“Pooh!” exclaimed bluff old John, “a gold piece would mend many broken bones. Well, my dear, I’m gettin’ sharp-set, what do ye say to a bit of breakfast? Pull up at the first sheltered place you come to, Jem.”
“But let it be somewhere where you can keep a look-out,” put in the old lady anxiously. “Don’t let’s be caught.”
By-and-by they arrived at a suitable place, and Jem duly pulled up, and John brought out a well-packed hamper from the rumble, and Mrs. Bussell made tea from a spirit-lamp, and dispensed goodly portions of buttered roll, and ham, and hard-boiled eggs, and John and Jem took turns to act sentry, and little Mrs. Bussell raised an alarm about every five minutes and entered more and more into the spirit of the enterprise. Her husband, setting his white hat rakishly on the back of his head, and looking extremely jocose, endeavoured to throw himself into the part which he had played a half-century before, but did not altogether succeed in representing the trembling young lover, even though he called the old lady by her maiden name, and delivered himself of sundry amorous speeches with a fervour that was occasionally mixed with hilarity.
“Faith, my dear,” he cried when she took him to task, “you must let me talk as I please. I was your lover then, and I am your lover now, for all we’ve been man and wife this fifty years. What signifies it whether your hair is gold or silver, or whether you are fat or slim? Handsome is as handsome does, I say, and you’ve a-been the best wife a man could have.”
“La! John,” said she, and winked away a tear. John put out his rugged old hand and gripped hers.
“The best wife a man could have,” he repeated earnestly. “Fifty years!—I wish we mid have fifty years more together.”
“I wish we was back at the beginning,” said she. “I’d like to go through it all over again, John. I’d take it all and be thankful—the rough and the smooth, and the joy and the sorrow. Except maybe—poor little Ben, you know—I don’t think I’d like to live through those years again. How we hoped, didn’t we? And he was took at the last.”
“Well, ye have the other seven, Susan, my dear, alive and well, and their children. Why, you mid say that one loss has been made up to ye by more than a score of other blessings.”
Mrs. Bussell shook her head, but smiled, and presently wondered aloud if John’s Annie would bring the baby.
“I’d like to have seen it, too,” she added. “I hope Mary will have the sense to keep them. I told her a good many of them would stop the night.”