“Well, well! Nobody can do more than that,” admitted Mr. Thorpe, and he glanced slowly round the room for a change of subject. “I see you have the sideboard still. Looks well there. Handsome bit o’ furniture.”
“Very,” said Andy.
“But you made a mistake, buying it in. You oughtn’t to have bought it in. If us Thorpes had thought Mrs. Simpson required that sideboard, us Thorpes would have bought it in for her. You meant well. But you made a mistake. Us Thorpes would have bought it in ourselves if it had been required.”
He straightened his chest as one who has delivered himself of a burden, and added—
“I’m not one to bear grudges and tattle from one to another. If I have anything to say to a man I say it to him. Us Thorpes are like that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Thorpe. I’m afraid I did seem officious. I didn’t mean to be,” said Andy, with a manly simplicity and an understanding of the point of view of “us Thorpes” which was very pleasant and was all Andy—not a vestige of the senior curate in it.
“Naturally,” continued Mr. Thorpe in a tone that somehow responded to Andy’s, but in words which he had previously rehearsed to Mrs. Thorpe and did not intend to depart from—“Naturally it was narking to a well-known family like us Thorpes, with big farms all around Bardswell, to have the tale going about. If we’d thought she required the sideboard bought in, we should have bought it in. We knew she didn’t require it, so we didn’t buy it. But,” he added, unrehearsed, “all’s well that ends well, and so it is.”
“Anyway I promise not to buy any more sideboards,” said Andy with a rueful smile.
Mr. Thorpe relaxed altogether, and his black eyes began to twinkle in his fat red face.
“She run you up, I hear. You had to pay a matter of eight pounds odd more than you would have done if Miss Elizabeth hadn’t been there. Appears Mrs. Simpson had been complaining to both of you, and you neither of you knew the other was going to give it to her. Would have been a rare good joke under some circumstances.”