Here was unwholesome talk! Here was an empty stomach feeding on an
unquiet mind! My answer--a pretty sharp one, in the poor girl's own
interests, I promise you!--was at my tongue's end, when it was snapped
short off on a sudden by a voice among the sand-hills shouting for me
by my name. "Betteredge!" cries the voice, "where are you?" "Here!"
I shouted out in return, without a notion in my mind of who it was.
Rosanna started to her feet, and stood looking towards the voice. I was
just thinking of getting on my own legs next, when I was staggered by a
sudden change in the girl's face.
Her complexion turned of a beautiful red, which I had never seen in it
before; she brightened all over with a kind of speechless and breathless
surprise. "Who is it?" I asked. Rosanna gave me back my own question.
"Oh! who is it?" she said softly, more to herself than to me. I twisted
round on the sand and looked behind me. There, coming out on us from
among the hills, was a bright-eyed young gentleman, dressed in a
beautiful fawn-coloured suit, with gloves and hat to match, with a rose
in his button-hole, and a smile on his face that might have set the
Shivering Sand itself smiling at him in return. Before I could get on my
legs, he plumped down on the sand by the side of me, put his arm round
my neck, foreign fashion, and gave me a hug that fairly squeezed the
breath out of my body. "Dear old Betteredge!" says he. "I owe you
seven-and-sixpence. Now do you know who I am?"
Lord bless us and save us! Here--four good hours before we expected
him--was Mr. Franklin Blake!
Before I could say a word, I saw Mr. Franklin, a little surprised to all
appearance, look up from me to Rosanna. Following his lead, I looked at
the girl too. She was blushing of a deeper red than ever, seemingly at
having caught Mr. Franklin's eye; and she turned and left us suddenly,
in a confusion quite unaccountable to my mind, without either making her
curtsey to the gentleman or saying a word to me. Very unlike her usual
self: a civiller and better-behaved servant, in general, you never met
with.
"That's an odd girl," says Mr. Franklin. "I wonder what she sees in me
to surprise her?"
"I suppose, sir," I answered, drolling on our young gentleman's
Continental education, "it's the varnish from foreign parts."
I set down here Mr. Franklin's careless question, and my foolish answer,
as a consolation and encouragement to all stupid people--it being, as I
have remarked, a great satisfaction to our inferior fellow-creatures to
find that their betters are, on occasions, no brighter than they are.
Neither Mr. Franklin, with his wonderful foreign training, nor I, with
my age, experience, and natural mother-wit, had the ghost of an idea of
what Rosanna Spearman's unaccountable behaviour really meant. She was
out of our thoughts, poor soul, before we had seen the last flutter of
her little grey cloak among the sand-hills. And what of that? you will
ask, naturally enough. Read on, good friend, as patiently as you can,
and perhaps you will be as sorry for Rosanna Spearman as I was, when I
found out the truth.