"Not married," said Mr. Voysey. "But he've a sister. I hope she ban't one of they gardening sort, so-called, that's always messing round making work and finding things blowed down here or eaten with varmints there. If she's a flower-liking female, 'twill be my place to tell her straight out from the shoulder that flowers won't grow in the vicarage garden, and that she must be content with the 'dendrums in summer time and the foxgloves and such-like homely old stuff."
"He was a football player to college and very skilled at it, so Barker told me," said Ned Baskerville.
"Then mark me, he'll be for making a club, and teaching the young chaps to play of a Saturday and keeping 'em out of your bar, Mr. Baskerville," declared the parish clerk; "Yes, look at it as you will, there's changes in the air, and I hope we'll all stand shoulder to shoulder against 'em, and down the man afore he gets his foot in the stirrup."
"You two—Joe Voysey and you—be enough to frighten the poor soul out of his seven senses afore he's been in the place a week," declared Ned Baskerville. "And I hope for one that Uncle Nat won't go against him; and I know father won't, for he's said this many a day that old Valletort was past his work and ought to be pensioned off."
"Your father's not a man for unseemly changes, all the same," declared Tommy; "and if this new young minister was to go in the pulpit in white instead of black, for instance, as the Popish habit is, Vivian Baskerville would be the first to rise up and tell him to dress himself decently and in order."
But Ned denied this.
"Don't you think you know my father, Tommy, because you don't. If this chap gets up a football club, he'll have father on his side from the first; and he can preach in black or white or pea-green, so long as he talks sense through his mouth, and not nonsense through his nose, like the old one did."
"Don't you speak for your father," said Joseph Voysey. He was a very tall and a very thin man, with pale, watery eyes and a scanty beard. Nature had done so much for his long and rather absurd hatchet nose, that there was no material left for his chin.
"If I shouldn't talk for my father, who should?" retorted Ned. Then Mr. Voysey descended to personalities and accused the other of irreverence and laziness. The argument grew sharp and Mr. Baskerville was forced to still it.
"Come you along and don't talk twaddle, Ned," he said to his nephew. "I'm going down to Undershaugh myself this minute, to see Mrs. Lintern, and you and Heathman will come with me."