“You set him on, you little saucy vixen! I saw it in your eyes. Let the rascal be scourged.”
“Not so,” said Dennet, with prim mouth and laughing eyes. “Far be it from me! But ’tis ever the wont of the kitchen, when those come there who have no call thither.”
Mistress Headley flounced away, dish-cloth and all, to go whimpering to the alderman with her tale of insults. She trusted that her cousin would give the pert wench a good beating. She was not a whit too old for it.
“How oft did you beat Giles, good kinswoman?” said Dennet demurely, as she stood by her father.
“Whisht, whisht, child,” said her father, “this may not be! I cannot have my guest flouted.”
“If she act as our guest, I will treat her with all honour and courtesy,” said the maiden; “but when she comes where we look not for guests, there is no saying what the black guard may take it on them to do.”
Master Headley was mischievously tickled at the retort, and not without hope that it might offend his kinswoman into departing; but she contented herself with denouncing all imaginable evils from Dennet’s ungoverned condition, with which she was prevented in her beneficence from interfering by the father’s foolish fondness. He would rue the day!
Meantime if the alderman’s peace on one side was disturbed by his visitor, on the other, suitors for Dennet’s hand gave him little rest. She was known to be a considerable heiress, and though Mistress Headley gave every one to understand that there was a contract with Giles, and that she was awaiting his return, this did not deter more wooers than Dennet ever knew of, from making proposals to her father. Jasper Hope was offered, but he was too young, and besides, was a mercer—and Dennet and her father were agreed that her husband must go on with the trade. Then there was a master armourer, but he was a widower with sons and daughters as old as Dennet, and she shook her head and laughed at the bare notion. There also came a young knight who would have turned the Dragon court into a tilt-yard, and spent all the gold that long years of prudent toil had amassed.
If Mistress Headley deemed each denial the result of her vigilance for her son’s interests, she was the more impelled to expatiate on the folly of leaving a maid of sixteen to herself, to let the household go to rack and ruin; while as to the wench, she might prank herself in her own conceit, but no honest man would soon look at her for a wife, if her father left her to herself, without giving her a good stepmother, or at least putting a kinswoman in authority over her.
The alderman was stung. He certainly had warmed a snake on his hearth, and how was he to be rid of it? He secretly winked at the resumption of a forge fire that had been abandoned, because the noise and smoke incommoded the dwelling-house, and Kit Smallbones hammered his loudest there, when the guest might be taking her morning nap; but this had no effect in driving her away, though it may have told upon her temper; and good-humoured Master Headley was harassed more than he had ever been in his life.