All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at Esslemont again while she’s in occupation.  His managing gentleman comes down from him, and goes up from her; that’s how they communicate.  One week she’s quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.  She ’s the great lady entertaining then.  Yet they say it ’s a fact, she has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar.  She ’ll stock a cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she’ll order the doctor in, and she’ll call and see the right things done for illness.  ’But no money; no one’s to expect money of her.  The shots you hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord Levellier’s gunpowder out of his mill; and he’s got no money either; not for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account.  But he ’s a known miser.  She’s not that.  She’s a pleasant-faced lady for the poor.  She has the voice poor people like.  It’s only her enemy, maybe her husband, she can be terrible to.  She’d drive a hole through a robber stopping her on the road, as soon as look at him.

This was Esslemont’s atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very long after the establishment of his countess there.  She could lay hold of the English, too, it seemed.  Did she call any gentleman of the district by his Christian name?  Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing so in the case of one of the Welshmen.  Those Welshmen!  Apparently they are making a push for importance in the kingdom!

CHAPTER XXXV

IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED

Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward:  a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his countenance and ostensibly his temper.  An idiot of a woman, incurable in her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger blazing Tom Fool’s show than any known or written romance gives word of!  And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband’s confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole mind to ensure the child.  But what sheer animals these women are, if they take impressions in such a manner!  And Mr. Philosopher argues that the abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it ’the commonest insanity, and the deadliest,’ and men are ’planted in the bog of their unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature makes the woman be.’  Oh,