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As she opened it to pass through, her attention was attracted by a lady, with a nursery-maid and two little boys behind her, loitering on the path outside the garden wall. The lady started, looked eagerly, and smiled to herself as Magdalen came out. Curiosity had got the better of Kirke's sister, and she had come to Aldborough for the express purpose of seeing Miss Bygrave.
I stood it as long as I could, with palms itching to knock their solemn heads together like so many bowling balls; but when one cadaverous-faced fellow, whose sanctity had gone bilious from lack of sunshine, whined out against "the saucy miss," meaning thereby Mistress Hortense, and another prayed Heaven through his nose that his daughter might "lie in her grave ere she minced her steps with such dissoluteness of hair and unseemly broideries and bright colours, showing the lightness of her mind," and a third averred that "a cucking-stool would teach a maid to walk more shamefacedly," I whirled upon them in a fury that had disinherited me from Eli Kirke's graces ere I spake ten words.
She sat absorbed in her own thoughts, and heedless of the second letter which she had not opened yet, until Kirke's return. He stopped on the landing outside, and, opening the door a little way only, asked, without entering the room, if she wanted anything that he could send her. She begged him to come in. His face was worn and weary; he looked older than she had seen him look yet.
No remembrances but old remembrances lived in her now. "Gone?" she repeated absently, thinking what she should say to her little friend next. "Yes," said the boy. "Gone to China." Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart. She put Kirke's little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.
"I suppose," he had conceded grudgingly, "we must have a brat to carry swords and cloaks for us, or we'll be taken for some o' your cheap-jack hucksters parading latest fashions," and he bade our host of the Star and Garter have some lad searched out for us by the time we should be coming home from Sir John Kirke's that night.
The disclosure, on Kirke's side, of his father's connection with the young officer in Canada, had followed naturally on the revelation of Magdalen's real name. Captain Wragge had expressed his surprise, but had made no further remark at the time.
As he crossed the threshold of the door he confronted the people of the house at the moment when they were moving her. The cabman who had remained was on one side of the chair, and the woman who had been disputing with the two drivers was on the other. They were just lifting her, when Kirke's tall figure darkened the door. "What are you doing with that lady?" he asked.
At length, upon the 105th day of the siege, three ships, under Kirke's command, broke through the boom in the channel, and brought their freights in safety to the starved and ghastly defenders, gathered like ghosts, rather than human beings, upon the quay.
Kirke's weather-beaten face was accustomed to no concealments it answered for him before he spoke a word. "Don't tell your husband till I am gone," he said, with a roughness quite new in his sister's experience of him. "I know I only deserve to be laughed at; but it hurts me, for all that." "Hurts you?" she repeated, in astonishment.
Faversham had left Colonel Percy Kirke in command at Bridgwater, a ruthless ruffian, who at one time had commanded the Tangier garrison, and whose men were full worthy of their commander. Kirke's Lambs they were called, in an irony provoked by the emblem of the Paschal Lamb on the flag of this, the First Tangier Regiment, originally levied to wage war upon the infidel.
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