Marbled! It’s a late brood then. And so long since you had any!”
“Two year; and this is the only place for ‘em.” The old man packed his bag and slung it across his back. “We’ll see about tea now,” he added, as the child rose on her crutch; “but we’ll keep open eyes as we go.”
Over the slade they took their way, where the purple carpet was patterned with round hollows, black with heather-ash and green with star-moss; by the edges of the old gravel-pits, overhung with bramble and bush; and so into more woods.
A jay flew up before them, scolding angrily. Now and again a gap among the trees let through red light from beyond Woodredon. Again and again the old man checked his walk, sometimes but to drop once more into his even tramp, sometimes to stop, and sometimes to beat the undergrowth and to shake branches. To any who saw there was always a vaguely familiar quality in old May’s walk; ever a patient plod, and, burdened or not, ever an odd suggestion of something carried over shoulder; matters made plain when it was learned that the old man had been forty years a postman.
Presently as they walked they heard shrieks, guffaws, and a discordant singing that half-smothered the whine of a concertina. The noise was the louder as they went, and when they came where the white of a dusty road backed the tree-stems, they heard it at its fullest. Across the way was an inn, and by its side a space of open ground whereon some threescore beanfeasters sported at large. Many were busy at kiss-in-the-ring, some waved branches torn from trees, others stood up empty bottles and flung more bottles at them; they stood, sat, ran, lay, and rolled, but each made noise of some sort, and most drank. Plainly donkey-riding had palled, for a man and a boy had gathered their half-dozen donkeys together, and were driving them off.
The people were Londoners, as Bessy knew, for she had often seen others. She had forgotten London herself—all of it but a large drab room with a row of little beds like her own, each bed with a board on it, for toys; and this, too, she would have forgotten (for she was very little indeed then) but that a large and terrible gentleman had come every day and hurt her bad leg. It was the Shadwell Hospital. But these were Londoners, and Bessy was a little afraid of them, and conceived London to be a very merry and noisy place, very badly broken, everywhere, by reason of the Londoners. Other people, also, came in waggonettes, and were a little quieter, and less gloriously bedecked. She had seen such a party earlier in the day. Probably they were not real Londoners, but folk from parts adjoining. But these—these were Londoners proper, wearing each other’s hats, with paper wreaths on them.
“Wayo, old ‘un!” bawled one, as the old man, net in hand, crossed toward the wood opposite; “bin ketchin’ tiddlers?” And he turned to his companions with a burst of laughter and a jerk of the thumb. “D’year, Bill! ‘Ere’s yer ole gran’father ketchin’ tiddlers! Why doncher keep ‘im out o’ mischief?” And every flushed face, doubly reddened by the setting sun, turned and opened its mouth in a guffaw. “You’ll cop it for gittin’ yer trouseys wet!” screamed a woman. And somebody flung a lump of crust.
Bessy jogged the faster into the wood, and in its shadow her grandfather, smiling doubtfully, said, “They like their joke, some of ‘em, don’t they? But it’s always ‘tiddlers’!”
It grew dusk under the trees, and the sky was pale above. They came to where the ground fell away in a glen that was almost a trench, and a brook ran in the ultimate furrow. On the opposing hill a broad green ride stood like a wall before them, a deep moss of trees clinging at each side. Here they turned, and, where the glen widened, a cottage was to be seen on sloping ground, with a narrow roadway a little beyond it. A whitewashed cottage, so small that there seemed scarce a score of tiles on its roof; one of the few scattered habitations holding its place in the forest by right of ancient settlement. A little tumult of garden tumbled about the cottage—a jostle of cabbages, lavender, onions, wallflowers and hollyhock, confined, as with difficulty, by a precarious fence, patched with wood in every form of manufacture and in every stage of decay.
“I expect mother and Johnny finished tea long ago,” Bessy remarked, her eyes fixed on the cottage. “Why there’s a light!”
The path they went by grew barer of grass as it neared the cottage, and as they trod it, men’s voices could be heard from within, and a woman’s laughter.
“Sounds like visitors!” the old man exclaimed. “That’s odd. I wonder who…”
“There you are then, father!” came a female voice from the door. “Here’s Uncle Isaac an’ a gentleman come to see us.” It was Bessy’s mother who spoke—a pleasant, fresh, active woman in a print dress, who stood in the doorway as the old man set back the gate.
The door opened into the living-room, where sat two men, while a boy of fourteen squeezed, abashed and a trifle sulky, in a corner. There was a smell of bad cigar, which had almost, but not quite, banished the wonted smell of the room; a smell in some degree due to camphor, though, perhaps, more to caterpillar; for the walls were hidden behind boxes and drawers of divers shapes and sizes, and before the window and in unexpected places on the floor stood other boxes, covered with muslin, nurseries for larvae, pupae, and doomed butterflies. And so many were these things that the room, itself a mere box, gave scant space to the three people and the little round table that were in it; wherefore Bessy’s mother remained in the doorway, and Uncle Isaac, when he rose, took a very tall hat from the floor and clapped it on his head for lack of other safe place; for the little table sustained a load of cups and saucers. Uncle Isaac was a small man, though with a large face; a face fringed about with grey wisps of whisker, and characterised by wide and glassy eyes and a great tract of shaven upper lip.
“Good evenin’, Mr. May, good evenin’!” said Uncle Isaac, shaking hands with the air of a man faithful to a friend in defiance of the world. “This is my friend Mr. Butson.”
Mr. Butson was a tall, rather handsome man of forty or thereabout, with curly hair and whiskers, and he greeted the old man with grum condescension.
“Mr. Butson,” Uncle Isaac continued, with a wave of the hand, “is a gentleman at present in connection with the steamboat profession, though above it by fam’ly and inclination. Mr. Butson an’ me ‘as bin takin’ a day’s ‘olludy with a seleck party by name of beanfeast, in brakes.”
“O yes,” responded old May, divesting himself of his bag; “we passed some of ‘em by the Dun Cow, an’ very merry they was, too, with concertinas, an’ kiss-in-the-ring, an’ what not—very gay.”
“O damn, no,” growled the distinguished Butson. “Not that low lot. He means that coster crowd in vans,” he added, for Uncle Isaac’s enlightenment. “I ain’t fell as low as that. Lor, no.” He sucked savagely at the butt of his cigar, found it extinct, looked vainly for somewhere to fling it, and at last dropped it into a teacup.
“No, Mr. May, no; not them lot,” Uncle Isaac said, with a touch of grave reproof. “As a man of some little property meself, an’ in company of Mr. Butson, by nature genteel-disposed, I should be far from mixin’ with such. We come down with the shipwrights an’ engineers from Lawsonses. That was prob’ly Mr. May’s little joke, Mr. Butson. Mr. May is a man of property hisself, besides a man of science, as I think I told you. This ‘ere land an’ residence bein’ in pint. If any man was to come an’ say to Mr. May, ‘Git out o’ that property, Mr. May,’ what would the law say to that man? Null-avoid. That’s what the lawr ‘ud say. It ‘ud say, ‘Git out yerself, your claim’s nullavoid.’” Uncle Isaac, checking a solemn thump at the table just in time to save the tea-cups, took his hat off instead, and put it on again.
Mr. Butson grunted “Ah!” and Mrs. May, taking the net, squeezed in, with Bessy behind her. “I’ll put a few o’ these boxes on the stairs, an’ make
