Lady Osborne looked round in a discreet and penetrating manner after he had gone and was out of hearing.
“Dora, my dear, you mustn’t mind what Alf says,” she remarked with much acuteness. “He gets a bit sour now and then, and I’m sure I don’t wonder, with his lumbago, and no one to look after him. If only he had found a nice girl to look after him when he was young! Poor old Alf! But you can take it from me as knows him, he doesn’t really mean all he says. It’s his joke, and I’m not one to quarrel with a joke, and bless him, why shouldn’t he joke in his own way just as the rest of us do? And if sometimes he seems a bit ill-humoured over his joke—well, you let him get his bit of ill-humour off his mind, and he’ll be all the better for it. I never take no notice and it don’t hurt me. ‘Alf and his joke,’ I say over to myself, and no harm done.”
“Rum old cove is Alf,” said her husband; “he seems sometimes to want to quarrel with us all. But it takes two to make a quarrel, and he’ll have hard work to find the second in this house, if I know who lives in it. And he was just as anxious as he could be, Maria, when you was at your worst in the summer, telephoning five and six times in the day, till I said down the tube, ‘Maria’s love, and she’s asleep till morning.’ And what it’ll be when Dora here——”
“Mr. O., you go too far,” said his wife in a shrill aside. “But as you were saying about Alf, if there’s crust outside there’s crumb within. It’s a soft heart like your own, Mr. O., though he don’t know it.”
“Dad, when last were you angry with anybody?” asked Dora. “Can you remember?”
Lord Osborne considered this: it was a question that required research.
“Well, my dear, if you leave out things like my being angry with the Mother for giving us all such a fright last July—there’s one for you, Maria—I couldn’t rightly say. I had a dishonest foreman I remember at the works whom I had to dismiss, summary, too, one Monday morning, but I think I was more sorry for his wife and children than I was angry with him. Nine children there was, and another expected, poor lamb! and stillborn when it came, for I inquired.”
Dora saw Lady Osborne shoot out a furtive finger at him, and he understood.
“Then I was angry with Claude one day,” he continued, “when he was a little lad. I think the devil must have been in the boy, for what must he do but rake out the fire from his mother’s drawing room grate, and dump it all on the hearthrug. And yet I could scarce help laughing even when I gave him his spanking. What was in the boy’s head that he should think of a trick like that? Perhaps it was his joke, too, something that looks mischievous at first, like old Alf’s jokes. I’ll take another cup of tea, Mother, for here’s Claude coming with Jim, and such a tea-pot drainer as Claude I never saw.”
“Yes, I doubt he’ll injure his stomach,” said Lady Osborne, “for I’m told that tea tans the coats of it like so much leather. Sir Henry told me so when we were having a chat one morning, after he’d dressed the place for me.”