For a moment she hid her face in her hands and wept;
but resisting the strong impulse which evidently moved
her to reply, opened the door—no wider
than was sufficient for the passage of his body—and
motioned him away. As the locksmith stood upon
the step, it was chained and locked behind him, and
the raven, in furtherance of these precautions, barked
like a lusty house-dog.
’In league with that ill-looking figure that
might have fallen from a gibbet—he listening
and hiding here—Barnaby first upon the spot
last night—can she who has always borne
so fair a name be guilty of such crimes in secret!’
said the locksmith, musing. ’Heaven forgive
me if I am wrong, and send me just thoughts; but she
is poor, the temptation may be great, and we daily
hear of things as strange.—Ay, bark away,
my friend. If there’s any wickedness going
on, that raven’s in it, I’ll be sworn.’
Mrs Varden was a lady of what is commonly called an
uncertain temper—a phrase which being interpreted
signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody
more or less uncomfortable. Thus it generally
happened, that when other people were merry, Mrs Varden
was dull; and that when other people were dull, Mrs
Varden was disposed to be amazingly cheerful.
Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious
nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch
of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability
to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and
neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the
changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods
and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing,
as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal
of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness
and rapidity of execution that astonished all who
heard her.
It had been observed in this good lady (who did not
want for personal attractions, being plump and buxom
to look at, though like her fair daughter, somewhat
short in stature) that this uncertainty of disposition
strengthened and increased with her temporal prosperity;
and divers wise men and matrons, on friendly terms
with the locksmith and his family, even went so far
as to assert, that a tumble down some half-dozen rounds
in the world’s ladder—such as the
breaking of the bank in which her husband kept his
money, or some little fall of that kind—would
be the making of her, and could hardly fail to render
her one of the most agreeable companions in existence.
Whether they were right or wrong in this conjecture,
certain it is that minds, like bodies, will often
fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere
excess of comfort, and like them, are often successfully
cured by remedies in themselves very nauseous and
unpalatable.
