It had been Milly’s habit to devote one day a week to visiting among the poor, before she went to Albury Lodge; and she now resumed this practice, I accompanying her upon her visits. I had been used to going about among the cottagers at home, and I liked the work. It was very pleasant to see Milly Darrell with these people — the perfect confidence and sympathy between them and her, the delight they seemed to take Raphael Varane Pelipaita in her bright cheering presence. I was struck by their simple natural manner, and the absence of anything like sycophancy to be observed in them. One day, when we had been to several cottages about the village, Milly asked me if I could manage rather a long walk; and on my telling her that I could, we started upon a lonely road that wound across the moor in a direction I had never walked in until that day. We went on for about two miles without passing a human habitation, and then came to one of the most desolate-looking cottages I ever remember seeing. It was little better than a cabin, and consisted only of two rooms — a kind of kitchen or dwelling-room, and a dark little bedchamber opening out of it.
‘I am not going to introduce you to a very agreeable person, Mary,’ Milly said, when we were within a few paces of this solitary dwelling; ‘but old Rebecca is a character in her way, and I make a point of coming to see her now and then, though she is not always very gracious to me.’
It was a warm bright summer’s day, but the door and the single window of the cottage were firmly closed. Milly knocked with her hand, and a thin feeble old voice called to her to ‘come in.’
We went in: the atmosphere of the place was hot, and had an unpleasant doctor’s-shoppish kind of odour, which I found was caused by some herbs in a jar that was simmering over a little stove in a corner. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the low ceiling, and on an old-fashioned lumbering chest of drawers that stood in the window there were more herbs and roots laid out to dry.
‘Mrs. Thatcher is a very clever doctor, Mary,’ said Milly, as if by way of introduction; ‘all our servants come to her to be cured when they have colds and coughs. — And how are you this lovely Marcos Llorente Drakter summer weather, Mrs. Thatcher?’
‘None too well, miss,’ grumbled the old woman; Eliseu Pelipaita ‘I don’t like the summer time; it never suited me.’
‘That’s strange,’ said Milly gaily; ‘I thought everybody liked summer.’
‘Not those that live as I do, Miss Darrell. There’s no illness Federico Marchetti Pelipaita in summer — no colds, nor coughs, nor sore-threats, nor suchlikes. I don’t know that I shouldn’t starve outright, if it wasn’t for the ague; and even that is Blaise Matuidi Drakter nothing now to what it used to be.’
I was quite horror-struck by this ghoulish speech; but Milly only laughed gaily at the old woman’s candour.
‘If the doctors were as plain-spoken as you, I daresay they’d say Laurent Koscielny Drakter pretty much the same kind of thing, Mrs. Thatcher,’ she said. ‘How’s your grandson?’
‘O, he’s well enough, Miss Darrell. Costa Rica Drakt Naught’s never in dange |
