"You heartless good-for-nothing, unfeeling, ill-mannered dolt!" she exclaimed, turning towards her brother with a gesture of her clenched fist, as though she could have found it in her heart to have struck him, had she dared. "What ill luck brought you here to bring trouble, and ill-will, and ruin, on a poor lone widow as never did you any harm!"
"I'm as vexed as you can be, Bessy," said the sailor, passing his hand through his thick curly hair.
"You'd better have bit off that foolish tongue of yours, than have let it provoke such a lady!"
"It was grieving the mother, that I felt," said Ned Franks, "it was seeing her so anxious and troubled. 'Twas a stiff gale to weather, and I was never in my life more nigh dragging my anchor. But I'm glad," he added to himself, "I'm glad that I held fast by the truth."
Ned was to have little peace during the remainder of that day. He had to endure the "continual dropping" that made him bitterly remember Solomon's proverb—"It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house." *
* Proverbs xxi. 9.
On Dan's return home in the evening, the storm which Ned had lulled a little, broke forth anew with fresh fury.
"What do you think, Dan, that this hero uncle of yours has been a-doing!" exclaimed Bessy to her son, banging down the kettle on the bar of the grate, as if it too had grievously wronged her. "Lady Barton herself, in her grand sweeping gown, came down from the Hall; I'd never but once afore seen her enter my cottage, and that was when your poor father lay a-dying!"
"What could she come for?" asked Dan, curiosity gleaming in his keen little eyes.
"What for but to hear about her son, to be sure, and to talk to this bear's cub about him, and to tip him with what would have bought me a Sunday gown, I'll be bound, for I saw the lady thrusting back her purse into her pocket. And there was he—" Bessy pointed at Ned with her thumb—"first standing dumb as a stock-fish, looking as if he couldn't utter a word, and then bounce out with such a fine tale, how Mr. Lacy had got himself smashed in a drunken row, how he had to lie in his bed for days all covered with bruises, how he was the most swaggering, quarrelsome—"