“Tut, if Mr. Thatcher, steward or no steward, felt like a gentleman, then in my eyes he’d be a gentleman, indeed. But no gentleman would ever act as Mr. Thatcher does, now, isn’t it?”
“Lad, lad!” Maggie remonstrated.
This advanced thinking would do for the young ones; she would have had to confess to a liking for it in her children’s letters. It was right for a new world perhaps; but she thought with alarm of Gabriel daring to assert such views here on the very flaggings, under the very thatch of Isgubor Newydd. She looked anxiously towards the hearth, as if she feared such social doctrine might quench its brightly glowing pot of coals, or destroy its shining fire-stools, candlesticks, pewter platters, and big copper cheese-dishes, or break its fragile, iridescent creamers and sugar basins and jugs,—there, much of it, four hundred years ago at a certain wedding-breakfast, just as it had been at her own some forty years ago. It would not have surprised her now to have it all come clattering down about her head and break in precious fragments on the stone hearth.
“Mam,” said Gabriel, looking shrewdly at her troubled face, “do ye recall the repairs we asked for and never got?”
“Aye, dad dear.”
“Well, mam, David Jones had his an’ he asked after us. David Jones trades at Mr. Thatcher’s shop, mam, an’ we don’t an’ we’re not a-goin’ to,” Gabriel ended pugnaciously.
“Och, father!”
“Aye, it’s so, isn’t it? It’s insultin’, isn’t it, suggestin’ a man change his way of prayin’ to suit his landlord’s steward an’—an’—” Gabriel added hesitatingly, “his landlord, I suppose, too; an’ the steward obligin’ him to trade at his shop to get any paint or a roof tatchèd.”
The firelight shone upon Gabriel’s fringe of whiskers and glowed through his pink ears and twinkled upon his bald head. He looked up indignantly to the rafters above him; they were well hung with hams and bacons upon which the dry salt glistened like frost. His expression mellowed. He glanced at the bright hearth with its bright trimmings; he looked from the purring kettle and purring kitten before Maggie’s feet to Maggie herself, daintily upright on the dark settle, her cap and apron immaculately white. She was as comely and fragile as the antique china she cherished. Then Gabriel spoke contentedly, like a man who has counted his riches and found them after all more than sufficient.