except in my own words. But he, in his solid way, would take his own view of her character – as if he knew anything about it!
“I don’t care a farthing about all that,” I cried, when he had spoken of some things, which tell the longest.
“I can see she is very quiet, and full of home affections,” he persisted, as if I were a boy at school, and he were holding the spelling book; “she is not extravagant, nor fond of waste; that I saw by the way she went through a ‘Huling’s Superb,’ with a hole in it. I could scarcely have done it any better myself. And she was really grieved, which the lady-housekeeper had not the sense to be, by the freedom – she called it recklessness – with which I picked those Jeffersons, to find one in tip-top condition. And then when I offered to make some tea, the housekeeper who had been stuffing for hours only asked if the water was boiling. But your sweetheart began to buckle up, and asked who could touch tea, after such delicious things.”
“Buckle up, indeed! Uncle Corny, you are outrageous. She had got no such thing as a buckle near her. Her waist is done round with a narrow blue ribbon, the colour of the sky, as her eyes are. And I will thank you not to call her my sweetheart, if you please. I shall never have such luck. And it sounds so common. There ought to be a better expression for it. And such things are not made to be talked of.”
“Very well! You won’t hear me say another word. It will all come to nothing; that’s one comfort. She goes back to London on Friday; and you will very soon console yourself with Rasp’s young woman. I am told that she has fine black eyes; and I am not sure that black don’t beat blue ones, after all.”
This was so disgusting that I went away, and worked till dusk at a heavy piece of trenching; and when it was dusk I lay in wait for three felonious boys who came from Hampton, almost every evening, prowling for our apples. I caught all three, and trounced them well – which is the only proper plan – and the sound of their wailings, as they went home, restored my faith in justice. For I had given them their choice – “a licking or a summons” – and they said very justly, “Oh, a licking, if you please, sir.” The world has now come to such a pass, that a father would summon me for assault, if I so discharged his duty for him; but thirty years ago a bit of common sense survived.
But in spite of that little satisfaction, I could not get much sleep that night, for rolling, and pondering, and twisting in and out, the tangle and the burden of a troubled mind. Turn it as I might, there was no opening through it for another view of that perfect creature, with whom my whole life seemed to flow. Terrible, terrible was the truth that she would leave us all on Friday, and be swallowed up and no more seen, in that great earthquake, London. A thousand wild ideas, and schemes, for stealing yet one more interview, and countless crazy hopes that she herself might try to compass it, all came thrilling through my restless brain, but not one would stop there. None had any shape or substance, such as could be worked upon, and brought to likelihood of success. This was Tuesday night; last Saturday night how different everything had been! Then I had only cared to know, that things in the ground were doing well, that all the fruit which required gathering got its due, and looked its best on its way to be devoured, that every man pocketed his wages in good time to spend them, and that there was a little hope of the weather taking up at last. Now there had been three days without rain, and with touch of autumnal sunshine; heaven began to look bright again, and the earth (which, like the dwellers therein, lives only aright in view of it) was beginning to lift her sodden crust, and fetch once more her storm-trampled breath and issue anew the genial green in the midrib of mouldy foliage. In a word, the summer which had failed the year, for want of a smile to lead it, was breaking out at this last moment, better late than never.
Possessed as I was with my own troubles, and only a flickering sunshine, I could not resist the contagious lightness of cheerful faces all around. The workmen, who do (in spite of all British reserve, and manly selfishness) take a deep interest in their employer’s welfare, and stand up for him bravely, when any one abuses him, except themselves – every man of them laid heel to spade, or hoisted ladder on shoulder, with new briskness; because they could say to one another – “The old buffer, who carries on this place, has fought against long odds like a man; and now things look as if they was taking a little turn in his favour.”
On the Wednesday morning glum however was my mind, and grim my face, and Uncle Corny made some jokes, which may have seemed very good to him. Our breakfast things were set as usual, and our breakfast cooked and served by Mrs. Tabby Tapscott, that sage widow from the village, whom we were often pleased to laugh at for her Devonshire dialect. Also for her firm conviction, that nothing in these outlandish parts, and none of our biggest men, were fit to compare with the products of the West. There was one point however on which we gladly confessed the truth that was in her – she could fry potatoes, not leathery chips, nor the cake of pulpy fatness, but the crisp yet melting patin of brown gold, so as none of the East may fry them. She turned them out of the frying-pan upon a willow-pattern plate, and the man deserved to wear the willow, who could think of weeping near them.
Now this good woman, who was a “cure,” as the slang boys of our village said, took (though I knew it not as yet) a tender interest in my affairs. For the last day or two, I had observed that she glanced at me rather strangely, and once or twice behind my Uncle’s back, she had put her finger on her lips, and then jerked her thumb over her shoulder, as if to say – “Come and have a quiet word with me.”
But my frame of mind had appeared to me too noble and exalted to be shared with her, until it was come to such a pitch that any aid would be welcome.
This morning, as half of her fine work remained on my plate neglected, she could no longer contain herself, but pinched my sleeve and whispered, while my Uncle was going to the window, “Come out in gearden, I want to spake to ’e.”
“Speak away,” I answered, “there is nothing to stop you, Mrs. Tapscott;” but she looked at me and muttered that I was just a fool, and she had a mind to have nought to do with me.
By the common law of nature, this made me long to hear what on earth she could have to say, and I gave her the chance, while she washed up the things, to see where I was, and to come out if she pleased. She might do exactly as she pleased, for I did not intend to encourage her. She came out, and began without asking me.
“I can’t abide to zee ’e look so crule weist and peaky. The toorn of your nose bain’t the zame as her was, and you don’t zim at home with your vittels, Measter Kit. Lor’ bless ’e, I been droo the zame my zen, and I knaws arl about ’en.”
At first I was inclined to walk away; but it would have been shabby to be rude to her, and a look of good-will and kindly pity was in her hard-worn eyes and face. “What can you have to say to me?” I asked.
“You be young, and I be old,” she took my coat to stop me; “you be peart and nimble, and I be a’most crippled with rheumatics and rumbago. But the Lord hath made us arl alike, though He have given us different. I knows as wull what ails ’e now, as if it arl coom droo my own heart. And what you be zaying to yourzelf is – ‘How be I to goo on with it’?”
This was a wonderfully accurate description of my present state of mind. I looked at Mrs. Tapscott, with the admiration she deserved, and said – “Well then, how be I to goo on with it?”
“I’ve athought ’un out,” she made answer bravely; “what you be bound to do, Measter Kit, is never to let she goo back to Lunnon, wi’out zettling zummat.”
Here was the whole of it in a nutshell. But how was I to settle anything?
“Oh, Tabby, dear Tabby!” I cried, with some loss of dignity, but much gain of truth; “how can I even get the chance of saying a word to her again? This is Wednesday, and she goes back on Friday, and perhaps she never comes again, and there are millions of people between us. Everybody knows what Miss
