The family sat on the grass, tailor fashion, and every one helped himself to what appetite prompted, in a fashion that suggested brilliant gymnastic powers. To pass a dish to any one, the governess discovered, was construed as an evidence of mental weakness and eccentricity. The family satisfied its appetite without assistance or amenities, but with the skill of a troupe of jugglers.
Breakfast was half over when Mrs. Yellett laid down her knife, which she had handled throughout the meal with masterly efficiency. Mary watched her in hopeless embarrassment, and wondered if her own timid use of a tin fork could be construed as an unfriendly comment upon the Yelletts’ more simple and direct code of table etiquette.
“Land’s sakes! I just felt, all the time we’ve been eating, we was forgettin’ something. You children ought to remember, I got so much on my mind.”
All eyes turned anxiously to the cooking-stove, while an expression of frank regret began to settle over the different faces. The backbone of their appetites had been broken, and there was something else, perhaps something even more appetizing, to come.
Interpreting the trend of their glance and expression, up flared Mrs. Yellett, with as great a show of indignation as if some one had set a match to her petticoats.
“I declare, I never see such children; no more nacheral feelin’s than a herd of coyotes; never thinks of a plumb thing but grub. No, make no mistake about the character of the objec’ we’ve forgot. ’Tain’t sweet pertaters, ’tain’t molasses, ’tain’t corn-bread—it’s paw! It’s your pore old paw—him settin’ in the tent, forsook and neglected by his own children.”
All started up to remedy their filial neglect without loss of time, but Mrs. Yellett waved them back to their places.
“Don’t the whole posse of you go after him, like he’d done something and was to be apprehended. Ben, you go after your father.”
Ben strode over to the little white tent that Mary had noticed glimmering in the moonlight the preceding evening, and presently emerged, supporting on his arm a partially paralyzed old man, who might have been Rip Van Winkle in the worst of tempers. His white hair and beard encircled a shrivelled, hawklike face, the mouth was sucked back in a toothless eddy that brought tip of nose and tip of chin into whispering distance, the eyes glittered from behind the overhanging, ragged brows like those of a hungry animal searching through the brush for its prey.
“If you’ve done eatin’,” whispered Mrs. Yellett to Miss Carmichael, “you’d better run on. Paw’s langwidge is simply awful when we forget to bring him to meals.” Mary ran on.