“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Mr. Saxon; “I’m always like that when I’ve got dyspepsia—and I’ve got it awfully this afternoon.”
“Well,” said Harry, “the best thing for that is exercise. Come and have a good walk.”
They went out, Harry and Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman, and when they came back they were all roaring with laughter. Mr. Saxon had forgotten all about his ailments, and Harry told me Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman had been pretending that they were two agents from London, who were down to look for the next heir to a John Smith, who had died in Australia worth a hundred thousand pounds, and they’d been into all the cottages making inquiries and questioning the people about their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, and Harry said that they’d set the whole village agog, and that half the people in it had tried to make out that they once had a relative named Smith. Harry laughed when he told me, because it was so droll, the way all the people began to tell Mr. Saxon their family histories, the Swedish gentleman taking it all down, as grave as a judge, in his note-book.
He said it was as good as a play. But it was an awful nuisance when people kept coming in and wanting to see the two gentlemen, and leaving bits of paper with the names of their ancestors written on, and old samplers, and I don’t know what. And one old gentleman from the almshouses, who hadn’t been out of his room for three months, was brought down in a wheelbarrow, with his family Bible to show his mother’s maiden name was Smith; and he was so disappointed not to find the hundred thousand pounds waiting for him, that Harry had to give him a shilling and a bit of tobacco to comfort him.
It really was too bad of Mr. Saxon to have played a joke like that, because people in a country place always have an idea that they are “next of kin,” or whatever you call it, to rich people, and that there is unclaimed money waiting for them.
You have only to mention that somebody of their name is advertised for or inquired for, and they are certain that they are coming into a fortune. Almost every old lady in a country place believes that there is a fortune left to her somewhere, if she only knew where to look for it.
But Mr. Saxon got nicely paid out for his joke. There was an old lady who lived in the village, a regular character, called Mrs. Croker, though her real name was Mrs. Smith—Croker having been the name of her first husband and Smith of her second; but she went back to her first husband’s name when her second ran away. She was an awful tartar if all they say of her was true, and no wonder the first one died and the second ran away. She was married from the village, her family living there for centuries, and that’s how her history was so well known.
She married a very quiet, middle-aged man first, and went to live in London with him, where he worked at his trade; but she was the master, it seems, from the first. They had a little house over Lambeth way. She made him scrub the stairs and clean the steps, and do all the house-work that a woman generally does, before he went to his work and after he came home from it; and he had to give her all his money, and she allowed him so much a day, just enough for his fare and his dinner that he had to get out. And woe betide him if he didn’t come home to his tea to the minute he ought to be home!
He was due home at half-past five from his work, and at five-and-twenty minutes to six the tea was all cleared away, and he had to go without for being late. Then she used to set him to do cleaning or whatever had to be done, and she always found him a job, because she said it wasn’t good for a man to be idle.
Once a friend called to see poor Mr. Croker, I was told, but she answered the door and gave the friend a bit of her mind. She said when a man came home he belonged to his wife, and she wasn’t going to have any dissolute companions coming there after him luring him into bad ways.