Part 11 (1/2)

Grace's disposition to make the best of everything, and to wink at deficiencies in Winterborne's menage, was so uniform and persistent that he suspected her of seeing even more deficiencies than he was aware of. That suppressed sympathy which had showed in her face ever since her arrival told him as much too plainly.

”This muddling style of house-keeping is what you've not lately been used to, I suppose?” he said, when they were a little apart.

”No; but I like it; it reminds me so pleasantly that everything here in dear old Hintock is just as it used to be. The oil is--not quite nice; but everything else is.”

”The oil?”

”On the chairs, I mean; because it gets on one's dress. Still, mine is not a new one.”

Giles found that Creedle, in his zeal to make things look bright, had smeared the chairs with some greasy kind of furniture-polish, and refrained from rubbing it dry in order not to diminish the mirror-like effect that the mixture produced as laid on. Giles apologized and called Creedle; but he felt that the Fates were against him.

CHAPTER X.

Supper-time came, and with it the hot-baked from the oven, laid on a snowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with folds, as in Flemish ”Last Suppers.” Creedle and the boy fetched and carried with amazing alacrity, the latter, to mollify his superior and make things pleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle's cleverness when they were alone.

”I s'pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, Mr.

Creedle, was when you was in the militia?”

”Well, yes. I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many ways of strange das.h.i.+ng life. Not but that Giles has worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day. 'Giles,' says I, though he's maister. Not that I should call'n maister by rights, for his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nouris.h.i.+ng.”

”I s'pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr.

Creedle?”

”Oh yes. Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many's the patriarch I've seed come and go in this paris.h.!.+ There, he's calling for more plates. Lord, why can't 'em turn their plates bottom upward for pudding, as they used to do in former days?”

Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in a half-unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a specially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the little three-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into a dish, exclaiming, simultaneously, ”Draw back, gentlemen and ladies, please!”

A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, and put her handkerchief to her face.

”Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?” said Giles, sternly, and jumping up.

”'Tis how I do it when they baint here, maister,” mildly expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

”Well, yes--but--” replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and hoped none of it had gone into her eye.

”Oh no,” she said. ”Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing.”

”Kiss it and make it well,” gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, ”Oh, it is nothing! She must bear these little mishaps.” But there could be discerned in his face something which said ”I ought to have foreseen this.”

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people as Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages there.

After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a lump of chalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played wherever they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in a corner with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest of the company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that Giles's grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the back of the room:

”And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'