Sue bent and kissed her.
“You’re a good wench, Anny,” she said, “in spite of yourself.”
CHAPTER VI
“SIT where you are, Joseph Pullen, and hold your peace, and be thankful you have a wife who knows your mind without you for ever speaking of it.”
Mistress Amy Pullen, her kirtle hitched up at one side to give her greater freedom in the discharge of her household duties, strode across her small kitchen, an earthenware bowl of cold fatty broth in her hands and two small children hanging at her petticoats.
The kitchen, which was very small, served also as a general living room for the Pullen family, and this evening, four or five days after Captain Dick had first left the Ship Inn, it was crowded. Joe, debarred from his favourite seat by his wife, who liked the whole of the fire to cook at, sat in a corner on a heap of miscellaneous lumber, a net which he was mending spread around him. In addition to the two little mites who hung on to their mother as though life itself depended on it, three other children were in the room, one baby of a year or so was nursed by another, a pretty fair-haired little girl of eight or nine, who sat on a roughly made-up bed built into the wall opposite the fireplace. She amused the child by making quaint shadows on the wall with her hand in the flickering firelight, and save for the clatter of the cooking, the baby’s happy gurgles and half-spoken words of delight were the only sounds in the warm little room. The third child, a boy of ten, even now remarkably like his father, sat on the lowest rung of a wide wooden ladder which led to two little rooms above the kitchen, with a skep of small onions at his side and a knife in his hand. As he peeled the onions the tears ran down his cheeks and he sniffed at intervals.
Joe looked up over his net at the boy.
“Tant, hold thy peace,” he said.
The child sniffed again.
“I can’t hold it, ’tis these,” he said, wiping his eyes on his jersey sleeve, and indicating the skep with one dirty little foot. Joe grunted, and the child went on peeling, his tears falling faster and his sniffs becoming more and more frequent. At last Joe looked up again.