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She dare not reprove the servants who were ruining her by their treatment, and whose manners were forming her own. Sir Jeoffry's servants were no more moral than their master, and being brought up as she was among them, their young mistress became strangely familiar with many sights and sounds it is not the fortune of most young misses of breeding to see and hear.
The neighbouring gentry had gradually ceased to visit the family some time before her ladyship's death, and since then the only guests who frequented the place were a circle of hunting, drinking, and guzzling boon companions of Sir Jeoffry's own, who joined him in all his carousals and debaucheries. To these he announced his discovery of his daughter with tumultuous delight.
She was a slovenly, guzzling old crone, who drank caudle from morning till night, and demanded good living as a support during the performance of her trying duties; but these last she contrived to make wondrous light, knowing that there was none to reprove her. "A fine night I have had," she had grumbled when she brought back Sir Jeoffry's answer to her lady's message.
"And may do worse!" quoth Mistress Clo, and laughed until the room rang. Sir Jeoffry's rage was such as made him like to burst; but she restrained him when he would have flung his tankard at the chaplain's head, and amid his storm of curses bundled the poor man out of the room, picking up his hat which in his hurry and fright he let fall, and thrusting it into his hand.
The only visitors who frequented it were a dozen or so chosen spirits who shared Sir Jeoffry's tastes hunted, drank, gambled with him, and were as loose livers as himself.
The chaplain, poor man, turned pale, having caught, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sir Jeoffry's reddening visage. "Madam," he faltered, bowing "Madam, I ask pardon of you most humbly! If it were your pleasure to deign to to allow me "
In the hall below guests were crowded, and there were indeed few of them who did not watch her as she mounted by Sir Jeoffry's side. In the upper hall there were guests also, some walking to and fro, some standing talking, many looking down at the arrivals as they came up. "'Tis Mistress Wildairs," these murmured as they saw her.
It was Sir Jeoffry's finest joke to bid her woman dress her as a boy, and then he would have her brought to the table where he and his fellows were dining together, and she would toss off her little bumper with the best of them, and rip out childish oaths, and sing them, to their delight, songs she had learned from the stable-boys.
The life the child led, it would have broken a motherly woman's heart to hear about; but there was no good woman near her, her mother's relatives, and even Sir Jeoffry's own, having cut themselves off early from them Wildairs Hall and its master being no great credit to those having the misfortune to be connected with them.
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