For we had settled with one accord, that until I had overtaken the large arrears of work which had lapsed behind through my long illness and absence, there should be no time lost by any return for early dinner. And this was better for my wife too, inasmuch as she had only Polly Tompkins to assist her, the eldest daughter of Selsey Bill, a very clean and tidy girl, but of small experience in cookery. I was busy at a long peach-wall, not the red-brick one, but further down, and the trees being large and sadly out of order, patient as well as skilful hands were required urgently. There was a very fine crop yet unthinned, feeble wood to be removed, robber shoots to be docked or tamed, green-fly to be dipped or dusted, and all the other crying needs of neglected trees to be made good. And Kitty used to appear exactly as the old church clock struck one, with a basket of bread and meat, a pint of ale, and a pipe filled by her own fair hands, which she used to light for me, and then trip home, singing merrily among the trees, to see to the business of the afternoon.
Dare anybody tell me that a wife like this would leave her dear husband of her own accord, without a word, without a letter, leave him to wonder, and mourn, and rage, and despair of his own life and hers? Yet this is what all the world believed, and impressed upon me, till my spirit failed.
“Now this is all very fine,” exclaimed my uncle, as he came round the corner of the wall one day, and caught me in the very act of hugging Kitty, as she was preparing to light my pipe. She was looking up and laughing, and pretending to pull my hair, when the deepening of her blush showed that an enemy was nigh. “This is all very fine; but how long will it last? How many quarrels have you had already? I suppose you are making up one of them now.”
“Uncle Corny, you are a disgrace,” cried Kitty, “a disgrace to the name of humanity. Mayn’t I even whisper in my husband’s ear, without being accused of quarrelling? We have never had a single word. Have we, Kit?”
“Then perhaps you will now. Here’s a telegram for you. I was going to send Kit home with it. But as you are so uncommonly close together, why, it saves the trouble. Hope some of your enemies are dead, my dear.”
“Hush! Don’t be so wicked,” she said, as she handed it to me, and I opened it with my pruning-knife, and held it for her to read first. But this required our united efforts, for it was badly written, as so often happens, and some of the words were run together. At last we made it out as follows:—
“Spoke All Kites off Scilly May 7th. Captain Fairshort desires love and best wishes to his daughter. Will be away two years perhaps. From Jenkins, s.s. Hibernia, Falmouth.”
“All Kites!” said my uncle, who had read some of the Georgics, as rendered by Dryden with lofty looseness, but never a line of Horace; “what a name for a ship, if it is a ship! Kitty, my dear, is that the proper word?”
“No, Uncle Corny, it should be Archytas. I am not sure who he was, but rather think that he must have been a king of Sparta.”
“I know who he was,” I said, to show how much I had learned at Hampton, though I never was much of a hand at Horace, and had only found this out in the dictionary; “a great man of science, who measured the seas, and the sand, and all that, but could not get to heaven, because nobody would throw a pinch of dust upon his body. And he lay upon the shore, imploring somebody to do it.”