“What is it?” I whispered.
“She’s going to make fun of him, poor soul!” he responded. “She’s tried everything else.”
Master Carty was striding up and down the room. “Stanna,” he said stopping short, “what’s the matter with you? One would think you’d never seen a bottle before.”
“It’s not that, brother,” she cried, lifting her head, and beating the table with both her little hands. “It’s the ridicule that will be made of you. Norman was just roaring with laughter. He thought it was the best drink joke he ever heard, and you know he is full of them. He will tell it to the men at the club at lunch. It will be all over the city, that Carty Resterton has sunk so low, that he drinks with the hens. You know what a picture Dicky Grey, and Mark Jones and all that set will draw—Carty Resterton having a carousal in the barn, because his sister’s house isn’t open for that sort of thing. He took a pull at the bottle, then the hens had their turn—oh! oh! oh! I can’t stand it,” and she went off into an admirable fit of hysterics.
Mrs. Granton threw water on her face, and rang for Annie and they slapped and pinched her, and put her on the sofa, and Master Carty stared and glowered, till she recovered enough for him to ask her a furious question, “Do you mean to say that Bonstone is deliberately going to make game of me?”
Mrs. Granton flashed out at him, “Carty Resterton, what do you mean? Your brother-in-law is the soul of honour, and he has had infinite patience with your weakness. Do you suppose any one told him it was your bottle?”
Master Carty rammed his hands down deep in his pockets. Annie came in the room with a glass of something for Mrs. Bonstone, and he had to wait till the door closed behind her. Then he shouted, “I wish to heaven I knew what you two women mean.”
“Hush, hush,” said Mrs. Granton patting Mrs. Bonstone as if she were a child. “I will speak for you,” and speak she did, and with an eloquence that astonished Gringo and me, too, though I understand how much she had developed since the baby came.
“She hits out from the shoulder,” muttered Gringo admiringly.
Mistress gave Master Carty about the plainest talk he’d ever had. She told him how he was killing his poor grandmother and sister, and if she’d been in their places, she would have turned him out to die in the gutter.