“’Twas meat an’ drink to her, sure enough; an’ meat an’ drink to me too, for that matter, because I never left the Man-o’-War Bay Sugar Estate no more. Very little work I done at first, for old Mrs. Damian would have me keep on ’bout home every afternoon in the verandah; but six months after I comed there she died, happy as a bird; an’ if I wasn’t down for fifty pound in her will!
“Richest people in Tobago, they was; an’ then I settled to work for Matthew Damian, an’ when he died, seventeen year after, the head man was pensioned off, an’ I got the billet under Matthew Damian’s son, who be my master now. An’ there I’ll work to the end, an’ my childern after me, please the Lord.”
“’Tis a very fine tale, Mr. Bates, if I may speak for the company,” said Merryweather Chugg; “an’ it do show what a blessing it be to come out of Devonshire. If you’d been a foreigner, now, none of these good things would have happened to ’e.”
“I mind my faither telling about Farmer Blake an’ how he helped to carry his coffin to Widecombe soon after I was born,” said Gaffer Pearn.
“For my part,” declared the landlady, “my mind be all ’pon that poor old blid, as went away from these parts in her maiden days. To think, after seventy years of waiting, that she should hear a Devonshire tongue again! I lay it helped her to pass in peace.”
“It did so,” declared the returned native. “She went out of life easy as a babby; for her appeared to see all her own folks very clear just afore she died, an’ she was steadfast sure as there’d be a West-Country welcome waitin’ up-along. Fill your glasses, my dears; an’ give they boys some ginger-beer, ma’am, will ’e?”
THE TWO WIDOWS
CHAPTER I
Upon the great main road that crosses Dartmoor from Moretonhampstead to Plymouth, and distant but half a mile from the little hamlet of Postbridge, near the eastern arm of Dart, there stand two cottages. Here slopes the broad bosom of Merripit Hill upon the heart of the wilderness, and the cots, that appear on each side of the way, are built exactly alike—of yellow bricks and blue slates. They have doors of the same green shade and window blinds of white chintz; their woodwork is painted brown, and their chimney-pots are red. In every respect these habitations seem outwardly identical, save that one faces north, while the other, over against it, looks southerly. Their gardens are of equal proportion, and contain the same class of cabbage, similar rows of tall scarlet-runner beans sprout from each little plot in summer, and patches of red lettuce, dusted over with soot to keep away the slugs, appear in both during springtime. Once two men dwelt in these abodes, and they were wiser than their wives and maintained an amiable acquaintance, but avoided hot friendship.
When Abel Haycraft and his newly married mate arrived at the northern-facing cottage, Henry Mogridge, the water-bailiff, who dwelt in the cottage that looked south, paid him a visit and put the position briefly and forcibly:—