While these events were taking place, and the children in their various ways were preparing check-mate for Aunt Maria Cameron, that good lady was having a by no means unexciting experience of her own. After her housekeeping cares were over, after she had interviewed Mrs. Power, and made Alice thoroughly uncomfortable; after, in short, meaning it all the while for the best, she had succeeded in jarring the whole household machinery to the utmost, it was her custom morning after morning to retire with Scorpion into the seldom used drawing-room, and there, seated comfortably in an old-fashioned arm-chair, with her feet well supported on a large cushion, and the dog on her lap, to devote herself to worsted work. Not crewel work, not church embroidery, not anything which would admit of the use of modern art colors, but genuine, old-fashioned worsted work. Mrs. Cameron delighted in the flaring scarlets, pinks, greens, blues, and mauves of thirty years ago. She admired with all her soul the hard, staring flowers which these colors produced. They looked, she said, substantial and durable. They looked like artificial flowers; nobody could mistake them for the real article, which was occasionally known to be the case with that flimsy, in her opinion, ugly, art embroidery. No, no, Mrs. Cameron would not be smitten by the art craze. “Let nature be nature!” she would say, “and worsted work be worsted work, and don’t let us try to clash the poor things[Pg 160] into one, as that wretched art-school is always endeavoring to do.” So each morning Mrs. Cameron plied her worsted needle, and Scorpion slumbered peacefully on her knee. She liked to sit with her back to the light, so that it should fall comfortably on her work, and her own eyes be protected from an extensive and very beautiful view of the south moor.

Mrs. Cameron hated the moor; it gave her, as she expressed it, “the creeps,” and on all occasions she avoided looking at it. On this morning, as usual, she took out her large roll of worsted work, and prepared to ground a huge, impossible arum lily. Her thoughts, however, were not, as usual, with her work. Her cheeks were flushed, and her whole face expressed annoyance and anxiety.

“How I miss even his dear little playful bite!” she said aloud, a big tear falling on her empty lap. “Ah, my Scorpion! why did I love you, but to lose you? How true are the poet’s words:

‘I never loved a dear gazelle.’

Well, I must say it, I seldom came across more wicked, heartless children than the Maybrights and Daisy Rymple. David is really the only one of the bunch worth rearing. Ah, my poor sister! your removal has doubtless spared you many sorrows, for what could you expect of the future of such a family as yours? Now, what is that? This moor is enough to keep anybody’s nerves in a state of tension. What is that awful sound approaching the house?“

The noise in question was the unmistakable one of a woman’s loud sobbing. It came nearer and nearer, gaining in fullness and volume as it approached the house.

Mrs. Cameron was always intensely curious. She threw open the drawing-room window; and as the sufferer approached, effectually stopped her progress with her own stout person.

“Now, my dear, good creature, what is this most unpleasant sound? Don’t you know that it is frightfully bad-mannered to cry in that loud, unrestrained fashion? Pray restrain yourself. You are quite childish. You cannot know what real affliction means. Now, if you had lost a—a—— If, my poor woman, you had lost a dear little dog!”

“Is it a dog?” gasped Mrs. Ricketts, for it was she. “Is it a dog? Oh, my word! Much you know about ’flictions and such-like! Let me go to the house, ma‘am. It isn’t to you as I has come to tell my tale.”

“Then let me inform you that you are going to tell it to no one else. Here I stand, and here I remain until you choose to explain to me the reason of your loud bursts of uncontrollable grief. During the illness of its master I am the mistress here, and either you speak to me or you go home.”

Mrs. Ricketts had by this time so far restrained her sobs[Pg 161] as to be able to take a long and very acute glance at the lady in question. Doubtless she was face to face with the formidable Mrs. Cameron, that terrible personage who had got her Maggie dismissed, and who had locked up poor darling Miss Polly for days in her bedroom.

There was no one, perhaps, in the world whom Mrs. Ricketts more cordially disliked than this good lady, but all the same, it was now her policy to propitiate her. She smoothed, therefore, her brow, dried her eyes, and, with a profound courtesy, began her tale.

“Ef you please, ma‘am, it’s this way; it’s my character that’s at stake. I always was, and always will be, honest of the honest. ’Ard I works, ma‘am, and the bread of poverty I eats, but honest I am, and honest I brings up those fatherless lambs, my children.”

Mrs. Cameron waved one of her fat hands impressively.

“Pardon me, my good woman. I am really not interested in your family. Pray come to the point, and then go home.”

“To the p’int, ma‘am? Oh, yes, I’ll come to the p’int. This is the p’int ef you please, ma‘am,” and she suddenly thrust, almost into Mrs. Cameron’s dazzled face, the splendid gleam and glitter of a large unset diamond. “This is the p’int, ma‘am; this is what’s to take my character away, and the bread out of the mouths of my innocent children.”

Mrs. Cameron never considered herself a worldly woman. She was undoubtedly a very Christian-minded, charitable, good woman, but all the same, she loved fine houses and big dinners and rich apparel, and above all things she adored jewelry. Flowers—that is, natural flowers—had never yet drawn a smile out of her. She had never pined for them or valued them, but jewels, ah! they were worth possessing. She quite gasped now, as she realized the value of the gem which Mrs. Ricketts so unceremoniously thrust under her nose.

“A diamond! Good gracious! How did you come by it? A most valuable diamond of extraordinary size. Give it to me this moment, my good dear creature! and come into the drawing-room. You can step in by this open window. We won’t be disturbed in here. I suppose you were weeping in that loud and violent manner at the thought of the grief of the person who had lost this treasure?”

“No, ma‘am, I were a sobbing at the grief of her what ’ad it. Oh, my word! And the young lady said for sure as I’d get nine-and-fourpence halfpenny for it. No, ma‘am, I won’t go into the ’ouse, thank you. Oh, dear! oh, dear! the young lady did set store by it, and said for certain I’d get my nine-and-fourpence halfpenny back, but when I took the stone to the shop to-day, and asked the baker to give me some bread and let this go partly to pay the account, he stared at me and said as I wasn’t honest, and he thrust it back in my hand. Oh, dearie me! oh, dearie me! the foreign young lady shouldn’t have done it!”[Pg 162]

“I am very sure that you’re honest, my good creature! Now, do tell me about this stone. How did you come by it?”

“It was the young lady, ma‘am; the young lady from Australia.”

“Daisy Rymple, do you mean?”

“Miss Flower she called herself, ma‘am. She come to me in sore plight late one evening, when we was all in bed, and ‘Mrs. Ricketts,’ said she, dear lamb, ‘will you help me to go away to Mrs. Cameron, to Bath? I want the money to go third class to Bath. Can you let me have nine shillings and fourpence halfpenny, Mrs. Ricketts? and I’ll give you this for the money!’ and she flashed that bit of a glittering stone right up into my eyes. My word, I thought as I was blinded by it. ‘You’ll get most like two pounds for it, Mrs. Ricketts,’ she said, ‘for my father told me it was worth a sight of money.’ That’s how I come by it, ma‘am, and that’s the w............