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Updated: June 24, 2025
The third person of the group was an Indian beldam, old, withered, and witch-like, who sat crouching over the fire, warming her skinny hands, and only intermitting her employment occasionally to eye the more youthful pair with looks of malignant hatred and suspicion.
"Yes," said he, confirming his first assertion. "An old she it is, surrounded by wolves. Ha! it's her cubs they're after! Voila, messieurs! She's got one of them on her back. Enfant de garce, how the old beldam keeps them at bay! She's fighting her way to the water!"
"Wha durst speak o' that?" said the old woman hastily; "wha durst say they were married? wha ken'd o' that? Not the Countess not I. If they wedded in secret, they were severed in secret They drank of the fountains of their ain deceit." "No, wretched beldam!" exclaimed Oldbuck, who could keep silence no longer, "they drank the poison that you and your wicked mistress prepared for them."
Yet, plain as Mrs. Brown's views were now come out, I had not the heart, or spirit to open my eyes to them: still I could not part with my dependence on that beldam, so much did I think myself hers, soul and body: or rather, I sought to deceive myself with the continuation of my good opinion of her, and choose to wait the worst at her hands, sooner than be turned out to starve in the streets, without a penny of money or a friend to apply to these fears were my folly.
Dirck began to chaff the beldam on her dilapidation, but she stopped his talk by dipping something from a caldron behind her and flinging it over both of her visitors. Whatever it was, it burned outrageously, and with a yell of pain they leaped the wall more briskly than they had jumped it the other way, and were soon in full flight. They had not gone far when the clock struck twelve.
Then he mounted his horse, perplexed and confounded for that which he had heard from the lying old beldam and saying, "There is no power and no virtue but in God the Most High! Verily our labour is lost and our hearts are heavy within us, for our king is a prisoner and those who are with him!"
"She wants her daughter, sir," said the same officer whose interference had given the hag such offence before "her daughter, who was taken up last night Madge Wildfire, as they ca' her." "Madge Hellfire, as they ca' her!" echoed the beldam "and what business has a blackguard like you to ca' an honest woman's bairn out o' her ain name?"
I can fancy the ancient beldam sniggering sardonically the while she figured to herself the chagrined astonishment, the helpless wrath, of her watchfully waiting neighbors, when they should discover that historic Hynds House, dating from the beginning of things Carolinian, had passed into the unpedigreed hands of a woman named Smith.
He gave them away to the sailors; then said to Pantagruel that beds were much cheaper at that place than in Chinnonois, though we have there the famous geese of Pautile; for the old beldam had asked him but fivepence for a bed which in Chinnonois had been worth about twelve francs.
But the strong-willed old beldam scowled, and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine.
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