of Turkey from some hidden receptacle of his coat. “Did she like that sort?”

She looked at it with the eye of a connoisseur, touched it, smelt it, and finally tasted it. “Ah, yes! that was good; very good; too good for her.”

“Not a bit of it,” said George. “It’s yours, old lady. There! It will keep your pipe going, on the road home.”

When fully convinced that he meant it in earnest, she seized his hand, shook it heartily, and plunged into a Welsh oration. It was cut short in the midst. She caught sight of Bray, coming in at the house door, and smuggled the present out of sight amidst her petticoats. Had Mr. Sandy seen it, she might have derived little benefit from it herself.

Time lagged, while they waited for Lady Godolphin. The conversation fell upon Bray’s trade—as the man was wont to call it: though who or what led to the topic none of them could remember. He recounted two or three interesting incidents; one, of a gentleman marrying a young wife and being shot dead the next day by her friends. She was an heiress, and they had run away from Ireland. But that occurred years and years ago, he added. Would the ladies like to see the room?

He opened a door at the back of the kitchen, traversed a passage, and entered a small place, which could only be called a room by courtesy. They followed, wonderingly. The walls were whitewashed, the floor was of brick, and the small skylight, by which it was lighted, was of thick coarse glass, embellished with green nobs. What with the lowering sky, and this lowering window, the room wore an appearance of the gloomiest twilight. No furniture was in it, except a table (or something that served for one) covered with a green baize cloth, on which lay a book. The contrast from the kitchen, bright with its fire, with the appliances of household life, to this strange comfortless place made them shiver. “A fit place for the noose to be tied in!” cried irreverent George, surveying it critically.

Bray took the words literally. “Yes,” said he. “It’s kept for that purpose alone. It is a bit out of the common, and that pleases the women. If I said the words in my kitchen, it might not be so satisfying to them, ye see. It does not take two minutes to do,” he added, taking his stand behind the table and opening the book. “I wish I had as many pieces of gold as I have done it, here, in my time.”

Charlotte Pain took up the words defiantly. “It is impossible that such a marriage can stand. It is not a marriage.”

“’Deed, but it is, young lady.”

“It cannot be legal,” she haughtily rejoined. “If it stands good for this loose-lawed country, it cannot do so for others.”

“Ay, how about that?” interrupted George, still in his light tone of ridicule. “Would it hold good in England?”

Minister Bray craned his long neck towards them, over the table, where they stood in a group. He took the hand of George Godolphin, and that of Charlotte Pain, and put them to together. “Ye have but to say, ‘I take you, young lady, to be my lawful wife;’ and, ‘I take you, sir, to be my husband,’ in your right names. I’d then pronounce ye man and wife, and say the blessing on it; and the deed would be done, and hold good all over the world.”

Did Mr. Sandy Bray anticipate that he might thus extemporise an impromptu ceremony, which should bring some grist to his empty mill? Not improbably: for he did not release their hands, but kept them joined together, looking at both in silence.

George Godolphin was the first to draw his hand away. Charlotte had only stared with wondering eyes, and she now burst into a laugh of ridicule. “Thank you for your information,” said Mr. George. “There’s no knowing, Bray, but I may call your services into requisition some time.”

“Where are you?” came the soft voice of Lady Godolphin down the passage. “We must all hurry home: it is going to rain. Charlotte, are you there? Where have you all gone to? Charlotte, I say?”

Charlotte hastened out. Lady Godolphin took her arm at once, and walked with a quick step through the kitchen into the open air, nodding adieu to the old Welshwoman. My lady herself, her ermine, her velvets, possibly her delicately-bloomed complexion, all shrank from the violence of a storm. Storms, neither of life nor of weather, had ever come too near Lady Godolphin. She glanced upward at the threatening and angry sky, and urged Charlotte on.

“Can you walk fast? So lovely a morning as it was!”

“Here comes one of the servants,” exclaimed Charlotte. “With umbrellas, no doubt. How he runs!”

My lady lifted her eyes. Advancing towards them with fleet foot, as if he were running for a wager, came a man in the Godolphin livery. If umbrellas had been the object of his coming, he must have dropped them on his way, for his arms swung beside him, and his hands were empty.

“My lady,” cried the man, almost as much out of breath as Lady Godolphin: “Sir George is taken ill.”

My lady stopped then. “Ill!” she repeated. “Ill in what way?”

“Margery has just found him lying on the floor of his room, my lady. We have got him on to the bed, but he appears to be quite insensible. Andrew has gone to the doctor.”

“Hasten to the house there, and acquaint Mr. George Godolphin,” said my lady, pointing to Bray’s.

But Charlotte had already gone on the errand. She left Lady Godolphin’s arm and started back with all speed, calling out that she would inform Mr. George Godolphin. My lady, on her part, had sped on in the direction of Broomhead, with a fleeter foot than before.

Leaving the man standing where he was. “Which of the two am I to follow, I wonder?” he soliloquized. “I suppose I had better keep up with my lady.”