Томас Харди (Гарди)
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Chapter III
‘Melodious birds sing madrigals’
That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one to young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had suggested to her father, with the materials for the heterogeneous meal called high tea – a class of refection welcome to all when away from men and towns, and particularly attractive to youthful palates. The table was prettily decked with winter flowers and leaves, amid which the eye was greeted by chops, chicken, pie, &c., and two huge pasties overhanging the sides of the dish with a cheerful aspect of abundance.
At the end, towards the fireplace, appeared the tea-service, of old-fashioned Worcester porcelain, and behind this arose the slight form of Elfride, attempting to add matronly dignity to the movement of pouring out tea, and to have a weighty and concerned look in matters of marmalade, honey, and clotted cream. Having made her own meal before he arrived, she found to her embarrassment that there was nothing left for her to do but talk when not assisting him. She asked him if he would excuse her finishing a letter she had been writing at a side-table, and, after sitting down to it, tingled with a sense of being grossly rude. However, seeing that he noticed nothing personally wrong in her, and that he too was embarrassed when she attentively watched his cup to refill it, Elfride became better at ease; and when furthermore he accidentally kicked the leg of the table, and then nearly upset his tea-cup, just as schoolboys did, she felt herself mistress of the situation, and could talk very well. In a few minutes ingenuousness and a common term of years obliterated all recollection that they were strangers just met. Stephen began to wax eloquent on extremely slight experiences connected with his professional pursuits; and she, having no experiences to fall back upon, recounted with much animation stories that had been related to her by her father, which would have astonished him had he heard with what fidelity of action and tone they were rendered. Upon the whole, a very interesting picture of Sweet-and-Twenty was on view that evening in Mr. Swancourt’s house.
Ultimately Stephen had to go upstairs and talk loud to the vicar, receiving from him between his puffs a great many apologies for calling him so unceremoniously to a stranger’s bedroom. ‘But,’ continued Mr. Swancourt, ‘I felt that I wanted to say a few words to you before the morning, on the business of your visit. One’s patience gets exhausted by staying a prisoner in bed all day through a sudden freak of one’s enemy – new to me, though – for I have known very little of gout as yet. However, he’s gone to my other toe in a very mild manner, and I expect he’ll slink off altogether by the morning. I hope you have been well attended to downstairs?’
‘Perfectly. And though it is unfortunate, and I am sorry to see you laid up, I beg you will not take the slightest notice of my being in the house the while.’
‘I will not. But I shall be down to-morrow. My daughter is an excellent doctor. A dose or two of her mild mixtures will fetch me round quicker than all the drug stuff in the world. Well, now about the church business. Take a seat, do. We can’t afford to stand upon ceremony in these parts as you see, and for this reason, that a civilized human being seldom stays long with us; and so we cannot waste time in approaching him, or he will be gone before we have had the pleasure of close acquaintance. This tower of ours is, as you will notice, entirely gone beyond the possibility of restoration; but the church itself is well enough. You should see some of the churches in this county. Floors rotten: ivy lining the walls.’
‘Dear me!’
‘Oh, that’s nothing. The congregation of a neighbour of mine, whenever a storm of rain comes on during service, open their umbrellas and hold them up till the dripping ceases from the roof. Now, if you will kindly bring me those papers and letters you see lying on the table, I will show you how far we have got.’
Stephen crossed the room to fetch them, and the vicar seemed to notice more particularly the slim figure of his visitor.
‘I suppose you are quite competent?’ he said.
‘Quite,’ said the young man, colouring slightly.
‘You are very young, I fancy – I should say you are not more than nineteen?’
I am nearly twenty-one.’
‘Exactly half my age; I am forty-two.’
‘By the way,’ said Mr. Swancourt, after some conversation, ‘you said your whole name was Stephen Fitzmaurice, and that your grandfather came originally from Caxbury. Since I have been speaking, it has occurred to me that I know something of you. You belong to a well-known ancient county family – not ordinary Smiths in the least.’
‘I don’t think we have any of their blood in our veins.’
‘Nonsense! you must. Hand me the “Landed Gentry.” Now, let me see. There, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith – he lies in St. Mary’s Church, doesn’t he? Well, out of that family Sprang the Leaseworthy Smiths, and collaterally came General Sir Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith of Caxbury – ’
‘Yes; I have seen his monument there,’ shouted Stephen. ‘But there is no connection between his family and mine: there cannot be.’
‘There is none, possibly, to your knowledge. But look at this, my dear sir,’ said the vicar, striking his fist upon the bedpost for emphasis. ‘Here are you, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith, living in London, but springing from Caxbury. Here in this book is a genealogical tree of the Stephen Fitzmaurice Smiths of Caxbury Manor. You may be only a family of professional men now – I am not inquisitive: I don’t ask questions of that kind; it is not in me to do so – but it is as plain as the nose in your face that there’s your origin! And, Mr. Smith, I congratulate you upon your blood; blue blood, sir; and, upon my life, a very desirable colour, as the world goes.’
‘I wish you could congratulate me upon some more tangible quality,’ said the younger man, sadly no less than modestly.
‘Nonsense! that will come with time. You are young: all your life is before you. Now look – see how far back in the mists of antiquity my own family of Swancourt have a root. Here, you see,’ he continued, turning to the page, ‘is Geoffrey, the one among my ancestors who lost a barony because he would cut his joke. Ah, it’s the sort of us! But the story is too long to tell now. Ay, I’m a poor man – a poor gentleman, in fact: those I would be friends with, won’t be friends with me; those who are willing to be friends with me, I am above being friends with. Beyond dining with a neighbouring incumbent or two, and an occasional chat – sometimes dinner – with Lord Luxellian, a connection of mine, I am in absolute solitude – absolute.’
‘You have your studies, your books, and your – daughter.’
‘Oh yes, yes; and I don’t complain of poverty. Canto coram latrone. Well, Mr. Smith, don’t let me detain you any longer in a sick room. Ha! that reminds me of a story I once heard in my younger days.’ Here the vicar began a series of small private laughs, and Stephen looked inquiry. ‘Oh, no, no! it is too bad – too bad to tell!’ continued Mr. Swancourt in undertones of grim mirth. ‘Well, go downstairs; my daughter must do the best she can with you this evening. Ask her to sing to you – she plays and sings very nicely. Good-night; I feel as if I had known you for five or six years. I’ll ring for somebody to show you down.’
‘Never mind,’ said Stephen, ‘I can find the way.’ And he went downstairs, thinking of the delightful freedom of manner in the remoter counties in comparison with the reserve of London.
‘I forgot to tell you that my father was rather deaf,’ said Elfride anxiously, when Stephen entered the little drawing-room.
‘Never mind; I know all about it, and we are great friends,’ the man of business replied enthusiastically. ‘And, Miss Swancourt, will you kindly sing to me?’
To Miss Swancourt this request seemed, what in fact it was, exceptionally point-blank; though she guessed that her father had some hand in framing it, knowing, rather to her cost, of his unceremonious way of utilizing her for the benefit of dull sojourners. At the same time, as Mr. Smith’s manner was too frank to provoke criticism, and his age too little to inspire fear, she was ready – not to say pleased – to accede. Selecting from the canterbury some old family ditties, that in years gone by had been played and sung by her mother, Elfride sat down to the pianoforte, and began, ‘’Twas on the evening of a winter’s day,’ in a pretty contralto voice.
‘Do you like that old thing, Mr. Smith?’ she said at the end.
‘Yes, I do much,’ said Stephen – words he would have uttered, and sincerely, to anything on earth, from glee to requiem, that she might have chosen.
‘You shall have a little one by De Leyre, that was given me by a young French lady who was staying at Endelstow House:
‘“Je l’ai plante, je l’ai vu naitre,
Ce beau rosier ou les oiseaux,” &c.;
and then I shall want to give you my own favourite for the very last, Shelley’s “When the lamp is shattered,” as set to music by my poor mother. I so much like singing to anybody who REALLY cares to hear me.’
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is usually recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special form of manifestation throughout the pages of his memory. As the patron Saint has her attitude and accessories in mediaeval illumination, so the sweetheart may be said to have hers upon the table of her true Love’s fancy, without which she is rarely introduced there except by effort; and this though she may, on further acquaintance, have been observed in many other phases which one would imagine to be far more appropriate to love’s young dream.
Miss Elfride’s image chose the form in which she was beheld during these minutes of singing, for her permanent attitude of visitation to Stephen’s eyes during his sleeping and waking hours in after days. The profile is seen of a young woman in a pale gray silk dress with trimmings of swan’s-down, and opening up from a point in front, like a waistcoat without a shirt; the cool colour contrasting admirably with the warm bloom of her neck and face. The furthermost candle on the piano comes immediately in a line with her head, and half invisible itself, forms the accidentally frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola. Her hands are in their place on the keys, her lips parted, and trilling forth, in a tender diminuendo, the closing words of the sad apostrophe:
‘O Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier!’
Her head is forward a little, and her eyes directed keenly upward to the top of the page of music confronting her. Then comes a rapid look into Stephen’s face, and a still more rapid look back again to her business, her face having dropped its sadness, and acquired a certain expression of mischievous archness the while; which lingered there for some time, but was never developed into a positive smile of flirtation.
Stephen suddenly shifted his position from her right hand to her left, where there was just room enough for a small ottoman to stand between the piano and the corner of the room. Into this nook he squeezed himself, and gazed wistfully up into Elfride’s face. So long and so earnestly gazed he, that her cheek deepened to a more and more crimson tint as each line was added to her song. Concluding, and pausing motionless after the last word for a minute or two, she ventured to look at him again. His features wore an expression of unutterable heaviness.
‘You don’t hear many songs, do you, Mr. Smith, to take so much notice of these of mine?’
‘Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was noticing: I mean yourself,’ he answered gently.
‘Now, Mr. Smith!’
‘It is perfectly true; I don’t hear much singing. You mistake what I am, I fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded spot, you think I must needs come from a life of bustle, and know the latest movements of the day. But I don’t. My life is as quiet as yours, and more solitary; solitary as death.’
‘The death which comes from a plethora of life? But seriously, I can quite see that you are not the least what I thought you would be before I saw you. You are not critical, or experienced, or – much to mind. That’s why I don’t mind singing airs to you that I only half know.’ Finding that by this confession she had vexed him in a way she did not intend, she added naively, ‘I mean, Mr. Smith, that you are better, not worse, for being only young and not very experienced. You don’t think my life here so very tame and dull, I know.’
‘I do not, indeed,’ he said with fervour. ‘It must be delightfully poetical, and sparkling, and fresh, and – ’
‘There you go, Mr. Smith! Well, men of another kind, when I get them to be honest enough to own the truth, think just the reverse: that my life must be a dreadful bore in its normal state, though pleasant for the exceptional few days they pass here.’
‘I could live here always!’ he said, and with such a tone and look of unconscious revelation that Elfride was startled to find that her harmonies had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen’s heart. She said quickly:
‘But you can’t live here always.’
‘Oh no.’ And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.
Elfride’s emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of woman’s lesser infirmities – love of admiration – caused an inflammable disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her.
Chapter IV
‘Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap.’
For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first, two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small. On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour, stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations. The lonely edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill. It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.
Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty, and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.
At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on his first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he looked, after that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph of its class. It was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of William Pitt, as represented in the well or little known bust by Nollekens – a mouth which is in itself a young man’s fortune, if properly exercised. His round chin, where its upper part turned inward, still continued its perfect and full curve, seeming to press in to a point the bottom of his nether lip at their place of junction.
Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the lawn in a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy’s velocity, superadded to a girl’s lightness, after a tame rabbit she was endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of coaxing words alternating with desperate rushes so much out of keeping with them, that the hollowness of such expressions was but too evident to her pet, who darted and dodged in carefully timed counterpart.
The scene down there was altogether different from that of the hills. A thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot from the wilderness without; even at this time of the year the grass was luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting belt of evergreens, wasting its force upon the higher and stronger trees forming the outer margin of the grove.
Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and calling ‘Mr. Smith!’ Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr. Swancourt. The young man expressed his gladness to see his host downstairs.
‘Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally goes off the second night. Well, where have you been this morning? I saw you come in just now, I think!’
‘Yes; I have been for a walk.’
‘Start early?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very early, I think?’
‘Yes, it was rather early.’
‘Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes seaward.’
‘No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.’
‘You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild place is a novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?’
‘Not altogether a novelty. I like it.’
The youth seemed averse to explanation.
‘You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a journey of fourteen or sixteen hours. But there’s no accounting for tastes, and I am glad to see that yours are no meaner. After breakfast, but not before, I shall be good for a ten miles’ walk, Master Smith.’
Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr. Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common with the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims to be considered handsome, – handsome, that is, in the sense in which the moon is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a close inspection, are seen to diversify its surface being left out of the argument. His face was of a tint that never deepened upon his cheeks nor lightened upon his forehead, but remained uniform throughout; the usual neutral salmon-colour of a man who feeds well – not to say too well – and does not think hard; every pore being in visible working order. His tout ensemble was that of a highly improved class of farmer, dressed up in the wrong clothes; that of a firm-standing perpendicular man, whose fall would have been backwards in direction if he had ever lost his balance.
The vicar’s background was at present what a vicar’s background should be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the chimneypiece were ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines, and against the wall was a high table, made up of the fragments of an old oak Iychgate. Upon this stood stuffed specimens of owls, divers, and gulls, and over them bunches of wheat and barley ears, labelled with the date of the year that produced them. Some cases and shelves, more or less laden with books, the prominent titles of which were Dr. Brown’s ‘Notes on the Romans,’ Dr. Smith’s ‘Notes on the Corinthians,’ and Dr. Robinson’s ‘Notes on the Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,’ just saved the character of the place, in spite of a girl’s doll’s-house standing above them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride’s hat hanging on its corner.
‘Business, business!’ said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began to find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the somewhat irregular forces of his visitor.
They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts, mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much at starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him. ‘Worm!’ the vicar shouted.
A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the building, mumbling, ‘Ah, I used to be strong enough, but ‘tis altered now! Well, there, I’m as independent as one here and there, even if they do write ‘squire after their names.’
‘What’s the matter?’ said the vicar, as William Worm appeared; when the remarks were repeated to him.
‘Worm says some very true things sometimes,’ Mr. Swancourt said, turning to Stephen. ‘Now, as regards that word “esquire.” Why, Mr. Smith, that word “esquire” is gone to the dogs, – used on the letters of every jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else, Worm?’
‘Ay, the folk have begun frying again!’
‘Dear me! I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes,’ Worm said groaningly to Stephen, ‘I’ve got such a noise in my head that there’s no living night nor day. ‘Tis just for all the world like people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in my poor head, till I don’t know whe’r I’m here or yonder. There, God A’mighty will find it out sooner or later, I hope, and relieve me.’
‘Now, my deafness,’ said Mr. Swancourt impressively, ‘is a dead silence; but William Worm’s is that of people frying fish in his head. Very remarkable, isn’t it?’
‘I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,’ said Worm corroboratively.
‘Yes, it is remarkable,’ said Mr. Smith.
‘Very peculiar, very peculiar,’ echoed the vicar; and they all then followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a little stone wall, from which gleamed fragments of quartz and blood-red marbles, apparently of inestimable value, in their setting of brown alluvium. Stephen walked with the dignity of a man close to the horse’s head, Worm stumbled along a stone’s throw in the rear, and Elfride was nowhere in particular, yet everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes at the sides, hovering about the procession like a butterfly; not definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in at points with the general progress.
The vicar explained things as he went on: ‘The fact is, Mr. Smith, I didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those d – dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not as an expletive.’
‘How very odd!’ said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious friendliness.
‘Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the churchwardens are – ; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk and the sexton as well.’
‘How very strange!’ said Stephen.
‘Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some progress soon.’
‘You must trust to circumstances.’
‘There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it? But I like it on such days as these.’
The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the forms of the mounds it covered, – themselves irregularly shaped, with no eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain that all this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with the effect of a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel. Detached rocks stood upright afar, a collar of foam girding their bases, and repeating in its whiteness the plumage of a countless multitude of gulls that restlessly hovered about.
‘Now, Worm!’ said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen running up the hill without a bonnet.
Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by ‘the purple light’ in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by sending him to measure the height of the tower.
What could she do but come close – so close that a minute arc of her skirt touched his foot – and asked him how he was getting on with his sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a preacher.
Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
‘Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?’ she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
‘Oh no, that I won’t,’ said he, staring up.
‘Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote it for him. Isn’t it absurd?’
‘How clever you must be!’ said Stephen. ‘I couldn’t write a sermon for the world.’
‘Oh, it’s easy enough,’ she said, descending from the pulpit and coming close to him to explain more vividly. ‘You do it like this. Did you ever play a game of forfeits called “When is it? where is it? what is it?”’
‘No, never.’
‘Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so on. You put that down under “Generally.” Then you proceed to the First, Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys – says they are all my eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being put in great black brackets, writing opposite, “LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE FARMERS ARE FALLING ASLEEP.” Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of each page, “KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN” – I mean,’ she added, correcting herself, ‘that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!’
Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched Elfride down the hill with a smile.
‘You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,’ he said, and turned to Stephen. ‘But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.’
‘I think Miss Swancourt very clever,’ Stephen observed.
‘Yes, she is; certainly, she is,’ said papa, turning his voice as much as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. ‘Now, Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the world – not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job she makes of them!’
‘She can do anything.’
‘She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade. But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!’
‘Not a word,’ said Smith.
‘Look there,’ said Mr. Swancourt. ‘What do you think of my roofing?’ He pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,
‘Did you do that, sir?’
‘Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens, slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?’
‘Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there – hee, hee!’ said William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. ‘Like slaves, ‘a b’lieve – hee, hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go straight? Mighty I! There, ‘tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to cuss and let it out, is it, sir?’
‘Well – why?’
‘Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.’
‘I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.’
‘Oh, doan’t I, sir – hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir, and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there. Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the chancel?’
‘Yes; what of that?’
‘I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ‘twas only a dog or cat – maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.’
‘Ah, I remember.’
‘No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ‘A was very well to look at; but, Lord! – ’
‘Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?’
‘ – ‘A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow. ‘Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat down upon the chair. “Get up, Worm,” says you, when you seed the chair go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and brimstone to t’other end of your shop – all in a passion. “Damn the chair!” says I. “Just what I was thinking,” says you, sir. “I could see it in your face, sir,” says I, “and I hope you and God will forgi’e me for saying what you wouldn’t.” To save your life you couldn’t help laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay, I’m as wise as one here and there.’
