She shrank together, like a lace shawl thrown aside, and the tears trickled down among the trinkets of her watch-chain.
Ursula rose and went out into the deserted corridor. From one of the stands by the distant hall-door a brown-tinged “Maréchal Niel” fell to pieces with a heavy thud on the marble pavement.
“Monk!” cried the mistress of the mansion. “Monk!”
With great yelps of greeting the St. Bernard came bounding towards her.
Ever since Otto’s sudden death the Freule Louisa had felt stirred to practical philanthropy. Something about “redeeming the time” had got wedged in one of her ears. With her own fair hand she had concocted during Ursula’s long illness uneatable messes for the invalid, and, mindful of the poor thing’s former overtures to herself, she had very nearly brought on a recurrence of delirium by insisting on reading Carlyle’s _French Revolution_ at the bedside. Routed by the doctor, she had extended her uncertain assistance to the village; but her efforts were much hampered by the steadfast resolution that neither personally, nor through the medium of her maid, would she incur any risk of infection. When the turnpike-woman’s little boy went up to the Manor-house for a promised bottle of wine the Freule rolled it across to him, her smelling-bottle held tight to her nostrils, over the broad slab before the open door. And somehow the little boy was awkward or frightened, and the bottle rolled away down the steps in crimson splashes and a puddle. All the village heard the story with a burst of derisive reproach. “Which seeing it was after _confinement_,” said the bottle-nosed turnpike-man, “a thing about which the Freule couldn’t be expected to know.”
“You can never be quite sure with these people, Hephzibah,” explained Freule Louisa, anxiously. “There is always a possibility of your catching something they haven’t got.”
“What you catch soonest is what you can’t catch afterwards,” replied Hephzibah, who meant fleas. Personally, the handmaid had a weakness for domiciliary visits, which afforded her an agreeable opportunity of telling the people of her own class--her inferiors, as she called them--how entirely they themselves were to blame for any misfortunes they might happen to have had.