“Twea lasses?” echoed Oldshaw, incredulously.
“Hey, feyther. An’ wan o’ them’s got a feace lik’ a rose.”
“Feace lik’ a rose?” thundered the farmer. “Doan’t thee daze tha dull wits lookin’ at wenches’ faces, for Ah tell tha Ah’ll have na son o’ mine hangin’ aboot t’ Hall noo.”
“She bain’t na lass for t’ likes o’ mea, feyther; yon lass is a leady,” said the lad, simply.
If the stranger’s fair face had not, as his father suggested, dazed his dull wits already, the young man would surely have had the tact to restrain these rash words, which fanned the flame of his father’s coarse malevolence.
“A leady! A foine leady! ta foine for any son o’ mine? Ah tell thee, feeal, t’ day’ll coom when tha foine leady’ll wish she wur good enoo for t’ loikes o’ thee; and good enoo she shall never be—tha heears?”
Though the young man’s head was bent in a listening attitude, and he assented in the meekest of gruff voices, the father guessed that this deep attention was not all for his discourse, when the sound of hoofs and wheels on the hard ground outside attracted him to the outer door, which he reached in time to see a luggage-laden cab slowly descend the hill and pass the inn door, giving time for a look at the two young faces inside. Mistress and maid evidently; both bright, eager, and rather anxious. The former met full the surly stare of the farmer, and she drew back her head as if a blast of chilling wind had met her on her approach to her new home. The little maid, who had rosy cheeks and what one may call retrousse features, was less sensitive, and she looked out to resent this cold unwelcome with a contemptuous toss of the head.
“They’re reg’lar savages in these parts, Miss Olivia,” she said, in a slightly raised tone. “I only hope we may be uneaten by the time the master comes!”
The cab had passed the front of the inn, and was rounding the sharp turn which led up a slight ascent through the open farmyard gate, when suddenly, without any warning except a few rough jolts over the uneven ground, it turned over on its side, to the accompaniment of shrill screams from one female throat, and a less loud but more plaintive cry from the other. Mat Oldshaw, who was standing on the inn doorstep behind his father, made a spring forward to help them. But the elder man, with a movement quicker than one would have expected from his clumsy form and ponderous gait, grasped his arm with a violence which made the lad reel, and giving him a push back against the wall of the house, said, in a low, thick voice—
“Doan’t thoo meddle with what darn’t concern thee. Wheer there’s so mooch cry, there ain’t mooch hurt, tak’ ma word for’t.”