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As the lady spoke, a servant-maid entered the apartment with the supper-tray, which the good vicar had ordered shortly after the arrival of his guest.
They knocked at the gate, and a black servant-maid came down and opened the door and seeing a man carrying a child and a woman with him, said to them, 'What is your business? 'We have a sick child here, answered the tailor's wife, 'whom we want the doctor to look at: so take this quarter-dinar and give it to thy master, and let him come down and see my son. The girl went up to tell her master, leaving the tailor and his wife in the vestibule, whereupon the latter said to her husband, 'Let us leave the hunchback here and be off. So the tailor carried the dead man to the top of the stairs and propping him up against the wall, went away, he and his wife.
That their name was still familiar in Italian society in the fourteenth century is evident from the circumstances that Boccaccio puts a story, no doubt founded on fact, into the mouth of the fair Lauretta, which deals with the adventures of one Landolfo Rufolo of Ravello, “who, not content with his great store, but anxious to make it double, was near losing all he had, and his life also.” The novel proceeds to relate how this member of a wealthy and respected family turned corsair, after losing all his capital in a mercantile speculation in Cyprus; how he, in his turn, was robbed of his ill-gotten gains on the high seas by some thievish merchants of Genoa; and how Landolfo, after passing through a variety of more or less improbable adventures, was finally rescued from drowning off the coast of Corfu by a servant-maid who, whilst washing dishes by the sea-shore, chanced to espy the unconscious merchant drifting towards the beach with his arms clasped round a small wooden chest, which kept him afloat. “Moved by compassion,” says the relator of the tale, “she stepped a little way into the sea, which was now calm, and seizing the half-drowned wretch by the hair of his head, drew both him and the chest to land, where with much trouble she unfolded his arms from the chest, which she set upon the head of her daughter who was with her.
Molly, the servant-maid, was the only one in the house with whom I parted with any regret; and it was with feelings considerably more exultant than sad that I accompanied my uncle to the City in the omnibus which he always took to his place of business, that convenient vehicle passing by in its route the corner of the road where uncle lived.
Then the loving little servant-maid, truthful as the blood of Scotch ancestors and a Presbyterian training could make her, faced what she knew would bring remorse, and, for all she could tell, unpardonable sin upon her soul, and said boldly, "No, she never did. She never said one single blessed word to me about hell."
His surprize now encreased every minute, and he began to grow uneasy, and to shew sufficient symptoms in his countenance of what he felt within. He then despatched the servant-maid to enquire after her mistress in the parish, but waited not her return; for she was scarce gone out of doors before he begged leave of his guests to go himself on the same errand.
This over, he asked his mother whether she had had her meal or not, and his parent said by way of reply: "I've had it, but I've kept something for you in there," and calling to the servant-maid, she bade her bring it round, and set it before him to eat. But as it was already dark, when the lamps had to be lit, Chia Yuen, after partaking of his meal, got ready and turned in.
The servant-maid, Biddy, now entered and informed them that four men, evidently strangers, were approaching the house from the rear, and ere she could add anything further on the subject, two of them walked in, and, seizing Connor, informed him that he was their prisoner. "Your prisoner!" exclaimed his mother, getting pale; "why, what could our poor boy do to make him your prisoner?
We could hear the rain battering at the roof, the walls, and the windows, flowing in a perfect deluge into the farmyard; and my dog was howling in the shed where the other dogs are howling to-night. "All of a sudden, when the servant-maid had gone to bed, the man said in a timid voice: "'M'sieu le Baron. "'What is it, my dear Jean? "'I have something to tell you. "'Tell it, my dear Jean.
Or did you think I had not heard to whom your heart had been given? That my ears only had been dead to the love tale which every servant-maid in Brattahlid rolled like honey on her tongue? Or did you imagine that I knew you so little as to think you capable of loving one man in the winter and another in the spring? Even had the Norman borne no resemblance to the Englishman, still would I "
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