After dismissing the Huswick boys, Squire Peternot carried his bag of coin into the room which served him as an office, where he had scarcely time to place it in a corner beside a bureau, when there came a dull thump at the kitchen door. He knew Mrs. Peternot’s signal, knocking with the soft under-part of her feeble fist, and went to let her in.
She was a thin, wrinkled woman, dressed in black, with an expression of countenance almost as stern and sour as that of the grim old squire himself.
“Huh!” said she, scowling as she entered, “how happens it ye hain’t got the fire agoin’ an’ the taters bilin’?”
“I’ve had somethin’ else to think on. Where’s Byron?” replied her husband, shortly.
“Gone to the barn with the hoss, I s’pose. But he won’t unharness,—ketch him!”
“I didn’t expect he would, with his Sunday clo’es on.”
“Sunday clo’es or any clo’es on, he don’t tech his fingers to anything that’ll sile ’em, or that looks like work, if he can help it,” muttered good Mrs. Peternot, laying off her black bonnet. “You never would allow sich laziness in your own son, an’ why ye should in a nephew any more, I can’t consait.”
“Byron is a sort of visitor,” said the squire. “And if I choose to favor him,—now that we’ve nobody else to show favors to,—why shouldn’t I?”
“If you’d felt so indulgent towards him when he was alive, he might be with us now,” replied the discontented wife, carefully doing up her shawl before putting it away in its appropriate drawer.
By him she meant their only son, whose bad habits had received so little encouragement beneath the parental roof, that he had taken them abroad with him and become their victim.