“The Flower room? Which be that?”
“Oh, it’s the name they’ve give the one on the right at the top o’ the stairs. It’s got a new laylock paper on the wall, and she’s got a new bedspread, white, with bunches of laylock all about it, and a bit o’ eeliertrope sateen hangs down behind the head of the bed to keep the draught off, though it ’ud be far more sense to shut the winder, I say, for that sateen’s faded dretful in the folds already. I was only noticing it th’other day, when my cousin was up from Woolv’ampton, and I took her over the house. . . . Oh, yes, Mrs. Widow’ll lend me the key any time” (Mrs. Widow is my caretaker), “and it do make a bit of a change to take anyone to. My cousin said at the time she’d never buy a bedspread like that; the colour’s so fleeting. Besides, she wouldn’t have a white ground in any case, it’s always in the wash. She’s made herself a lovely spread, she was telling me, out of a pair of old long curtains, just cutting out the bad places and then dyeing it a deep coffee colour with a little cold tea; makes it last like anything. I say the same; them white spreads never pay for themselves. Though I rather like the one she’s got with roses on—Hannah Craddock was a-washing of it one day when I dropped in” (Hannah is the village laundress), “that was the last time Miss Ursula was down, because Hannah was doing of her blouses that week, and my Mabel was very taken with one that had bits of crochet let in all about, and points of it up the sleeves just here, and my Mabel tried to copy it, only Hannah had promised it home that very afternoon, so we’re waiting for it to come again, as Mabel can’t get the yoke quite right. I’m sorry it isn’t them who’s coming. She wants to get it finished afore she goes to London next month.”
“Did you see the name on the trunks? Now you mention it, I saw the boy taking a telegraft up to the house yesterday—no, the day before.”
“It was my husband told me about it, when he looked in home just now, and his sight being so poor, he couldn’t see the name” (in spite of the Educational Authorities many of the men in our village cannot read, but by courtesy it is always referred to as poor sight!), “so he asked the station-master if he should drop ’em anywhere, as he had got her ladyship’s cart there. He is helping at the Manor House to-day. He’d just taken some hay to the station, and it seemed a real waste o’ good time to do nothing with it coming back. But the station-master said they was for up here, and old Bob was taking ’em up as the ladies wouldn’t have the fly; said they’d pefer to walk. And, would you believe it, he never so much as thought to ask how many there were. Still, I’ll soon find out and let you know. I’ll go up and ask Abigail if she can oblige me with the loan of a little salt. I’ve a couple of ducks myself as I’d be glad to get four-and-six apiece for if——”
At this moment Abigail appeared at the cottage door, and the gong reverberated and echoed as she gave it a vigorous hammering, calculated to wake me up wherever I might be.
“Good gracious, that’s for her one o’clock dinner!” exclaimed both the women in one breath, and fled in opposite directions, presumably to minister to the raving and the ravenous!
As the conversation had implied, the duck was tough and inadequate; but it was a certain satisfaction to me—as I sought about in vain for a fairly good slice from the breast of the skinny carcase—to reflect that I hadn’t paid for it as yet. I was out when the youthful Perkins had delivered it.
For the rest, I didn’t attach any value to the women’s gossip. Once you have any real footing in a rural district, and have become part and parcel of the country-side, you soon learn that one impossibility is “terrible isolation.” From rosy morn till dewy eve one or another woman is engaged in lengthy gossip with any other she meets, and in nearly every case the topic of exhaustive conversation will be the doings of somebody else; moreover, the less that is actually known about the third and absent party the more two and two will add up to nineteen.
In the main, I have seldom found such gossips either spiteful or slanderous. They consider it being neighbourly to keep count of your sayings and doings.