Cosmo followed very willingly, longing for water and a clothes-brush rather than for food. The cold and damp, fatigue and exposure of the night were telling upon him more than he knew, and all the time he was at work, he had been cramped by hitherto unknown pains in his limbs.
The gardener brought him to the half-ruinous wing already mentioned, to a small kitchen, opening under a great sloping buttress, and presented him to his wife, an English woman, some ten years younger than himself. She received him with a dignified retraction of the feelers, but the moment she understood his needs, ministered to them, and had some breakfast ready for him by the time he had made his toilet. He sat down by her little fire, and drank some tea, but felt shivery, and could not eat. In dread lest, if he yielded a moment to the invading sickness, it should at once overpower him, he made haste to get out again into the sun, and rejoined the old man, who had gone back to his cabbage-ground. There he pulled off his coat, and once more seized the spade, for work seemed the only way of meeting his enemy hand to hand. But the moment he began, he was too hot, and the moment he took breath he was ready to shiver. As long as he could stand, however, he would not give in.
“How many years have you been gardener here?” he asked, forcing himself to talk.
“Five an’ forty year, an’ I’m nearhan’ tired o’ ’t.”
“The present lord is a young man, is he not?”
“Ay; he canna be muckle ayont five an’ thirty.”
“What sort of a man is he?”
“Weel, it’s hard to say. He’s ane o’ them ’at naebody says weel o’, an’ naebody’s begud to say ill o’—yet.”
“There can’t be much amiss with him then, surely!”’
“Weel, I wadna gang freely sae far as say that. You ’at’s a man o’ sense, maun weel un’erstan’, gien it was only frae yer carritchis (catechism ), ’at there’s baith sins o’ o-mission, an’ sins o’ co-mission. Noo, what sins o’ co-mission may lie at my lord’s door, I dinna ken, an’ feow can ken, an’ we’re no to jeedge; but for the o-mission, ye hae but to see hoo he neglects that bonny sister o’ his, to be far eneuch frae thinkin’ a sant o’ ’im.”