Betty began to enter into the plot. "Ay, ay," said she: "the flowers first; and so creep on. But nought will avail to make a man of him so long as he eats but of eggs and garden-stuff, like the beasts of the field, 'that to-day are, and to-morrow are cast into the oven.'"
Mrs. Gaunt smiled at this ambitious attempt of the widow to apply Scripture. Then she said, rather timidly, "Could you make his eggs into omelets? and so pound in a little meat with your small herbs; I dare say he would be none the wiser, and he so bent on high and heavenly things."
"Well, then. And I shall send you some stock from the castle, and you can cook his vegetables in good strong gravy, unbeknown."
"But stay," said Mrs. Gaunt; "for us to play the woman so, and delude a saint for his mere bodily weal--will it not be a sin, and a sacrilege to boot?"
"Let that flea stick in the wall," said Betty, contemptuously. "Find you the meat, and I'll find the deceit: for he is as poor as a rat into the bargain. Nay, nay, God Almighty will never have the heart to burn us two for such a trifle. Why, 'tis no more than cheating a froward child taking's physic."
Mrs. Gaunt got into her carriage and went home, thinking all the way. What she had heard filled her with feelings strangely but sweetly composed of veneration and pity. In that Leonard was a great orator and a high-minded priest, she revered him; in that he was solitary and sad, she pitied him; in that he wanted common sense, she felt like a mother, and must take him under her wing. All true women love to protect; perhaps it is a part of the great maternal element; but to protect a man, and yet look up to him, this is delicious.
Leonard, in truth, was one of those high-strung men who pay for their periods of religious rapture by hours of melancholy. This oscillation of the spirits in extraordinary men appears to be more or less a law of nature; and this the widow Gough was not aware of.
The very next Sunday, while he was preaching, she and Mrs. Gaunt's gardener were filling his bow window with flowerpots, the flowers in full bloom and leaf. The said window was large, and had a broad sill outside, and, inside, one of the old fashioned high window-seats that follow the shape of the window. Mrs. Gaunt, who did nothing by halves, sent up a cartload of flowerpots, and Betty and the gardener arranged at least eighty of them, small and great, inside and outside the window.