‘He’s a handsome boy,’ sighed the hostess. ‘Like his father as I remember him. He was a fine-looking man, in a foreign way. But he’s his mother’s eyes—poor Lucy!’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Pepperdine. ‘He’s Lucy’s eyes, but all the rest of him’s like his father.’
‘Were you in time to see his father before he died?’ asked Mr. Trippett, who was now attacking the cold beef, after having demolished the greater part of a fowl. ‘You didn’t think you would be when you went off that morning.’
‘Just in time, just in time,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine. ‘Ay, just in time. He went very sudden and very peaceful. The boy was very brave and very old-fashioned about it—he never says anything now, and I don’t mention it.’
‘It’s best not,’ said Mrs. Trippett. ‘Poor little fellow!—of course, he’ll not remember his mother at all?’
‘No,’ said Mr. Pepperdine, shaking his head. ‘No, he was only two years old when his mother died.’
Mr. Trippett changed the subject, and began to talk of London and what Mr. Pepperdine had seen there. But when the tea-table had been cleared, and Mrs. Trippett had departed to the kitchen regions to bustle amongst her maids, and the two farmers were left in the parlour with the spirit decanters on the table, their tumblers at their elbows and their pipes in their mouths, the host referred to Mr. Pepperdine’s recent mission with some curiosity.
‘I never rightly heard the story of this nephew of yours,’ he said. ‘You see, I hadn’t come to these parts when your sister was married. The missis says she remembers her, ’cause she used to visit hereabouts in days past. It were a bit of a romance like, eh?’
Mr. Pepperdine took a pull at his glass and shook his head.
‘Ah!’ said he oracularly. ‘It was. A romance like those you read of in the story-books. I remember the beginning of it all as well as if it were yesterday. Lucy—that was the lad’s mother, my youngest sister, you know, Trippett—was a girl then, and the prettiest in all these parts: there’s nobody’ll deny that.’