“Oh! yes, come, let’s hurry! But first to the Lady Principal. Maybe we can help them both. Won’t that be fine?”
But they were not to help Robin just then. A groan from the servants’ parlor, a pleasant room opening from the kitchen, arrested their attention and made them pause to listen. Punctuated by other sounds, a querulous voice was complaining:
“Seems if there warn’t a hull spot left on my old body that ain’t bruised sore as a bile. Why, sir, when I fell off that blamed sled we’d tinkered up”—groan—“I didn’t know anything. Just slid—an’ slid—an’ rolled over and over, never realizin’ which side of me was topmost till I fetched up—kerwhack! to the very bottom. Seemed as if I’d fell out o’ the sky into the bottomless pit. Oh! dear!”
Dawkins’s voice it was that answered him, both pitying and teasing him in the same breath:
“I’m sure it’s sorry I am, Mr. Gilpin, for what’s befell; but for a man that’s lived in a tobogganing country ever since he was born, you begun rather late in life to learn the sport. Why—”
“Ain’t no older’n the Bishop! Can’t one man do same’s t’other, I’d like to know, Mis’ Dawkins?”
“Seems not;” laughed the maid. “But, here, take this cup of hot spearmint tea. ’Twill warm your old bones and help ’em to mend; an’ next time you start playin’ children’s game—why don’t! And for goodness’ sake, John, quit groanin’! Takin’ on like that don’t help any and I tell you fair and square I’ve had about all the strain put on my nerves, to-day, ’t I can bear. What was your bit of a roll down that smooth ice compared to what our girls went through?”
“Has you got any nuts in your pockets? Has you?” broke in Millikins-Pillikins, who had been a patient listener to the confab between the farmer and the nurse till she could wait no longer. Never had the old man come to Oak Knowe without some dainty for the little girl and she expected such now.
“No, sissy, I haven’t. I dunno as I’ve got a pocket left. I dunno nothing, except—except—What’ll SHE say when I go home all lamed up like this! Oh! hum! Seems if I was possessed to ha’ done it, and so she thought. But ’twas Robin’s fault. If Robin hadn’t beset me so I’d never thought of it. Leastwise, not to go the length I did. If I’d—But there! What’s the use? But one thing’s sure. I’ll get shut of that boy, see if I don’t. He’s well now an’ why should I go to harboring reptiles in my buzzum? Tell me that if ye can! Reptiles. That’s what he was, a-teasin’ an’ misleadin’ a poor old man into destruction. Huh! I’ll make it warm for him—trust John Gilpin for that!”