CHAPTER 45. The Trusty Agent
Edith went out alone that day, and returned home early. It was but a few minutes after ten o’clock, when her carriage rolled along the street in which she lived.
There was the same enforced composure on her face, that there had been when she was dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the same cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen its leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, or rendered shapeless by the fitful searches of a throbbing and bewildered brain for any resting-place, than adorning such tranquillity. So obdurate, so unapproachable, so unrelenting, one would have thought that nothing could soften such a woman’s nature, and that everything in life had hardened it.
Arrived at her own door, she was alighting, when some one coming quietly from the hall, and standing bareheaded, offered her his arm. The servant being thrust aside, she had no choice but to touch it; and she then knew whose arm it was.
‘How is your patient, Sir?’ she asked, with a curled lip.
‘He is better,’ returned Carker. ‘He is doing very well. I have left him for the night.’
She bent her head, and was passing up the staircase, when he followed and said, speaking at the bottom:
‘Madam! May I beg the favour of a minute’s audience?’
She stopped and turned her eyes back ‘It is an unseasonable time, Sir, and I am fatigued. Is your business urgent?’
‘It is very urgent, returned Carker. ‘As I am so fortunate as to have met you, let me press my petition.’
She looked down for a moment at his glistening mouth; and he looked up at her, standing above him in her stately dress, and thought, again, how beautiful she was.
‘Where is Miss Dombey?’ she asked the servant, aloud.
‘In the morning room, Ma’am.’
‘Show the way there!’ Turning her eyes again on the attentive gentleman at the bottom of the stairs, and informing him with a slight motion of her head, that he was at liberty to follow, she passed on.
‘I beg your pardon! Madam! Mrs Dombey!’ cried the soft and nimble Carker, at her side in a moment. ‘May I be permitted to entreat that Miss Dombey is not present?’
She confronted him, with a quick look, but with the same self-possession and steadiness.
‘I would spare Miss Dombey,’ said Carker, in a low voice, ‘the knowledge of what I have to say. At least, Madam, I would leave it to you to decide whether she shall know of it or not. I owe that to you. It is my bounden duty to you. After our former interview, it would be monstrous in me if I did otherwise.’
She slowly withdrew her eyes from his face, and turning to the servant, said, ‘Some other room.’ He led the way to a drawing-room, which he speedily lighted up and then left them. While he remained, not a word was spoken. Edith enthroned herself upon a couch by the fire; and Mr Carker, with his hat in his hand and his eyes bent upon the carpet, stood before her, at some little distance.
‘Before I hear you, Sir,’ said Edith, when the door was closed, ‘I wish you to hear me.’
‘To be addressed by Mrs Dombey,’ he returned, ‘even in accents of unmerited reproach, is an honour I so greatly esteem, that although I were not her servant in all things, I should defer to such a wish, most readily.’
‘If you are charged by the man whom you have just now left, Sir;’ Mr Carker raised his eyes, as if he were going to counterfeit surprise, but she met them, and stopped him, if such were his intention; ‘with any message to me, do not attempt to deliver it, for I will not receive it. I need scarcely ask you if you are come on such an errand. I have expected you some time.’
‘It is my misfortune,’ he replied, ‘to be here, wholly against my will, for such a purpose. Allow me to say that I am here for two purposes. That is one.’
‘That one, Sir,’ she returned, ‘is ended. Or, if you return to it – ’
‘Can Mrs Dombey believe,’ said Carker, coming nearer, ‘that I would return to it in the face of her prohibition? Is it possible that Mrs Dombey, having no regard to my unfortunate position, is so determined to consider me inseparable from my instructor as to do me great and wilful injustice?’
‘Sir,’ returned Edith, bending her dark gaze full upon him, and speaking with a rising passion that inflated her proud nostril and her swelling neck, and stirred the delicate white down upon a robe she wore, thrown loosely over shoulders that could hear its snowy neighbourhood. ‘Why do you present yourself to me, as you have done, and speak to me of love and duty to my husband, and pretend to think that I am happily married, and that I honour him? How dare you venture so to affront me, when you know – I do not know better, Sir: I have seen it in your every glance, and heard it in your every word – that in place of affection between us there is aversion and contempt, and that I despise him hardly less than I despise myself for being his! Injustice! If I had done justice to the torment you have made me feel, and to my sense of the insult you have put upon me, I should have slain you!’
She had asked him why he did this. Had she not been blinded by her pride and wrath, and self-humiliation, – which she was, fiercely as she bent her gaze upon him, – she would have seen the answer in his face. To bring her to this declaration.
She saw it not, and cared not whether it was there or no. She saw only the indignities and struggles she had undergone and had to undergo, and was writhing under them. As she sat looking fixedly at them, rather than at him, she plucked the feathers from a pinion of some rare and beautiful bird, which hung from her wrist by a golden thread, to serve her as a fan, and rained them on the ground.
He did not shrink beneath her gaze, but stood, until such outward signs of her anger as had escaped her control subsided, with the air of a man who had his sufficient reply in reserve and would presently deliver it. And he then spoke, looking straight into her kindling eyes.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I know, and knew before to-day, that I have found no favour with you; and I knew why. Yes. I knew why. You have spoken so openly to me; I am so relieved by the possession of your confidence – ’
‘Confidence!’ she repeated, with disdain.
He passed it over.
‘ – that I will make no pretence of concealment. I did see from the first, that there was no affection on your part for Mr Dombey – how could it possibly exist between such different subjects? And I have seen, since, that stronger feelings than indifference have been engendered in your breast – how could that possibly be otherwise, either, circumstanced as you have been? But was it for me to presume to avow this knowledge to you in so many words?’
‘Was it for you, Sir,’ she replied, ‘to feign that other belief, and audaciously to thrust it on me day by day?’
‘Madam, it was,’ he eagerly retorted. ‘If I had done less, if I had done anything but that, I should not be speaking to you thus; and I foresaw – who could better foresee, for who has had greater experience of Mr Dombey than myself? – that unless your character should prove to be as yielding and obedient as that of his first submissive lady, which I did not believe – ’
A haughty smile gave him reason to observe that he might repeat this.
‘I say, which I did not believe, – the time was likely to come, when such an understanding as we have now arrived at, would be serviceable.’
‘Serviceable to whom, Sir?’ she demanded scornfully.
‘To you. I will not add to myself, as warning me to refrain even from that limited commendation of Mr Dombey, in which I can honestly indulge, in order that I may not have the misfortune of saying anything distasteful to one whose aversion and contempt,’ with great expression, ‘are so keen.’
‘Is it honest in you, Sir,’ said Edith, ‘to confess to your “limited commendation,” and to speak in that tone of disparagement, even of him: being his chief counsellor and flatterer!’
‘Counsellor, – yes,’ said Carker. ‘Flatterer, – no. A little reservation I fear I must confess to. But our interest and convenience commonly oblige many of us to make professions that we cannot feel. We have partnerships of interest and convenience, friendships of interest and convenience, dealings of interest and convenience, marriages of interest and convenience, every day.’
She bit her blood-red lip; but without wavering in the dark, stern watch she kept upon him.
‘Madam,’ said Mr Carker, sitting down in a chair that was near her, with an air of the most profound and most considerate respect, ‘why should I hesitate now, being altogether devoted to your service, to speak plainly? It was natural that a lady, endowed as you are, should think it feasible to change her husband’s character in some respects, and mould him to a better form.’
‘It was not natural to me, Sir,’ she rejoined. ‘I had never any expectation or intention of that kind.’
The proud undaunted face showed him it was resolute to wear no mask he offered, but was set upon a reckless disclosure of itself, indifferent to any aspect in which it might present itself to such as he.
‘At least it was natural,’ he resumed, ‘that you should deem it quite possible to live with Mr Dombey as his wife, at once without submitting to him, and without coming into such violent collision with him. But, Madam, you did not know Mr Dombey (as you have since ascertained), when you thought that. You did not know how exacting and how proud he is, or how he is, if I may say so, the slave of his own greatness, and goes yoked to his own triumphal car like a beast of burden, with no idea on earth but that it is behind him and is to be drawn on, over everything and through everything.’
His teeth gleamed through his malicious relish of this conceit, as he went on talking:
‘Mr Dombey is really capable of no more true consideration for you, Madam, than for me. The comparison is an extreme one; I intend it to be so; but quite just. Mr Dombey, in the plenitude of his power, asked me – I had it from his own lips yesterday morning – to be his go-between to you, because he knows I am not agreeable to you, and because he intends that I shall be a punishment for your contumacy; and besides that, because he really does consider, that I, his paid servant, am an ambassador whom it is derogatory to the dignity – not of the lady to whom I have the happiness of speaking; she has no existence in his mind – but of his wife, a part of himself, to receive. You may imagine how regardless of me, how obtuse to the possibility of my having any individual sentiment or opinion he is, when he tells me, openly, that I am so employed. You know how perfectly indifferent to your feelings he is, when he threatens you with such a messenger. As you, of course, have not forgotten that he did.’
She watched him still attentively. But he watched her too; and he saw that this indication of a knowledge on his part, of something that had passed between herself and her husband, rankled and smarted in her haughty breast, like a poisoned arrow.
‘I do not recall all this to widen the breach between yourself and Mr Dombey, Madam – Heaven forbid! what would it profit me? – but as an example of the hopelessness of impressing Mr Dombey with a sense that anybody is to be considered when he is in question. We who are about him, have, in our various positions, done our part, I daresay, to confirm him in his way of thinking; but if we had not done so, others would – or they would not have been about him; and it has always been, from the beginning, the very staple of his life. Mr Dombey has had to deal, in short, with none but submissive and dependent persons, who have bowed the knee, and bent the neck, before him. He has never known what it is to have angry pride and strong resentment opposed to him.’
‘But he will know it now!’ she seemed to say; though her lips did not part, nor her eyes falter. He saw the soft down tremble once again, and he saw her lay the plumage of the beautiful bird against her bosom for a moment; and he unfolded one more ring of the coil into which he had gathered himself.
‘Mr Dombey, though a most honourable gentleman,’ he said, ‘is so prone to pervert even facts to his own view, when he is at all opposed, in consequence of the warp in his mind, that he – can I give a better instance than this! – he sincerely believes (you will excuse the folly of what I am about to say; it not being mine) that his severe expression of opinion to his present wife, on a certain special occasion she may remember, before the lamented death of Mrs Skewton, produced a withering effect, and for the moment quite subdued her!’
Edith laughed. How harshly and unmusically need not be described. It is enough that he was glad to hear her.
‘Madam,’ he resumed, ‘I have done with this. Your own opinions are so strong, and, I am persuaded, so unalterable,’ he repeated those words slowly and with great emphasis, ‘that I am almost afraid to incur your displeasure anew, when I say that in spite of these defects and my full knowledge of them, I have become habituated to Mr Dombey, and esteem him. But when I say so, it is not, believe me, for the mere sake of vaunting a feeling that is so utterly at variance with your own, and for which you can have no sympathy’ – oh how distinct and plain and emphasized this was! – ‘but to give you an assurance of the zeal with which, in this unhappy matter, I am yours, and the indignation with which I regard the part I am to fill!’
She sat as if she were afraid to take her eyes from his face.
And now to unwind the last ring of the coil!
‘It is growing late,’ said Carker, after a pause, ‘and you are, as you said, fatigued. But the second object of this interview, I must not forget. I must recommend you, I must entreat you in the most earnest manner, for sufficient reasons that I have, to be cautious in your demonstrations of regard for Miss Dombey.’
‘Cautious! What do you mean?’
‘To be careful how you exhibit too much affection for that young lady.’
‘Too much affection, Sir!’ said Edith, knitting her broad brow and rising. ‘Who judges my affection, or measures it out? You?’
‘It is not I who do so.’ He was, or feigned to be, perplexed.
‘Who then?’
‘Can you not guess who then?’
‘I do not choose to guess,’ she answered.
‘Madam,’ he said after a little hesitation; meantime they had been, and still were, regarding each other as before; ‘I am in a difficulty here. You have told me you will receive no message, and you have forbidden me to return to that subject; but the two subjects are so closely entwined, I find, that unless you will accept this vague caution from one who has now the honour to possess your confidence, though the way to it has been through your displeasure, I must violate the injunction you have laid upon me.’
‘You know that you are free to do so, Sir,’ said Edith. ‘Do it.’
So pale, so trembling, so impassioned! He had not miscalculated the effect then!
‘His instructions were,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘that I should inform you that your demeanour towards Miss Dombey is not agreeable to him. That it suggests comparisons to him which are not favourable to himself. That he desires it may be wholly changed; and that if you are in earnest, he is confident it will be; for your continued show of affection will not benefit its object.’
‘That is a threat,’ she said.
‘That is a threat,’ he answered, in his voiceless manner of assent: adding aloud, ‘but not directed against you.’
Proud, erect, and dignified, as she stood confronting him; and looking through him as she did, with her full bright flashing eye; and smiling, as she was, with scorn and bitterness; she sunk as if the ground had dropped beneath her, and in an instant would have fallen on the floor, but that he caught her in his arms. As instantaneously she threw him off, the moment that he touched her, and, drawing back, confronted him again, immoveable, with her hand stretched out.
‘Please to leave me. Say no more to-night.’
‘I feel the urgency of this,’ said Mr Carker, ‘because it is impossible to say what unforeseen consequences might arise, or how soon, from your being unacquainted with his state of mind. I understand Miss Dombey is concerned, now, at the dismissal of her old servant, which is likely to have been a minor consequence in itself. You don’t blame me for requesting that Miss Dombey might not be present. May I hope so?’
‘I do not. Please to leave me, Sir.’
‘I knew that your regard for the young lady, which is very sincere and strong, I am well persuaded, would render it a great unhappiness to you, ever to be a prey to the reflection that you had injured her position and ruined her future hopes,’ said Carker hurriedly, but eagerly.
‘No more to-night. Leave me, if you please.’
‘I shall be here constantly in my attendance upon him, and in the transaction of business matters. You will allow me to see you again, and to consult what should be done, and learn your wishes?’
She motioned him towards the door.
‘I cannot even decide whether to tell him I have spoken to you yet; or to lead him to suppose that I have deferred doing so, for want of opportunity, or for any other reason. It will be necessary that you should enable me to consult with you very soon.’
‘At any time but now,’ she answered.
‘You will understand, when I wish to see you, that Miss Dombey is not to be present; and that I seek an interview as one who has the happiness to possess your confidence, and who comes to render you every assistance in his power, and, perhaps, on many occasions, to ward off evil from her?’
Looking at him still with the same apparent dread of releasing him for a moment from the influence of her steady gaze, whatever that might be, she answered, ‘Yes!’ and once more bade him go.
He bowed, as if in compliance; but turning back, when he had nearly reached the door, said:
‘I am forgiven, and have explained my fault. May I – for Miss Dombey’s sake, and for my own – take your hand before I go?’
She gave him the gloved hand she had maimed last night. He took it in one of his, and kissed it, and withdrew. And when he had closed the door, he waved the hand with which he had taken hers, and thrust it in his breast.
Edith saw no one that night, but locked her door, and kept herself alone.
She did not weep; she showed no greater agitation, outwardly, than when she was riding home. She laid as proud a head upon her pillow as she had borne in her carriage; and her prayer ran thus:
‘May this man be a liar! For if he has spoken truth, she is lost to me, and I have no hope left!’
This man, meanwhile, went home musing to bed, thinking, with a dainty pleasure, how imperious her passion was, how she had sat before him in her beauty, with the dark eyes that had never turned away but once; how the white down had fluttered; how the bird’s feathers had been strewn upon the ground.
CHAPTER 46. Recognizant and Reflective
Among sundry minor alterations in Mr Carker’s life and habits that began to take place at this time, none was more remarkable than the extraordinary diligence with which he applied himself to business, and the closeness with which he investigated every detail that the affairs of the House laid open to him. Always active and penetrating in such matters, his lynx-eyed vigilance now increased twenty-fold. Not only did his weary watch keep pace with every present point that every day presented to him in some new form, but in the midst of these engrossing occupations he found leisure – that is, he made it – to review the past transactions of the Firm, and his share in them, during a long series of years. Frequently when the clerks were all gone, the offices dark and empty, and all similar places of business shut up, Mr Carker, with the whole anatomy of the iron room laid bare before him, would explore the mysteries of books and papers, with the patient progress of a man who was dissecting the minutest nerves and fibres of his subject. Perch, the messenger, who usually remained on these occasions, to entertain himself with the perusal of the Price Current by the light of one candle, or to doze over the fire in the outer office, at the imminent risk every moment of diving head foremost into the coal-box, could not withhold the tribute of his admiration from this zealous conduct, although it much contracted his domestic enjoyments; and again, and again, expatiated to Mrs Perch (now nursing twins) on the industry and acuteness of their managing gentleman in the City.
The same increased and sharp attention that Mr Carker bestowed on the business of the House, he applied to his own personal affairs. Though not a partner in the concern – a distinction hitherto reserved solely to inheritors of the great name of Dombey – he was in the receipt of some percentage on its dealings; and, participating in all its facilities for the employment of money to advantage, was considered, by the minnows among the tritons of the East, a rich man. It began to be said, among these shrewd observers, that Jem Carker, of Dombey’s, was looking about him to see what he was worth; and that he was calling in his money at a good time, like the long-headed fellow he was; and bets were even offered on the Stock Exchange that Jem was going to marry a rich widow.
Yet these cares did not in the least interfere with Mr Carker’s watching of his chief, or with his cleanness, neatness, sleekness, or any cat-like quality he possessed. It was not so much that there was a change in him, in reference to any of his habits, as that the whole man was intensified. Everything that had been observable in him before, was observable now, but with a greater amount of concentration. He did each single thing, as if he did nothing else – a pretty certain indication in a man of that range of ability and purpose, that he is doing something which sharpens and keeps alive his keenest powers.
The only decided alteration in him was, that as he rode to and fro along the streets, he would fall into deep fits of musing, like that in which he had come away from Mr Dombey’s house, on the morning of that gentleman’s disaster. At such times, he would keep clear of the obstacles in his way, mechanically; and would appear to see and hear nothing until arrival at his destination, or some sudden chance or effort roused him.
Walking his white-legged horse thus, to the counting-house of Dombey and Son one day, he was as unconscious of the observation of two pairs of women’s eyes, as of the fascinated orbs of Rob the Grinder, who, in waiting a street’s length from the appointed place, as a demonstration of punctuality, vainly touched and retouched his hat to attract attention, and trotted along on foot, by his master’s side, prepared to hold his stirrup when he should alight.
‘See where he goes!’ cried one of these two women, an old creature, who stretched out her shrivelled arm to point him out to her companion, a young woman, who stood close beside her, withdrawn like herself into a gateway.
Mrs Brown’s daughter looked out, at this bidding on the part of Mrs Brown; and there were wrath and vengeance in her face.
‘I never thought to look at him again,’ she said, in a low voice; ‘but it’s well I should, perhaps. I see. I see!’
‘Not changed!’ said the old woman, with a look of eager malice.
‘He changed!’ returned the other. ‘What for? What has he suffered? There is change enough for twenty in me. Isn’t that enough?’
‘See where he goes!’ muttered the old woman, watching her daughter with her red eyes; ‘so easy and so trim a-horseback, while we are in the mud.’
‘And of it,’ said her daughter impatiently. ‘We are mud, underneath his horse’s feet. What should we be?’
In the intentness with which she looked after him again, she made a hasty gesture with her hand when the old woman began to reply, as if her view could be obstructed by mere sound. Her mother watching her, and not him, remained silent; until her kindling glance subsided, and she drew a long breath, as if in the relief of his being gone.
‘Deary!’ said the old woman then. ‘Alice! Handsome gall Ally!’ She gently shook her sleeve to arouse her attention. ‘Will you let him go like that, when you can wring money from him? Why, it’s a wickedness, my daughter.’
‘Haven’t I told you, that I will not have money from him?’ she returned. ‘And don’t you yet believe me? Did I take his sister’s money? Would I touch a penny, if I knew it, that had gone through his white hands – unless it was, indeed, that I could poison it, and send it back to him? Peace, mother, and come away.’
‘And him so rich?’ murmured the old woman. ‘And us so poor!’
‘Poor in not being able to pay him any of the harm we owe him,’ returned her daughter. ‘Let him give me that sort of riches, and I’ll take them from him, and use them. Come away. Its no good looking at his horse. Come away, mother!’
But the old woman, for whom the spectacle of Rob the Grinder returning down the street, leading the riderless horse, appeared to have some extraneous interest that it did not possess in itself, surveyed that young man with the utmost earnestness; and seeming to have whatever doubts she entertained, resolved as he drew nearer, glanced at her daughter with brightened eyes and with her finger on her lip, and emerging from the gateway at the moment of his passing, touched him on the shoulder.
‘Why, where’s my sprightly Rob been, all this time!’ she said, as he turned round.
The sprightly Rob, whose sprightliness was very much diminished by the salutation, looked exceedingly dismayed, and said, with the water rising in his eyes:
‘Oh! why can’t you leave a poor cove alone, Misses Brown, when he’s getting an honest livelihood and conducting himself respectable? What do you come and deprive a cove of his character for, by talking to him in the streets, when he’s taking his master’s horse to a honest stable – a horse you’d go and sell for cats’ and dogs’ meat if you had your way! Why, I thought,’ said the Grinder, producing his concluding remark as if it were the climax of all his injuries, ‘that you was dead long ago!’
‘This is the way,’ cried the old woman, appealing to her daughter, ‘that he talks to me, who knew him weeks and months together, my deary, and have stood his friend many and many a time among the pigeon-fancying tramps and bird-catchers.’
‘Let the birds be, will you, Misses Brown?’ retorted Rob, in a tone of the acutest anguish. ‘I think a cove had better have to do with lions than them little creeturs, for they’re always flying back in your face when you least expect it. Well, how d’ye do and what do you want?’ These polite inquiries the Grinder uttered, as it were under protest, and with great exasperation and vindictiveness.
‘Hark how he speaks to an old friend, my deary!’ said Mrs Brown, again appealing to her daughter. ‘But there’s some of his old friends not so patient as me. If I was to tell some that he knows, and has spotted and cheated with, where to find him – ’
‘Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?’ interrupted the miserable Grinder, glancing quickly round, as though he expected to see his master’s teeth shining at his elbow. ‘What do you take a pleasure in ruining a cove for? At your time of life too! when you ought to be thinking of a variety of things!’
‘What a gallant horse!’ said the old woman, patting the animal’s neck.
‘Let him alone, will you, Misses Brown?’ cried Rob, pushing away her hand. ‘You’re enough to drive a penitent cove mad!’
‘Why, what hurt do I do him, child?’ returned the old woman.
‘Hurt?’ said Rob. ‘He’s got a master that would find it out if he was touched with a straw.’ And he blew upon the place where the old woman’s hand had rested for a moment, and smoothed it gently with his finger, as if he seriously believed what he said.
The old woman looking back to mumble and mouth at her daughter, who followed, kept close to Rob’s heels as he walked on with the bridle in his hand; and pursued the conversation.
‘A good place, Rob, eh?’ said she. ‘You’re in luck, my child.’
‘Oh don’t talk about luck, Misses Brown,’ returned the wretched Grinder, facing round and stopping. ‘If you’d never come, or if you’d go away, then indeed a cove might be considered tolerable lucky. Can’t you go along, Misses Brown, and not foller me!’ blubbered Rob, with sudden defiance. ‘If the young woman’s a friend of yours, why don’t she take you away, instead of letting you make yourself so disgraceful!’
‘What!’ croaked the old woman, putting her face close to his, with a malevolent grin upon it that puckered up the loose skin down in her very throat. ‘Do you deny your old chum! Have you lurked to my house fifty times, and slept sound in a corner when you had no other bed but the paving-stones, and do you talk to me like this! Have I bought and sold with you, and helped you in my way of business, schoolboy, sneak, and what not, and do you tell me to go along? Could I raise a crowd of old company about you to-morrow morning, that would follow you to ruin like copies of your own shadow, and do you turn on me with your bold looks! I’ll go. Come, Alice.’
‘Stop, Misses Brown!’ cried the distracted Grinder. ‘What are you doing of? Don’t put yourself in a passion! Don’t let her go, if you please. I haven’t meant any offence. I said “how d’ye do,” at first, didn’t I? But you wouldn’t answer. How you do? Besides,’ said Rob piteously, ‘look here! How can a cove stand talking in the street with his master’s prad a-wanting to be took to be rubbed down, and his master up to every individgle thing that happens!’
The old woman made a show of being partially appeased, but shook her head, and mouthed and muttered still.
‘Come along to the stables, and have a glass of something that’s good for you, Misses Brown, can’t you?’ said Rob, ‘instead of going on, like that, which is no good to you, nor anybody else. Come along with her, will you be so kind?’ said Rob. ‘I’m sure I’m delighted to see her, if it wasn’t for the horse!’
With this apology, Rob turned away, a rueful picture of despair, and walked his charge down a bye street’ The old woman, mouthing at her daughter, followed close upon him. The daughter followed.