"Yes, yes, it certainly might," said Dame Marigold, thoughtfully.
They had now come to a door padlocked and bolted. "This is where we have put the prisoner, ma'am," said the guardian, unlocking it. And then he ushered her into the presence of her old schoolmistress.
Miss Primrose was sitting bolt upright in a straight backed old fashioned chair, against a background of fine old tapestries, faded to the softest loveliest pastel tints -as incongruous with her grotesque ugliness as had been the fresh prettiness of the Crabapple Blossoms.
Dame Marigold stood staring at her for a few seconds in silent indignation. Then she sank slowly on to a chair, and said sternly, "Well, Miss Primrose? I wonder how you dare sit there so calmly after the appalling thing you have brought about."
But Miss Primrose was in one of her most exalted moods -"On her high hobby-horse," as the Crabapple Blossoms used to call it. So she merely glittered at Dame Marigold contemptuously out of her little eyes, and, with a lordly wave of her hand, as if to sweep away from her all mundane trivialities, she exclaimed pityingly, "My poor blind Marigold! Perhaps of all the pupils who have passed through my hands you are the one who are the least worthy of your noble birthright."
Dame Marigold bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and said in a low voice of intense irritation, "What do you mean, Miss Primrose?"
Miss Primrose cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and, in her most treacly voice she answered, "The great privilege of having been born a woooman!"
Her pupils always maintained that "woman," as pronounced by Miss Primrose, was the most indecent word in the language.
Dame Marigold's eyes flashed: "I may not be a woman, but, at any rate, I am a mother - which is more than you are!" she retorted.
Then, in a voice that at each word grew more indignant, she said, "And, Miss Primrose, do you consider that you yourself have been `worthy of your noble birthright' in betraying the trust that has been placed in you? Are vice and horror and disgrace and breaking the hearts of parents `true womanliness' I should like to know? You are worse than a murderer - ten times worse. And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor - as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats! I do really believe"
But Miss Primrose's shrillness screamed down her low-toned indignation: "Shake me! Stick pins in me! Fling me into the Dapple!" she shrieked. "I will bear it all with a smile, and wear my shame like a flower given by him!"
Dame Marigold groaned in exasperation: "Who, on earth, do you mean by `him', Miss Primrose?"
Then her irrepressible sense of humour broke out in a dimple, and she added: "Duke Aubrey or Endymion Leer?"
For, of course, Prunella had told her all the jokes about the goose and the sage.
At this question Miss Primrose gave an unmistakable start; "Duke Aubrey, of course!" she answered, but the look in her eyes was sly, suspicious, and distinctly scared.
None of this was lost upon Dame Marigold. She looked her slowly up and down with a little mocking smile; and Miss Primrose began to writhe and to gibber.
"Hum!" said Dame Marigold, meditatively.
She had never liked the smell of Endymion Leer's personality.
The recent crisis had certainly done him no harm. It had doubled his practice, and trebled his influence.
Besides, it cannot have been Miss Primrose's beauty and charms that had caused him to pay her recently such marked attentions.
At any rate, it could do no harm to draw a bow at a venture.
"I am beginning to understand, Miss Primrose," she said slowly. "Two outsiders, have put their heads together to see if they could find a plan for humiliating the stupid, stuck-up, `so-called old families of Lud!' Oh! don't protest, Miss Primrose. You have never taken any pains to hide your contempt for us. And I have always realized that yours was not a forgiving nature. Nor do I blame you. We have laughed at you unmercifully for years - and you have resented it. All the same I think your revenge has been an unnecessarily violent one; though, I suppose, to `a true woooman,' nothing is too mean, too spiteful, too base, if it serves the interests of `him'!"
But Miss Primrose had gone as green as grass, and was gibbering with terror: "Marigold! Marigold!" she cried, wringing her hands, "How can you think such things? The dear, devoted Doctor! The best and kindest man in Lud-in-the-Mist! Nobody was angrier with me over what he called my `criminal carelessness' in allowing that horrible stuff to be smuggled into my loft, I assure you he is quite rabid on the subject of er fruit. Why, when he was a young man at the time of the great drought he was working day and night trying to stop it, he"
But not for nothing was Dame Marigold descended from generations of judges. Quick as lightning, she turned on her: "The great drought? But that must be forty years ago long before Endymion Leer came to Dorimare."
"Yes, yes, dear of course quite so I was thinking of what another doctor had told me since all this trouble my poor head gets quite muddled," gibbered Miss Primrose. And she was shaking from head to foot.
Dame Marigold rose from her chair, and stood looking down on her in silence for a few seconds, under half-closed lids, with a rather cruel little smile.
Then she said, "Good-bye, Miss Primrose. You have provided me with most interesting food for thought."
And then she left her, sitting there with frightened face against the faded tapestry.
That same day, Master Nathaniel received a letter from Luke Hempen that both perplexed and alarmed him.
It was as follows:
Your Worship, - I'd be glad if you'd take Master Ranulph away from this farm, because the widow's up to mischief, I'm sure of that, and some of the folks about here say as what in years gone by she murdered her husband, and she and somebody else, though I don't know who, seem to have a grudge against Master Ranulph, and, if I might take the liberty, I'll just tell your Worship what I heard.
It was this way - one night, I don't know how it was, but I couldn't get to sleep, and thinking that a bite, may be, of something would send me off, towards midnight I got up from my bed to go and look in the kitchen for a bit of bread. And half-way down the stairs I heard the sound of low voices, and someone said, "I fear the Chanticleers," so I stood still where I was, and listened. And I peeped down and the kitchen fire was nearly out, but there was enough left for me to see the widow, and a man wrapped up in a cloak, sitting opposite to her with his back to the stairs, so I couldn't see his face. Their talk was low and at first I could only hear words here and there, but they kept making mention of the Chanticleers, and the man said something like keeping the Chanticleers and Master Ambrose Honeysuckle apart, because Master Ambrose had had a vision of Duke Aubrey. And if I hadn't known the widow and how she was a deep one and as fly as you make them, I'd have thought they were two poor daft old gossips, whose talk had turned wild and nasty with old age. And then the man laid his hand on her knee, and his voice was low, but this time it was so clear that I could hear it all, and I think I can remember every word of it, so I'll write it down for your Worship: "I fear counter orders. You know the Chief and his ways - at any moment he might betray his agents. Willy Wisp gave young Chanticleer fruit without my knowledge. And I told you how he and that doitered old weaver of yours have been putting their heads together, and that's what has frightened me most."
And then his voice became too low for me to hear, till he said, "Those who go by the Milky Way often leave footprints. So let him go by the other."