“Would you care to offer a few words of thanks for the vouchsafed blessing?” asked Mr. Lansing, with a laudable desire to make his saintly guest comfortable, entering the house after putting the bays in their stable.
“Blessing!” echoed Temperance irascibly. “He’s had enough of blessings this night, I’m thinkin’; it’s boneset tea he needs now.”
“Woman!” said Mr. Lansing. Vashti looked her cold displeasure. The word and the look did not disturb Temperance.
“Lend a hand, M’bella,” said she; “we’ll go and get them yarbs.”
“Oh—thank you, Miss Tribbey,” said Sidney, feeling strangely comforted by this motherly old maid’s attentions. “But——”
Temperance cut him short, looking at him with grim kindness and heeding his protest not at all.
“Your face is as pale as buttermilk,” she began. “Now what you’ll do is to go upstairs and go to bed. Mind shut your window down, for rain after a drought is terrible penetratin’. When this boneset tea has drawed Mr. Lansing ’ill bring it up to you.”
Mabella was bustling about getting a lamp to go to the garret for the herbs.
“You are very good,” Sidney said to her as one might praise a willing child.
“Light heart makes light foot,” said Temperance oracularly. Mabella smiled brightly and blushed.
Vashti standing with the dark folds of her cloak slipping down about her superb figure, noted the blush, and connecting it with the eagerness of Mabella’s aid to Temperance concluded that Mabella was casting eyes upon Sidney. Vashti’s eyes grew deep and sombre. A pale smile curled her sculptural lips; such a smile as Mona Lisa wears in her portraits.
Mabella’s coquetries against her power! Bah! a sneer flickered across her countenance, erasing expression from it as acid cleans metal of stain. But she was shaken with silent rage at the mere idea. She let her white lids fall over her full eyes for a moment; then crossed to where Sidney stood. She always seemed to move slowly, because of her long gliding paces, which in reality bore her swiftly forward. She looked into his eyes. “I am so sorry,” she said—her voice, always beautiful, seemed to his greedy ears more than exquisite now—
“I am so sorry you are not well. You will go upstairs, won’t you, and take what Temperance sends you? You are not suffering?”