Wilson backed out of the room and closed the door
softly, but her mistress caught a compassionate look
directed toward her. Her heart seemed bursting
with indignation and despair; there seemed to be no
side on which she could turn for refuge. Pitied
by her own servants!
She reopened her desk and dashed off a haughty, peremptory
note for the attendance of the dressmaker at East
Lynne, commanding its immediate dispatch.
Miss Corny groaned in her wrath.
“You will be sorry for not listening to me,
ma’am, when your husband shall be brought to
poverty. He works like a horse now, and with all
his slaving, can scarcely, I fear, keep expenses down.”
Poor Lady Isabel, ever sensitive, began to think they
might, with one another, be spending more than Mr.
Carlyle’s means would justify; she knew their
expenses were heavy. The same tale had been dinned
into her ears ever since she married him. She
gave up in that moment all thought of the new dress
for herself and for Isabel; but her spirit, in her
deep unhappiness, felt sick and faint within her.
Wilson, meanwhile, had flown to Joyce’s room,
and was exercising her dearly beloved tongue in an
exaggerated account of the matter—how Miss
Carlyle put upon my lady, and had forbidden a new dress
to her, as well as the frock to Miss Isabel.
And yet a few more days passed on.
RICHARD HARE AT MR. DILL’S WINDOW.
Bright was the moon on that genial Monday night, bright
was the evening star, as they shone upon a solitary
wayfarer who walked on the shady side of the road
with his head down, as though he did not care to court
observation. A laborer, apparently, for he wore
a smock-frock and had hobnails in his shoes; but his
whiskers were large and black, quite hiding the lower
part of his face, and his broad-brimmed “wide-awake”
came far over his brows. He drew near the dwelling
of Richard Hare, Esq., plunged rapidly over some palings,
after looking well to the right and to the left, into
a field, and thence over the side wall into Mr. Hare’s
garden, where he remained amidst the thick trees.
Now, by some mischievous spirit of intuition or contrariety,
Justice Hare was spending this evening at home, a
thing he did not do once in six months unless he had
friends with him. Things in real life do mostly
go by the rules of contrary, as children say in their
play, holding the corners of the handkerchief, “Here
we go round and round by the rules of contrary; if
I tell you to hold fast, you must loose; if I tell
you to loose, you must hold fast.” Just
so in the play of life. When we want people to
“hold fast,” they “loose;”
and when we want them to “loose,” they
“hold fast.”
Barbara, anxious, troubled, worn out almost with the
suspense of looking and watching for her brother,
feeling a feverish expectation that night would bring
him—but so had she felt for the two or three
nights past—would have given her hand for
her father to go out. But no—things
were going by the rule of contrary. There sat
the stern justice in full view of the garden and the
grove, his chair drawn precisely in front of the window,
his wig awry, and a long pipe in his mouth.
