“Of course,” replied Agatha, impatient to be moving. “It is almost a ruin.”
“Then let us go there, by all means,” said Miss Wilson, not disposed to stand on trifles at the risk of a bad cold.
They hurried on, and came presently to a green hill by the wayside. On the slope was a dilapidated Swiss cottage, surrounded by a veranda on slender wooden pillars, about which clung a few tendrils of withered creeper, their stray ends still swinging from the recent wind, now momentarily hushed as if listening for the coming of the rain. Access from the roadway was by a rough wooden gate in the hedge. To the surprise of Agatha, who had last seen this gate off its hinges and only attached to the post by a rusty chain and padlock, it was now rehung and fastened by a new hasp. The weather admitting of no delay to consider these repairs, she opened the gate and hastened up the slope, followed by the troop of girls. Their ascent ended with a rush, for the rain suddenly came down in torrents.
When they were safe under the veranda, panting, laughing, grumbling, or congratulating themselves on having been so close to a place of shelter, Miss Wilson observed, with some uneasiness, a spade—new, like the hasp of the gate—sticking upright in a patch of ground that someone had evidently been digging lately. She was about to comment on this sign of habitation, when the door of the chalet was flung open, and Jane screamed as a man darted out to the spade, which he was about to carry in out of the wet, when he perceived the company under the veranda, and stood still in amazement. He was a young laborer with a reddish-brown beard of a week’s growth. He wore corduroy trousers and a linen-sleeved corduroy vest; both, like the hasp and spade, new. A coarse blue shirt, with a vulgar red-and-orange neckerchief, also new, completed his dress; and, to shield himself from the rain, he held up a silk umbrella with a silver-mounted ebony handle, which he seemed unlikely to have come by honestly. Miss Wilson felt like a boy caught robbing an orchard, but she put a bold face on the matter and said:
“Will you allow us to take shelter here until the rain is over?”
“For certain, your ladyship,” he replied, respectfully applying the spade handle to his hair, which was combed down to his eyebrows. “Your ladyship does me proud to take refuge from the onclemency of the yallovrments beneath my ‘umble rooftree.” His accent was barbarous; and he, like a low comedian, seemed to relish its vulgarity. As he spoke he came in among them for shelter, and propped his spade against the wall of the chalet, kicking the soil from his hobnailed blucher boots, which were new.
“I came out, honored lady,” he resumed, much at his ease, “to house my spade, whereby I earn my living. What the pen is to the poet, such is the spade to the working man.” He took the kerchief from his neck, wiped his temples as if the sweat of honest toil were there, and calmly tied it on again.
“If you’ll ‘scuse a remark from a common man,” he observed, “your ladyship has a fine family of daughters.”
“They are not my daughters,” said Miss Wilson, rather shortly.
“Sisters, mebbe?”