“You seem but poorly,” said Mrs. Todhetley, looking at her. She was a thin, dark-haired woman, with a sensible face. Before she married Mitchel, she had lived as under-nurse in a gentleman’s family, where she picked up some idea of good manners.
“I be feeling a bit stronger, thank you,” said the woman. “Strength don’t come back to one in a day, ma’am.”
The Mitchel children were sidling up, attracted by the sight of the lady. Four young grubs in tattered garments.
“I can’t keep ’em decent,” said the mother, with a sigh of apology. “I’ve not got no soap nor no clothes to do it with. They come on so fast, and make such a many, one after another, that it’s getting a hard pull to live anyhow.”
Looking at the children; remembering that, with the father and mother, there were eight mouths to feed, and that the man’s wages were the ten shillings a week all the year round (but there were seasons when he did over-work and earned more), Mrs. Todhetley might well give her assenting answer with an emphatic nod.
“We was hoping to get on a bit better,” resumed the wife; “but Mitchel he says the master don’t seem to like to listen. A’most a three weeks it be now since Mitchel first asked it him.”
“In what way better?”
“By putting little Dick to the plough, ma’am. He gets a shilling a week now, he’d got two then, perhaps three, and ’twould be such a help to us. Some o’ the farmers gives fourpence halfpenny a day to a ploughboy, some as much as sixpence. The master he bain’t one of the near ones; but Dick be little of his age, he don’t grow fast, and Mitchel telled the master he’d take fourpence a day and be thankful for’t.”
Thoughts were crowding into Mrs. Todhetley’s mind—as she mentioned afterwards. A child of ten ought to be learning and playing; not working from twelve to fourteen hours a day.