Here the grins of the stable-boys broke into hoarse guffaws, and Mary’s ire culminated in a sharp rebuke all round.
“Go to your work, you idle fellows. I told your father long ago, Jim, what ’ud be the latter end of you. As for you, Robert, I could cry when I think of your blessed mother!
“And what business have you in the yard,” she cried, turning on the two younger sinners. “Be off with you this instant. ’Tis easy to see none of the men are about. You two, Jim and Robert, you’d be surprised yourselves if you could see what soft idiots you look with them stumps of pipes between your jaws.
“Look, Master Dacre, look at the bird’s tail. Haven’t you any heart at all? The creature might have been through the furze covert—”
“There’s not a feather broke,” said the boy, after a critical survey, “not one; I believe that tail were made for swingin’ as much as my arms was.”
For an instant words failed Mary and she employed herself hushing the bird into his pen. When she came back, Dacre had disappeared, and the yard seemed to be quite clear of human life, not to be traced even by the smell of shag tobacco.
Pursuit was useless, as Mary very well knew, so she returned to her nursery a good deal down at heart, muttering and murmuring as she went.
“Oh Lord, whatever is to be the end of it all? Learning is the ruin of the whole place, and yet them children is as ignorant as bears, excepting for their queer words and ways. Set them to read a Royal Reader or to tot up a sum, bless you, they couldn’t for the life of them. And the tempers of the two,” she went on, putting the cross stitches on a darn, “their parents had no hand in them anyway. Where they got ’em from the Lord only knows. Tempers, indeed! And from them two blessed babies as bore ’em.” She lifted her head and glanced out of the window.
“Look at ’em,” she whispered, “hand in hand up and down the drive, talking mathymatics, I’ll be bound,” and Mary’s eyes returned to her basket a trifle moist. She had nursed Mrs. Waring and Mrs. Waring’s children, and she was a good soul with a deal of sentiment about her.
As it happened, Mr. and Mrs. Waring were not discussing mathematics. They were just then deeply and solemnly exercised in their minds as to the exact date of a skeleton recently unearthed from some red sandstone in the neighbourhood. They had dismissed the carriage at the hall gates, and were now hot in argument concerning the bones, each holding diametrically opposed views on the subject, and struggling hard to prove his or her side.