Holiday Stories
9781465682611
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THORLEY; go and tell Miss Margaretta to make less noise. How can I get my afternoon nap with that girl screeching and screaming loud enough to be heard beyond the park? I suppose she thinks I cannot be disturbed by her noise when she is out of doors, though I have told her twenty times already that she has a voice like a railway-whistle, and that it travels as far as one. It seems to me I cannot get out of reach of it. Thorley, why don't you go? What are you waiting for? The last questions were uttered in such a shrill tone, and with such evident irritation, that the pale face of the listener flushed, and she answered in a frightened voice—"I thought your ladyship was speaking to me, and I waited for you to finish." "I was doing nothing of the kind. I gave you an order which might have been attended to by this time. Then I went on thinking aloud, and you stood staring there, and listening in place of going about your business. Go now. Wait! I cannot hear the girl's voice. She has stopped, but she will begin again, so go all the same." The person addressed as "Thorley" did not wait for the speaker to change her mind again, but hastened to do her mistress's bidding. "Poor young thing!" she murmured, as she went in search of the offender. "It is well she can sing. Only one that has not been long at Northbrook Hall would be likely to lift up a cheerful voice in my mistress's hearing. I believe she would silence the very birds if she could, but she cannot do that, thank God." And the woman listened with gladness to a flood of melody that was being poured from scores of bird-throats, and rejoiced again that a message from her mistress could not stop it. Thorley was old Lady Longridge's personal attendant, and had been such for twenty-five years. She was a staid spinster of fifty or thereabouts. Not that she ever told her age, or that any member of the household would have ventured to ask it; but there were older retainers at the Hall than herself, who could put two and two together.
