VI
That Jane Price!
When Abigail announced, “Mrs. Price says can you spare a minute to see her, please, ma’am,” you would have known by the toss of her nose that the lady-caller was not very nearly related to the aristocracy.
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Price, or “that Jane Price,” as she is more usually styled, is held in no great esteem in our village. Yet everything is said to fulfil some useful purpose, and if Mrs. Price does nothing else, at least she and her family serve as conspicuous moral warnings and give us something to throw up our hands about at intervals, when we exclaim:
“Did you EVER!!”
She is a widow of ample and well-fed proportions, owning her cottage, some bees and a pig, and apparently getting a fairly good living out of doing remarkably little sewing. If, under a mistaken sense of duty, you strive to encourage local industry, and seek to engage her services, she has to consider before she consents to undertake the bit of sewing you offer her to do, at three times the amount you would have to pay for having it done in town. And as often as not she replies that she “really can’t oblige you” this time, as she’s got a “spell” on cruel bad, that has gone all down her back to her knees, making her head feel nohow.
You turn away not even worried about her condition, since she seems as cheerful as a daisy and as comfortably complacent as a cow. And you also know, even though you may have been acquainted with the lady only a few months, that however cruel the spell may be, and however long it may last and prevent her working, her children will be some of the most elaborately dressed in the Sunday school, and from the cottage door there will radiate the most appetising of odours as regularly as the mealtimes come round.
How it is that she manages to do so well with so little visible means of subsistence, only a stranger would stop to inquire. The residents know only too well that her pockets are large; that the shawl she invariably wears on weekdays has voluminous folds; that her carrying and stowing-away capacity is almost worthy of a professional conjurer. Kleptomania (to give it as refined a name as we can) is her besetting sin. Unfortunately her family follow in her footsteps.
Mrs. Price seems to have a positive gift for turning everything to profitable account; and her methods of raising money are as ingenious as they are varied.