A remark which takes a man unawares by means of his own coat is not an easy remark to answer.Something in the girl herself, too, made me particularly sorry for her just then.She had nice brown eyes, plain as she was in other ways--and she looked at me with a sort of respect for my happy old age and my good character, as things for ever out of her own reach, which made my heart heavy for our second housemaid.Not feeling myself able to comfort her, there was only one other thing to do.That thing was--to take her in to dinner.
`Help me up,' I said.`You're late for dinner, Rosanna--and I have come to fetch you in.'
`You, Mr.Betteredge!' says she.
`They told Nancy to fetch you,' I said.`But I thought you might like your scolding better, my dear, if it came from me.'
Instead of helping me up, the poor thing stole her hand into mine, and gave it a little squeeze.She tried hard to keep from crying again, and succeeded--for which I respected her.`You're very kind, Mr.Betteredge,'
she said.`I don't want any dinner today--let me bide a little longer here.'
`What makes you like to be here?' I asked.`What is it that brings you everlastingly to this miserable place?'
`Something draws me to it,' says the girl, making images with her finger in the sand.`I try to keep away from it, and I can't.Sometimes,' says she in a low voice, as if she was frightened at her own fancy, `sometimes, Mr.Betteredge, I think that my grave is waiting for me here.'
`There's roast mutton and suet-pudding waiting for you!' says I.`Go in to dinner directly.This is what comes, Rosanna, of thinking on an empty stomach!' I spoke severely, being naturally indignant (at my time of life)to hear a young woman of five-and-twenty talking about her latter end!
She didn't seem to hear me: she put her hand on my shoulder, and kept me where I was, sitting by her side.
`I think the place has laid a spell on me,' she said.`I dream of it night after night; I think of it when I sit stitching at my work.You know I am grateful, Mr.Betteredge--you know I try to deserve your kindness, and my lady's confidence in me.But I wonder sometimes whether the life here is too quiet and too good for such a woman as I am, after all I have gone through, Mr.Betteredge--after all I have gone through.It's more lonely to me to be among the other servants, knowing I am not what they are, than it is to be here.My lady doesn't know, the matron at the reformatory doesn't know, what a dreadful reproach honest people are in themselves to a woman like me.Don't scold me, there's a dear good man.I do my work, don't I? Please not to tell my lady I am discontented--I am not.My mind's unquiet, sometimes, that's all.' She snatched her hand off my shoulder, and suddenly pointed down to the quicksand.`Look!' she said.`Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it terrible? I have seen it dozens of times, and it's always as new to me as if I had never seen it before!'
I looked where she pointed.The tide was on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver.The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.`Do you know what it looks like to me ?'
says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again.`It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it--all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps! Throw a stone in, Mr.Betteredge! Throw a stone in, and let's see the sand suck it down!'
Here was unwholesome talk! Here was an empty stomach feeding on an unquiet mind! My answer--a pretty sharp one, in the poor girl's own interests, I promise you!--was at my tongue's end, when it was snapped short off on a sudden by a voice among the sand-hills shouting for me by my name.`Betteredge!'
cries the voice, `where are you?' `Here!' I shouted out in return, without a notion in my mind of who it was.Rosanna started to her feet, and stood looking towards the voice.I was just thinking of getting on my own legs next, when I was staggered by a sudden change in the girl's face.
Her complexion turned of a beautiful red, which I had never seen in it before; she brightened all over with a kind of speechless and breathless surprise.`Who is it?' I asked.Rosanna gave me back my own question.`Oh!
who is it?' she said softly, more to herself than to me.I twisted round on the sand and looked behind me.There, coming out on us from among the hills, was a bright-eyed young gentleman, dressed in a beautiful fawn-coloured suit, with gloves and hat to match, with a rose in his button-hole, and a smile on his face that might have set the Shivering Sand itself smiling at him in return.Before I could get on my legs, he plumped down on the sand by the side of me, put his arm round my neck, foreign fashion, and gave me a hug that fairly squeezed the breath out of my body.`Dear old Betteredge!' says he.`I owe you seven-and-sixpence.Now do you know who I am?'
Lord bless us and save us! Here--four good hours before we expected him--was Mr.Franklin Blake!
Before I could say a word, I saw Mr.Franklin, a little surprised to all appearance, look up from me to Rosanna.Following his lead, I looked at the girl too.She was blushing of a deeper red than ever, seemingly at having caught Mr.Franklin's eye; and she turned and left us suddenly, in a confusion quite unaccountable to my mind, without either making her curtsey to the gentleman or saying a word to me.Very unlike her usual self: a civiller and better-behaved servant, in general, you never met with.
`That's an odd girl,' says Mr.Franklin.`I wonder what she sees in me to surprise her?'
`I suppose, sir,' I answered, drolling on our young gentleman's Continental education, `it's the varnish from foreign parts.'
I set down here Mr.Franklin's careless question, and my foolish answer, as a consolation and encouragement to all stupid people--it being, as Ihave remarked, a great satisfaction to our inferior fellow-creatures to find that their betters are, on occasions, no brighter than they are.Neither Mr.Franklin, with his wonderful foreign training, nor I, with my age, experience, and natural mother-wit, had the ghost of an idea of what Rosanna Spearman's unaccountable behaviour really meant.She was out of our thoughts, poor soul, before we had seen the last flutter of her little grey cloak among the sand-hills.And what of that? you will ask, naturally enough.
Read on, good friend, as patiently as you can, and perhaps you will be as sorry for Rosanna Spearman as I was, when I found out the truth.