“I am better up; I am indeed, father. Not sleeping much, I get tired of lying: and my cough is worse in bed.”
He sat down to his cup of tea and to the bread she placed before him. Some mornings there was a little butter, or dripping, or mayhap bacon fat; but this morning he had to eat his bread dry. It was getting near the end of the week, and the purse ran low. Lee had a horror of debt, and would never let his people run into it for the smallest sum if he knew it.
“It’s poor fare for you this morning, father; but I’ll try and get a morsel of boiled pork for dinner, and we’ll have it ready early. I expect to be paid to-day for the bit of work I have been doing for young Mrs. Ashton. Some of those greens down by the apple-trees want cutting: they’ll be nice with a bit of pork.”
Lee turned his eyes in the direction of the greens and the apple-trees; but the window was misty, and he could only see the drizzle of rain-drops on the diamond panes. As he sat there, a thought came into his head that he was beginning to feel old: old, and worn, and shaky. Trouble ages a man more than work, more than time; and Lee never looked at the wan face of his daughter, and at its marks of sad repentance, but he felt anew the sting which was always pricking him more or less. What with that, and his difficulty to keep the pot boiling, and his general state of shakiness, Lee was older than his years. Timberdale had fallen into the habit of calling him Old Lee, you see; but he was not sixty yet. He had a nice face; when it was a young face it must have been like Mamie’s. It had furrows in it now, and his scanty grey locks hung down on each side of it.
Putting on his top-coat, which was about as thin as those remarkable sheets told of by Brian O’Linn, Lee went out buttoning it. The rain had ceased, but the cold wind took him as he went down the narrow garden-path, and he could not help shivering.
“It’s a bitter wind to-day, father; in the north-east, I think,” said Mamie, standing at the door to close it after him. “I hope there’ll be no letters for Crabb.”
Lee, as he pressed along in the teeth of the cruel east wind, was hoping the same. Salmon the grocer, who had taken the post-office, as may be remembered, when the late Thomas Rymer gave it up, was sorting the letters in the room behind the shop when Lee went in. Spicer, a lithe, active, dark-eyed man of forty-five, stood at the end of the table waiting for his bag. Lee went and stood beside him, giving him a brief good-morning: he had not taken kindly to the man since West ran away with Mamie.
“A light load this morning,” remarked Mr. Salmon to Spicer, as he handed him his appropriate bag. “And here’s yours, Lee,” he added a minute after: “not heavy either. Too cold for people to write, I suppose.”
“Anything for Crabb, sir?”
“For Crabb? Well, yes, I think there is. For the Rector.”