“Well, then, keep it to yourself, that’s all. I don’t want to hear a word against young Kit. And what’s more – if I heard fifty, I wouldn’t believe one of them.”
“No more wouldn’t I. He’s as steady a young fellow as ever drove a tax-cart. And so quiet in his manners, why, you wouldn’t think that butter – ”
“His mother was a lady of birth and breeding. That’s where he gets his manners from; though there’s plenty in our family for folk that deserve them. Out with your news, man, whatever it is.”
“Well, it don’t go again him much,” the baker replied, with some fear – for my Uncle’s face was stern, and the wall-hammer swung in his brown right hand; “and indeed you might take it the other way, if he had done it all on his road home from church. You know the bridge over the Halliford brook, or at least where it was, for it’s all washed away, as you heard very likely this morning. What right had your nevvy there, going on for dark?”
My Uncle was a rather large-minded man; but without being loose, or superior. “Rasp, if it comes to that,” he said, “what right have you and I to be anywhere?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” answered the baker, having always been a man of business; “but wherever I go, I pay my way. However, your Kit was down there, and no mistake. What you think he done? He punched Sam Henderson’s head to begin with, for fear of him giving any help, and then he jumped into the water, that was coming like a house on fire from Tim Osborne’s dam, and out of it he pulled Mother Marker, and the pretty young lady as had been in church.”
“Kit can swim,” said my Uncle shortly. “It is a very dangerous trick to learn, being bound to jump in, whenever any one is drowning. Did the women go in, for him to pull them out?”
“Ah, you never did think much of them, Mr. Corny; but you never had no inskin experience. Take ’em all round, they are pretty nigh as good as we are. But they never jumped in – no, you mustn’t say that. They were bound to go home, and they were doing of it, till the flood took their legs from under them. Mrs. Marker have been, this very morning, conversing along of my good missus, and was likely to stop when I was forced to come away, and you should hear her go on about your Kit! And nobody knows if she has any friends. I am told when her time comes to go to heaven, she will have the disposal of four hundred pounds.”
“You be off to your wife!” cried Uncle Corny; “Mrs. Marker is quite a young woman yet, but old enough to have discovered what men are. Go to your work, Rasp. I hate all gossip. But I am glad that Kit thrashed Sam Henderson.”
CHAPTER V.
A LITTLE TIFF
Everybody knows, as he reads his newspaper, that nothing has ever yet happened in the world with enough of precision and accuracy to get itself described, by those who saw it, in the same, or in even a similar manner. No wonder then that my little adventure – if I have any right to call it mine – presented itself in many different lights, not only to the people among whom it spread, but even to the few who were present there and then. Mrs. Jenny Marker’s account of what had happened was already very grand that Sunday eve; but as soon as she had slept and dreamed upon it, her great command of words proved unequal to the call made at the same moment by the mind and heart. Everybody listened, for her practice was to pay every little bill upon a Monday morning; and almost everybody was convinced that she was right.
“Miraculous is the only word that I can think of,” she said to Mrs. Cutthumb, who sold tin-tacks and cabbages; “not a miracle only of the sandy desert, but of the places where the trees and waters grow.”
“The Jordan perhaps you means, Mrs. Marker, ma’am? Or did you please to have in your mind the Red Sea?”
“They were both in my mind, and both come uppermost at the same moment, Mrs. Cutthumb. But the best authorities inform us now that we must not look for more than we can understand. Yet I cannot understand how Kit Orchardson contrived after pulling me out to pull out our Miss Kitty. But look, here he comes! Why, he is everywhere almost. He seems to swing along so. His uncle ought to work him harder. Not that he is impudent. No one can say that of him. Too bashful for a man, in my opinion. But he seems to have taken such a liking to me; and I must be his senior by a considerable time. I will go into your parlour, my dear Mrs. Cutthumb, and then I can look out for our poor Miss Kitty – ah, she is so very young, and no one to stand up for her!”
“Excuse me, Miss Marker, if you please,” said Mrs. Cutthumb; “but if I may make so bold to say, you are very young yourself, Miss, in years, though not in worship. And to be run away with from school is a thing that may occur to any girl when bootiful. But concerning of Miss Kitty – bless her innocent young face! – what you was pleased to say, ma’am, is most surprising.”
“No, Mrs. Cutthumb, very far from that, when you come to consider what human nature is. I never could do such things myself; I never could sleep easy in my bed if I thought that they ever could be imputed to me. But when we look at things it is our duty to remember that the world is made up of different people from what we are.”
“What experience you have had, ma’am, and yet keeping your complexion so! Ah, if my poor Cutthumb could have kept away from the imperial! But he said it were the duty of a Briton, and he done it. Sally, get away into the back yard with your dolly. I beg your pardon, ma’am, for interrupting you of your words so.”
“Well, one thing I make a point of is,” Mrs. Marker continued with a gentle frown, “never to enter into any domestic affairs, though without any bias of any sort, out of doors. We all have enough, as you know, Mrs. Cutthumb, and sometimes more than we can manage, to regulate our own histories. Miss Coldpepper is a remarkable lady, so very, so highly superior; but her niece, our Miss Kitty, does not seem as yet to take after her in that particular; and scarcely to be wondered at, when you remember that she is not her niece at all of rights. But this is not a question to interest you much, nor any one outside of what I might call the Coldpepper domesticity.”
“What superior words you always do have, as it were, in your muff, Mrs. Marker! But if you please to mean, Miss – being still so young I slips into it naturally – the Coldpepper Manor, why I was born upon it, and so was my parents before me. And that makes it natural, as you might say, and proper for me to have a word to say about them. I remember all the Coldpeppers since I was that high; and it shall never go no further.”
“There is nothing to conceal. You must never fancy that of them. The Coldpeppers always were a haughty race, and headstrong; but bold, and outspoken, and defying of their neighbours. It was bad for any one who crossed them: you know that, if you remember old Squire Nicholas. But Miss Kitty Fairthorn is not a Coldpepper. You see you don’t know everything about them, Mrs. Cutthumb. The captain had been married before he ever saw Miss Monica.”
“Lor’, Mrs. Marker, you quite take my breath away! And yet I might have known it, I was bound almost to know it, the moment one comes to reflection. ‘Kitty’s’ not a name at all becoming to the rank of the Manor of Coldpepper. I’ve been wondering about it many’s the time; Arabella and Monica sounds something like; but Kitty isn’t fit, except for women that has to get their own livelihood. Well, it eases my mind that she is not a Coldpepper.”
“No, Mrs. Cutthumb; but she is a Fairthorn; and from all I hear the Fairthorns are much better known, in the great world of London, than our Coldpeppers. Captain Fairthorn is a man who has discovered more than the whole world knew in our fathers’ days. He can make a bell ring in John o’ Groat’s house, he can blow up a cliff at the Land’s End from London, he knows every wrinkle at the bottom of the sea, he can make a ghost stand at eight corners of the room.”
“Can he save his own soul, ma’am?” the greengrocer asked in a solemn voice, being a strict Wesleyan. “Them vanities, falsely called Science nowadays, is the depth of the snare of the