"Did you?" said Margery. "What else did you think?"

"And your sister, poor dear!" continued Harriet, pa.s.sing over the retort, and speaking sympathizingly, for she generally found it to her interest to keep friends with Margery. "Has she got well?"

"As well as she ever will be, I suppose," was Margery's crusty answer.

She sat down, untied her bonnet and threw it off, and unpinned her shawl. Harriet snuffed the candle and resumed her work, which appeared to be sewing tapes on a pinafore of Meta's.

"Has she torn 'em off again?" asked Margery, her eyes following the progress of the needle.

"She's always tearing 'em off," responded Harriet, biting the end of her thread.

"And how's things going on here?" demanded Margery, her voice a.s.suming a confidential tone, as she drew her chair nearer to Harriet's. "The Bank's not opened again, I find, for I asked so much at the station."

"Things couldn't be worse," said Harriet. "It's all a smash together.

The house is bankrupt."

"Lord help us!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Margery.

Harriet let her work fall on the table, and leant her head towards Margery's, her voice dropped to a whisper.

"I say! We have a man in here!"

"In here!" breathlessly rejoined Margery.

Harriet nodded. "Since last Tuesday. There's one stopping here, and there's another at Ashlydyat. Margery, I declare to you when they were going through the house, them creatures, I felt that sick, I didn't know how to bear it. If I had dared I'd have upset a bucket of boiling water over the lot as they came up the stairs."

Margery sat, revolving the news, a terribly blank look upon her face.

Harriet resumed.

"We shall all have to leave, every soul of us: and soon, too, we expect.

I don't know about you, you know. I am so sorry for my mistress!"

"Well!" burst forth Margery, giving vent to her indignation; "_he_ has brought matters to a fine pa.s.s!"

"Meaning master?" asked Harriet.

"Meaning n.o.body else," was the tart rejoinder.

"He just has," said Harriet. "Prior's Ash is saying such things that it raises one's hair to hear them. We don't like to repeat them again, only just among ourselves."

"What's the drift of 'em?" inquired Margery.

"All sorts of drifts. About his having took and made away with the money in the tills: and those bonds of my Lord Averil's, that there was so much looking after--it was he took them. Who'd have believed it, Margery, of Mr. George G.o.dolphin, with his gay laugh and his handsome face?"

"Better for him if his laugh had been a bit less gay and his face less handsome," was the sharp remark of Margery. "He might have been steadier then."

"Folks talk of the Verralls, and that set, up at Lady G.o.dolphin's Folly," rejoined Harriet, her voice falling still lower. "Prior's Ash says he has had too much to do with them, and----"

"I don't want that scandal repeated over to me," angrily reprimanded Margery. "Perhaps other people know as much about it as Prior's Ash; they have eyes, I suppose. There's no need for you to bring it up to one's face."

"But they talk chiefly about Mr. Verrall," persisted Harriet, with a stress upon the name. "It's said that he and master have had business dealings together of some sort, and that that's where the money's gone.

I was not going to bring up anything else. The man downstairs--and upon my word, Margery, he's a decent man enough, if you can only forget who he is--says that there are thousands and thousands gone into Verrall's pockets, which ought to be in master's."

"They'd ruin a saint, and I have always said it," was Margery's angry remark. "See _her_ tearing about with her horses and her carriages, in her feathers and her bra.s.s; and master after her! Many's the time I've wondered that Mr. G.o.dolphin has put up with it. _I'd_ have given him a word of a sort, if I had been his brother."

"I should if I'd been his wife----" Harriet was beginning, but Margery angrily arrested her. Her own tongue might be guilty of many slips in the heat of argument; but it was high treason for Harriet to lapse into them.

"Hold your sauce, girl! How dare you bring your mistress's name up in any such thing? I don't know what you mean, for my part. When she complains of her husband, it will be time enough then for you to join in the chorus. Could you wish to see a better husband, pray?"

"He is quite a model husband to her face," replied saucy Harriet. "And the old saying's a true one: What the eye don't see, the heart won't grieve. Where's the need for us to quarrel over it?" she added, taking up her work again. "You have your opinion and I have mine, and if they were laid side by side, it's likely they'd not be far apart from each other. But let them be bad or good, it can't change the past. What's done, is done: and the house is broken up."

Margery flung off her shawl just as Charlotte Pain had flung off hers the previous Monday morning in the breakfast-room, and a silence ensued.

"Perhaps the house may go on again?" said Margery, presently, in a dreamy tone.

"Why, how can it?" returned Harriet, looking up from her work at the pinafore, which she had resumed. "All the money's gone. A bank can't go on without money."

"What does he say to it?" very sharply asked Margery.

"What does who say to it?"

"Master. Does _he_ say how the money comes to be gone? How does he like facing the creditors?"

"He is not here," said Harriet. "He has not been home since he left last Sat.u.r.day. It's said he is in London."

"And Mr. G.o.dolphin?"

"Mr. G.o.dolphin's here. And a nice task he has of it every day with the angry creditors. If we have had one of the bank creditors bothering at the hall-door for Mr. George, we have had fifty. At first, they wouldn't believe he was away, and wouldn't be got rid of. Creditors of the house, too, have come, worrying my mistress out of her life. There's a sight of money owing in the town. Cook says she wouldn't have believed there was a quarter of the amount only just for household things, till it came to be summed up. Some of them downstairs are wondering if they will get their wages. And--I say, Margery, have you heard about Mr. Hastings?"

"What about him?" asked Margery.

"He has lost every shilling he had. It was in the Bank, and----"

"He couldn't have had so very much to lose," interposed Margery, who was in a humour to contradict everything. "What can a parson save? Not much."

"But it is not that--not _his_ money. The week before the Bank went, he had lodged between nine and ten thousand pounds in it for safety. He was left trustee, you know, to dead Mr. Chisholm's children, and their money was paid to him, it turns out, and he brought it to the Bank. It's all gone."

Margery lifted her hands in dismay. "I have heard say that failures are like nothing but a devouring fire, for the money they swallow up," she remarked. "It seems to be true."

"My mistress has looked so ill ever since! And she can eat nothing.

Pierce says it would melt the heart of a stone to see her make believe to eat before him, waiting at dinner, trying to get a morsel down her throat, and not able to do it. My belief is, that she's thinking of her father's ruin night and day. Report is, that master took the money from the Rector, knowing it would never be paid back again, and used it for himself."

Margery got up with a jerk. "If I stop here I shall be hearing worse and worse," she remarked. "This will be enough to kill Miss Janet. That awful Shadow hasn't been on the Dark Plain this year for nothing. We might well notice that it never was so dark before!"

Perching her bonnet on her head, and throwing her shawl over her arm, Margery lighted a candle and opened a door leading from the room into a bed-chamber. Her own bed stood opposite to her, and in a corner at the opposite end was Miss Meta's little bed. She laid her shawl and bonnet on the drawers, and advanced on tiptoe, shading the light with her hand.

Intending to take a fond look at her darling. But, like many more of us who advance confidently on some pleasure, Margery found nothing but disappointment. The place where Meta ought to have been was empty.

Nothing to be seen but the smooth white bed-clothes, laid ready open for the young lady's reception. Did a fear dart over Margery's mind that she must be lost? She certainly flew back as if some such idea occurred to her.