Chapter Three.
Pilchar’ Will and the Old Folks at Home.
“Been overboard again? Well, I never did see such a boy in my life; never!”
“What’s the matter, Ruth?”
“Matter enough!” came in the same strident voice, in answer to the hoarse gruff inquiry. “There, who spoke to you? Just you get back to your work; and if that pie’s burnt again to-day you’ll have to leave!”
This last was to a heavy-faced simple-looking girl, who, on hearing her mistress’s angry voice, had hurried into the passage of Nor’-nor’-west Cottage, Cliftside, and stood in front of the kitchen door, with one end of her apron in her mouth.
Amanda Trevor, commonly called Betsey, stepped back into the kitchen, just catching the word “dripping” as she closed the door—a word that excited her curiosity again, but she dared not try to gratify it; and if she had tried she would only have been disappointed on finding that it related to a few drops of water from Will Marion’s clothes.
“I said—heave ho, there! what’s the matter?” was heard again; and this time a very red-faced grey-haired man, with the lower part of his features framed in white bristles, and clad in a blue pea-jacket and buff waistcoat, ornamented with gilt anchor buttons, stood suddenly in the doorway on the right, smoking solemnly a long churchwarden clay pipe, rilling his mouth very full of smoke, and then aggravating the looker-on by puzzling him as to where the smoke would come from next—for sometimes he sent a puff out of one corner of his mouth, sometimes out of the other. Then it would come from a little hole right in the middle, out of which he had taken the waxed pipe stem, but only for him perhaps to press one side of his nose with the pipe, and send the rest out of the left nostril, saving perhaps a little to drive from the right. The result of practice, for the old man had smoked a great deal.
“Collision?” said Abram Marion, ex-purser and pensioner of the British navy.