They had now come to a door padlocked and bolted. “This is where we have put the prisoner, ma’am,” said the guardian, unlocking it. And then he ushered her into the presence of her old schoolmistress.
Miss Primrose was sitting bolt upright in a straight backed old fashioned chair, against a background of fine old tapestries, faded to the softest loveliest pastel tints—as incongruous with her grotesque ugliness as had been the fresh prettiness of the Crabapple Blossoms.
Dame Marigold stood staring at her for a few seconds in silent indignation. Then she sank slowly on to a chair, and said sternly, “Well, Miss Primrose? I wonder how you dare sit there so calmly after the appalling thing you have brought about.”
But Miss Primrose was in one of her most exalted moods—“On her high hobbyhorse,” as the Crabapple Blossoms used to call it. So she merely glittered at Dame Marigold contemptuously out of her little eyes, and, with a lordly wave of her hand, as if to sweep away from her all mundane trivialities, she exclaimed pityingly, “My poor blind Marigold! Perhaps of all the pupils who have passed through my hands you are the one who are the least worthy of your noble birthright.”
Dame Marigold bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and said in a low voice of intense irritation, “What do you mean, Miss Primrose?”
Miss Primrose cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and, in her most treacly voice she answered, “The great privilege of having been born a woooman!”
Her pupils always maintained that “woman,” as pronounced by Miss Primrose, was the most indecent word in the language.
Dame Marigold’s eyes flashed: “I may not be a woman, but, at any rate, I am a mother—which is more than you are!” she retorted.
Then, in a voice that at each word grew more indignant, she said, “And, Miss Primrose, do you consider that you yourself have been ‘worthy of your noble birthright’ in betraying the trust that has been placed in you? Are vice and horror and disgrace and breaking the hearts of parents ‘true womanliness’ I should like to know? You are worse than a murderer—ten times worse. And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor—as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats! I do really believe …”
But Miss Primrose’s shrillness screamed down her low-toned indignation: “Shake me! Stick pins in me! Fling me into the Dapple!” she shrieked. “I will bear it all with a smile, and wear my shame like a flower given by him!”
Dame Marigold groaned in exasperation: “Who, on earth, do you mean by ‘him,’ Miss Primrose?”
Then her irrepressible sense of humour broke out in a dimple, and she added: “Duke Aubrey or Endymion Leer?”
For, of course, Prunella had told her all the jokes about the goose and the sage.
At this question Miss Primrose gave an unmistakable start; “Duke Aubrey, of course!” she answered, but the look in her eyes was sly, suspicious, and distinctly scared.
None of this was lost upon Dame Marigold. She looked her slowly up and down with a little mocking smile; and Miss Primrose began to writhe and to gibber.
“Hum!” said Dame Marigold, meditatively.
She had never liked the smell of Endymion Leer’s personality.
The recent crisis had certainly done him no harm. It had doubled his practice, and trebled his influence.
Besides, it cannot have been Miss Primrose’s beauty and charms that had caused him to pay her recently such marked attentions.
At any rate, it could do no harm to draw a bow at a venture.
“I am beginning to understand, Miss Primrose,” she said slowly. “Two … outsiders, have put their heads together to see if they could find a plan for humiliating the stupid, stuck-up, ‘so-called old families of Lud!’ Oh! don’t protest, Miss Primrose. You have never taken any pains to hide your contempt for us. And I have always realized that yours was not a forgiving nature. Nor do I blame you. We have laughed at you unmercifully for years—and you have resented it. All the same I think your revenge has been an unnecessarily violent one; though, I suppose, to ‘a true woooman,’ nothing is too mean, too spiteful, too base, if it serves the interests of ‘him’!”
But Miss Primrose had gone as green as grass, and was gibbering with terror: “Marigold! Marigold!” she cried, wringing her hands, “How can you think such things? The dear, devoted Doctor! The best and kindest man in Lud-in-the-Mist! Nobody was angrier with me over what he called my ‘criminal carelessness’ in allowing that horrible stuff to be smuggled into my loft, I assure you he is quite rabid on the subject of … er … fruit. Why, when he was a young man at the time of the great drought he was working day and night trying to stop it, he …”
But not for nothing was Dame Marigold descended from generations of judges. Quick as lightning, she turned on her: “The great drought? But that must be forty years ago … long before Endymion Leer came to Dorimare.”
“Yes, yes, dear … of course … quite so … I was thinking of what another doctor had told me … since all this trouble my poor head gets quite muddled,” gibbered Miss Primrose. And she was shaking from head to foot.
Dame Marigold rose from her chair, and stood looking down on her in silence for a few seconds, under half-closed lids, with a rather cruel little smile.
Then she said, “Goodbye, Miss Primrose. You have provided me with most interesting food for thought.”
And then she left her, sitting there with frightened face against the faded tapestry.
That same day, Master Nathaniel received a letter from Luke Hempen that both perplexed and alarmed him.
It was as follows:
Your Worship—I’d be glad if you’d take Master Ranulph away from this farm, because the widow’s up to mischief, I’m sure of that, and some of the folks about here say as what in years gone by she murdered her husband,
