“Oh, but I am accustomed to that; you are not, I should think,” and her soft, sad blue eye ran over my dress. “But I must sweep these shavings away; husband made him a new ax-helve this morning before sunrise, and I have been so busy washing, that I have had no time to clear up. But now they are just the thing I want for the fire. They’d be much better though, were they not so green.”
Now if Blandmour were here, thought I to myself, he would call those green shavings “Poor Man’s Matches,” or “Poor Man’s Tinder,” or some pleasant name of that sort.
“I do not know,” said the good woman, turning round to me again—as she stirred among her pots on the smoky fire—“I do not know how you will like our pudding. It is only rice, milk, and salt boiled together.”
“Ah, what they call ‘Poor Man’s Pudding,’ I suppose you mean?”
A quick flush, half resentful, passed over her face.
“We do not call it so, sir,” she said, and was silent.
Upbraiding myself for my inadvertence, I could not but again think to myself what Blandmour would have said, had he heard those words and seen that flush.
At last a slow, heavy footfall was heard; then a scraping at the door, and another voice said, “Come, wife; come, come—I must be back again in a jif—if you say I must take all my meals at home, you must be speedy; because the Squire—Good-day, sir,” he exclaimed, now first catching sight of me as he entered the room. He turned toward his wife, inquiringly, and stood stock-still, while the moisture oozed from his patched boots to the floor.
“This gentleman stops here awhile to rest and refresh: he will take dinner with us, too. All will be ready now in a trice: so sit down on the bench, husband, and be patient, I pray. You see, sir,” she continued, turning to me, “William there wants, of mornings, to carry a cold meal into the woods with him, to save the long one-o’clock walk across the fields to and fro. But I won’t let him. A warm dinner is more than pay for the long walk.”
“I don’t know about that,” said William, shaking his head. “I have often debated in my mind whether it really paid. There’s not much odds, either way, between a wet walk after hard work, and a wet dinner before it. But I like to oblige a good wife like Martha. And you know, sir, that women will have their whimseys.”