The little old woman in black had been blinking her eyes and fidgeting with her work, while Miss Hardacre was suffering the ordeal of looking for the hundredth time at her own face. Jilian’s own maid had refused to attend on her mistress at the very beginning of her illness, and old Mrs. Martha, who had handled both Lot and his sister in their infancy, had been brought from the cottage, where she had been pensioned, to nurse Jilian through the small-pox.
Mrs. Martha was unable to restrain the impatience of her loyalty and pride when Miss Hardacre’s hand wavered once more towards the mirror. She jumped up very briskly for so shrivelled an old lady, toddled across the polished floor, snatched up the mirror, and plunged it into the pocket of her voluminous apron.
“The good Lord knows, my dear,” she said, with the affectionate familiarity of an old servant—“the good Lord knows why you should be for making yourself vaporish and miserable with this paltry bit of glass! You should forget to look into a mirror, my dear, and in a month you won’t be so much afraid of your own pretty face. I’ve seen ladies as have had the small-pox before, haven’t I? And very decent faces they managed to keep after it, though I’ll warrant they were more like plum dumplings afore the pock-marks healed.”
Jilian lay back looking piteously about the mouth, as though she were trying not to believe a word of what this silly old woman said. Mrs. Martha had toddled back to her chair with the air of a grandmother who has done her duty by a peevish child.
“I hope you may be right, Martha,” said Miss Hardacre, miserably; “to be sure I look ugly enough now to make Mr. Richard go off into a faint.”
Mrs. Martha seated herself in her chair with solid precision. She fingered her work irritably, and continued her declaiming as though some imaginary person were threatening her constantly with contradictions.
“And I should like to know who Mr. Richard Jeffray is, to give himself airs before a Hardacre of Hardacre? His grandfather was an ‘iron man,’ as we all know, I reckon; he made his money by turning the country-side upside down, and cutting down all the trees. And hasn’t Mr. Jeffray been down with the small-pox himself, and didn’t he give it to you, sure; for you must have had it of him, my dear, or I never heard Parson Jessel read the Bible. As for your purty face, my dear, it’ll just mend superb with all the fine stuffs you may be using in that there box. And the hair always grows stronger, like a tree, for being pruned. And maybe Mr. Jeffray may be worse off than you in the matter of scars.”