“Tell your name to the Squire,” said Miss Timmens, with authority. And the little one lifted her pretty blue eyes appealingly to his face, as if beseeching him not to bite her.
“It’s Nettie Trewin, sir,” she said in a whisper.
“Dear me! Is that poor Trewin’s child! She has a look of her father too. A delicate little maid.”
“And silly also,” added Miss Timmens. “You came here to play, you know, Nettie; not hide your face. What are they all stirring at, now? Oh, going to have ‘Puss-in-the-corner.’ You can play at that, Nettie. Here, Jane Bright! Take Nettie with you and attend to her. Find her a corner: she has not had any play at all.”
A tall, awkward girl stepped up: slouching shoulders, narrow forehead, stolid features, coarse hair all ruffled; thick legs, thick boots—Miss Jane Bright. She seized Nettie’s hand.
“Yes, sir, you are right: the child is a delicate, dainty little thing, quite a contrast to most of these other girls,” resumed Miss Timmens, in answer to the Squire. “Look at that one who has just fetched Nettie away: she is only a type of the rest. They come, most of them, of coarse, stupid parents, and will be no better to the end of the chapter, whatever education you may try to hammer into them. As I said to Mr. Bruce the other day when—— Well, I never! There he is!”
The young parson caught her eye, as he was looming in. Long coat, clerical waistcoat, no white tie to speak of round his bare neck; quite à la mode. The new fashions and the new notions that Mr. Bruce went in for, were not at all understood at North Crabb.
The Squire had gone on at first against the party; but no face was more sunshiny than his, now that he was in the thick of it. A select few of the children, with ours and the little Lawsons, had appropriated the dining-room for “Hunt-the-Whistle.” The pater chanced to look in just before it began, and we got him to be the hunter. I shall never forget it as long as I live. I don’t believe I had ever laughed as much before. He did not know the play, or the trick of it: and to see him whirling himself about in search of the whistle as it was blown behind his back, now seizing on this bold whistler, believing he or she must be in possession of the whistle, and now on that one, all unconscious that the whistle was fastened to the back button of his own coat; and to look at the puzzled wonder of his face as to where the whistle could possibly be, and how it contrived to elude his grasp, was something to be remembered. The shrieks of laughter might have been heard down at the Ravine. Tod had to sit on the floor and hold his sides; Tom Coney was in convulsions.
“Ah—I—ah—what do you think, Mr. Todhetley?” began Bruce, with his courteous drawl, catching the Squire, as he emerged later, red and steaming, from the whistle-hunt. “Suppose I collect these young ones around me and give them a quarter-of-an-hour’s lecture on pneumatics? I’ve been getting up the subject a little.”
“Pneumatics be hanged!” burst forth the pater, more emphatically than politely, when he had taken a puzzled stare at the parson. “The young ones have come here to play, not to have their brains addled. Be shot if I quite know myself what ‘pneumatics’ means. I beg your pardon, Bruce. You mean well, I know.”