[CHAPTER X]
A WALK IN THE GARDEN
"Here you are, Emmy. These are the gentlemen you are expecting," announced Carstairs, cheerily.
Miss Costivan—who was about four-and-twenty—said she was pleased to meet them, and then turned to call through an open door, "Mother, the London gentlemen have come. Luke's just fetched 'em."
Immediately the sound of someone making vigorous use of a washboard, which all along had been issuing from the door, came to an abrupt end; a pair of clogs clattered noisily across a tiled floor, and there issued from the scullery a tall, gaunt, black-haired, somewhat slatternly female whose cast of features was so strongly suggestive of the Romany race that one might well have suspected her of having more than a mere dash of gypsy blood in her veins.
She advanced into the room, drying her hands on her apron, and welcomed the newcomers heartily. Cleek decided that never in his life had he seen a mother and daughter who bore so little resemblance to each other.
"I'll have the kettle on and some tea ready in a very few minutes, gentlemen," declared Mrs. Costivan, with an odd use of certain words which was not lost upon Cleek. "But maylike you'd be glad to run up to your room and wash a bit, the whiles the kittle's boilin'? Luke, lad, show the way, there's a bonny. Old Man's not home from the fields yet. They've a power o' hay to get under cover over at Mason's before the weather breaks." By which it was clear to Cleek that the good lady wished her visitors to understand that her husband was a field hand on one of the outlying farms.
Carstairs announced his readiness to perform the suggested office, and called on the two "London gentlemen" to follow him—an act which pulled Cleek up with a jerk, for he had fallen into a state of abstraction born of a sudden realization of the peculiar character of the wet marks Mrs. Costivan had left upon her apron when she dried her hands.