I was assured by Mr. Bannerbridge that my father’s health and appetite were excellent; he gave me a number of unsatisfying messages, all the rest concerning his interview he whispered to his daughter and his sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole day in different conveyances, the last of which landed us miles away from London, at the gates of an old drooping, mossed and streaked farmhouse, that was like a wall-flower in colour.
CHAPTER III. DIPWELL FARM
In rain or in sunshine this old farmhouse had a constant resemblance to a wall-flower; and it had the same moist earthy smell, except in the kitchen, where John and Martha Thresher lived, apart from their furniture. All the fresh eggs, and the butter stamped, with three bees, and the pots of honey, the fowls, and the hare lifted out of the hamper by his hind legs, and the country loaves smelling heavenly, which used to come to Mrs. Waddy’s address in London, and appear on my father’s table, were products of Dipwell farm, and presents from her sister, Martha Thresher. On receiving this information I felt at home in a moment, and asked right off, ‘How long am I to stay here?—Am I going away tomorrow?—What’s going to be done with me?’ The women found these questions of a youthful wanderer touching. Between kissings and promises of hens to feed, and eggs that were to come of it, I settled into contentment. A strong impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy’s saying, ‘Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you may be sure he will, for I have his word he will, and he’s not one to break it, unless his country’s against him; and for his darling boy he’d march against cannons. So here you’ll sit and wait for him, won’t you?’ I sat down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher raised their hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my love for my father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the thing to conjure him to me.
‘Where his heart’s not concerned,’ Mrs. Waddy remarked of me flatteringly, ‘he’s shrewd as a little schoolmaster.’
‘He’ve a bird’s-nesting eye,’ said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was studying.
John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached that goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of his English.
‘More than his eating and his drinking, that child’s father worrits about his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,’ Mrs. Waddy exclaimed. ‘Before that child your h’s must be like the panting of an engine—to please his father. He ‘d stop me carrying the dinner-tray on meat-dish hot, and I’m to repeat what I said, to make sure the child haven’t heard anything ungrammatical. The child’s nursemaid he’d lecture so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to bend double, like a bundle of nothing, his observations so took the pride out of her. That’s because he ‘s a father who knows his duty to the child:—“Child!” says he, “man, ma’am.” It’s just as you, John, when you sow your seed you think of your harvest. So don’t take it ill of me, John; I beg of you be careful of your English. Turn it over as you’re about to speak.’
‘Change loads on the road, you mean,’ said John Thresher. ‘Na, na, he’s come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain’t nigh reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who’re a widde, which ‘s as much as say, an unocc’pied mind, there’s cockney, and there’s country, and there ‘s school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment. Now, yon ‘s my view.
His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, ‘True!’
‘Drink or no, that’s the trick o’ brewery,’ he added.
They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.
‘What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A stew’s a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a steady fire, and not a furnace.’
‘Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the evil in a world like this.’
‘Then I’m no scholar, and you’re at ease,’ said John.
Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.
Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.
In some way she had regained her advantage. ‘Art sure of it?’ he inquired.
‘Pray, don’t offend me by expressing a doubt of it,’ she replied, bowing.
John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of the children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to be thought of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a serious consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the rooms of state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the kitchen, and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and supping with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father across the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be impatient, is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father’s absence. I knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing. Thus begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These heroes lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival of my father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of John Thresher’s pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird cut the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm from him I loved. Planet communicating with planet would be not more wonderful to men than words of his to me, travelling in such a manner. I went to sleep, and awoke imagining the bird bursting out of heaven.
Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me at Leckham fair. ‘I say, don’t we know one another? How about your grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I’ve got news for you.’
Not unwilling to hear him, I took his hand, leaving my companion, the miller’s little girl, Mabel Sweetwinter, at a toy-stand, while Bob, her brother and our guardian, was shying sticks in a fine attitude. ‘Yes, and your father, too,’ said the young man; ‘come along and see him; you can run?’ I showed him how fast. We were pursued by Bob, who fought for me, and won me, and my allegiance instantly returned