So, angry as I was at Martha’s total lack of common sense, but remembering all she had been to me and my boys in the past dozen years, I made up a bundle of such things as the needy hospital had not claimed, and after breakfast took it up to the chicken farm, where I found that father had preceded me.
It is useless to tell a woman over thirty that men are lacking in curiosity! Father asked two questions to my one. However, he pronounced Albert and Victoria sound of limb and lungs, but seemed to regard the whole matter as a joke, even going so far as to admire their pronounced Guelph noses, and was not as judicious as I had expected in the advice he gave to Martha.
The doings of the next three weeks I will give as recorded in my Experience Book. It had been a long time since anything had occurred worthy of record, so I resorted to it to relieve my feelings.
August 9. The investigation as to the origin of Albert and Victoria has proved a complete failure; no one can be found who saw a horse and wagon driven by a strange, small, dark man on the day of their arrival or the night before. Already Martha’s neat cottage has suffered a change, and the sitting-room looked this morning like a ship’s deck swept by a hurricane; all objects that could be hung up or stowed away on mantel-shelf or in cupboard had been removed, and the chairs were huddled together in a corner. The twins move about in a very lively manner: Victoria, creeping on her hands and right knee, uses her left leg as an oar; while Albert, not content with this method, pulls himself slowly upon his feet and totters forward a few steps on a run, only to topple over, catching at anything within reach.
This morning, according to Effie, he caught at the cloth that covered the pan of evenly risen bread dough that Martha was about to mould into loaves, upset it, falling backward into the wreck that made a most comfortable air-cushion.
Timothy’s bed has been moved upstairs, as the children have never been “trained rightly to sleep in their beds,” as Martha expresses it, and the process is painful to a listener, who, as Martha says of Timothy, is “a bachelor boiled through, and hasn’t maternal instinks!”
August 12. The twins babble away at a great rate between themselves, and Martha, anxious to find meaning in their utterances, called me in to translate. “It sounds to me like broad Yorkshire they do be trying for, Mrs. Evan,” she said in perfect earnest; “but then, again, it mought be Lancaster; that talk is so overlappin’ ’tis hard to reach.”
To my ear, even with the echo of Ian and Richard’s baby talk in it, the sounds are wholly alien and barbaric, a fit match for the carnal appetites of the youngsters. All in a minute, when Martha’s back was turned, Victoria hastily devoured the contents of the dish wherein food had been put on the stoop for the hounds, while Albert howled and kicked with symptoms of a fiendish temper because he was not quick enough to get any of the scraps.
Victoria will be ill to-morrow!
“The ’ounds make too free!” ejaculated Martha, wrathfully (she who had raised many a fall litter by tiding them over cold days in the corner of our spotless kitchen). “Timothy must keep them off and fodder them at the stables and not put temptation in the way of Christian babes!”