“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton, rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”
“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”
“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”
“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”
Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.
“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”
Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!
“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake. And as for my hands”—she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size—“my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”
At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?
“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”