Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/631

1868.] "I called to let you know, Mrs. Brume, that your husband thinks of remaining with me for the present. My name is Gillies, and I live at Cragness, the estate of the late Mr. Reginald Vaughn."

Mrs. Brume's color rose, and she twitched at the strings of her apron, but as she raised her eyes they met the cold grave look steadily bent upon her, and with a very unusual effort to suppress her rising wrath, she asked,

"How long does he think of stopping?"

"As long as I wish to employ him," returned Gillies, coolly.

"O—h!" replied Mistress Brume, slowly, while an ominous pallor settled about her lips, and her hands flew to her hips.

"And if I might ask without offence, Mr. Gillies, I'd just like to know how long you calc'late to keep a honest woman's husband away from her?"

"So long as he wishes to remain," replied Gillies, in the same imperturbable manner, and beneath that manner and that steady gaze Nancy Brume found her usually unfailing powers of invective mysteriously checked and subdued. She bravely tried to rally her forces.

"O well," said she, bridling, "I don't suppose its of no consequence to either one of you what I think about it. A poor weak woman hain't got no chance when the man as had ought to look out for her can get them as calls themselves gentlemen to back him up and help him along in trampling onto her feelings—"

But these same feelings of Nancy Brume's, denied full expression in their usual manner, found sudden vent in another form, and she burst into tears, sobbing from behind the white apron.

"I don't know, I'm sure, what I ever did to you, sir, that you should come and take away my husband this way, and then set there as cold as I don't know what, and—make from fun of me, and all."

"Make fun of you, ma'am!" exclaimed Mr. Gillies, indignantly, and indeed the phrase by which Dame Brume had sought to express the unsympathizing and unassailable manner of her guest was ludicrously inappropriate, although sufficiently significant of a jealousy almost universal in her class toward its social superiors. Nancy, unable to defend her position, with feminine quickness changed her base of operations.

"I'm sure I've been as good a wife to that man as there is in Carrick. His house has been kept tidy and his vittles has been cooked reg'lar, and if his clo's hain't always been whole and neat, it wasn't my fault, but his'n, which he wouldn't leave 'em off—"

"Mrs. Brume! will you stop and listen to me!" interrupted Mr. Gillies, so decidedly, that the white apron suddenly dropped into Nancy's lap, disclosing a scarlet but attentive face.

Mr. Gillies glanced at it and then away. Poor Nancy's beauty was not of the exceptional style to which tears are an added charm.

"What I wish to say is simply this," continued the guest, rising to depart. "I have taken your husband into my service for an indefinite period, and thinking it proper you should be informed of the fact, I called here to mention it. With your matrimonial virtues or faults I have, of course, no concern, and merely came here to-day lest you should think it necessary to seek your husband at Cragness."

"I don't know but I've been kind o' ha'sh, sometimes," pursued the wife, more attentive to her own course of thought than to the cold words of her guest,