The elder woman felt a cold wrath take possession of her as she heard the precious house of her dream described in this derogatory manner. If Dolly’s cousin Jessie had indeed been present at that moment, it would doubtless have gone hard with her. As she was not, Mattie was forced to content herself with glaring across the kitchen at Dolly, who, however, was busy putting a drawer in the dresser to rights, and could not see her.
“No place to swing a cat, Jessie says, and that ugly an’ all! She says she’d give the eyes out of her head for a nice bit of mortared stone. ‘Something like that grand cottage of Mrs. Kirkby’s,’ she says, ‘up at the gardens at the Hall.’ I once brought her up here on a message or something, if you remember, and she was that taken with this spot there was no holding her.”
Mattie did not remember, as it happened, and was, at that moment, as far as it was possible to be from wishing to remember. Her exasperation at the onslaughts of Dolly’s cousin Jessie was only to be measured by her growing sense of helplessness in face of them. She had, however, just discovered something to say that might possibly put her out of court for good and all, when Dolly, passing to another drawer, flowed steadily onward.
“As for the folks out there, she hasn’t a good word to say for them, home or foreign! A lot of bounders, she says,—barring always your folks, you’ll understand, Mrs. Kirkby. The shop-folk, Jessie says, are that impudent she can bare bring herself to speak to them. Talk to you like as if they’d known you all your life, and call you ‘my dear’ as soon as look at you!”
“I’d like to hear anybody calling me ‘my dear’ before I had asked ’em for it!” Mattie said furiously, fingering a tea-cup with such fierceness that she broke the handle. The retainers connected with a big house have always a curious sense of being a species apart, and in spite of her rebellion she was not immune from it.
“Likely Jessie did ask for it,” Dolly said soothingly, though without turning to look at her. “I always thought her a bit free.... But the things she says about the folks as belong are nothing to what she says about the folks out from England. They fair ruin the place, she says—barring always your belongings, Mrs. Kirkby, as I said before. They’re that stuck up, she says, each of ’em trying to best the rest, that you’d fair bust out laughing if you didn’t feel that mad at ’em. I reckon Jessie’s done her bit of sticking up as well, and it didn’t come off, and that’s what makes her so wild.”
“I don’t know why any of them should be stuck up, I’m sure,” Mattie burst out before she had time to think,—“folks as didn’t make good over here, and thought another country’d likely do the job!”
“Why, that’s what Jessie says, Mrs. Kirkby!” Dolly said, looking at her now, and with definite surprise. “Leaving their country for their country’s good, is how she puts it. But I didn’t look to hear you saying the same, and with your folks doing so well an’ all!
“Some on ’em,” she continued, before Mattie could find breath to speak again, “make out they were that swell at home you’d likely think as they’d have brought their coronets with them! There’s some Madisons, she says, from over Witham way, as is that full of themselves they can hardly walk. They tell folks they had a big farm over here, with a pedigree herd of the best; whereas everybody knows they had nothing but a milk-round as was more like a water-round, by a deal!”
But Mattie had had more than she could bear for the time being of Jessie’s depressing reflections. A fresh picture of Canada was forming before her eyes, blotting out the fine-hued image which she had made for her own enchantment. Already its glamour was blurred beneath Jessie’s touch, as frost-traceries are blurred by the rub of a rough finger. She was appalled, too, by her sudden, contemptuous speech, with its astonishing infidelity to her past beliefs. She had always thought of the Canadian adventurers by the brave title of pioneers, and would have been proud to have made one of their gallant company. It seemed the last treachery of all that she should have nursed that subtle contempt, so that in a moment of idle annoyance it might set a sneer upon her lips.