With a laugh, which challenged our criticism (for no man, except a sailor, knows the rudiments of scrubbing), she loosed for us a cord which she had tied across, lest any Selsey baby might break bonds, and crawl upstairs; and presently we stood in a pretty little bedroom, with an ample but rickety window, facing southwards. The room was not too lofty, and I might have knocked my hat against the ceiling, if I had not doffed it. But Uncle Corny, being not so tall though wider, had plenty of head-room, and asked what man could want more. And when I looked out of the window, I agreed that a man deserved less, who could not be pleased with this.
For Honeysuckle Cottage stood at the very highest corner of all his pleasant fruit-grounds; and I was much surprised, having never been inside this house before, at the rich view of gardening ever varied, and of fair land and water beyond the fruit-alleys, which shone in the soft spread of sunshine far away. Over the heads of countless trees, and betwixt their coats of many colours, matched by the motherly hands of autumn, the broad reaches of the flooded Thames, with many a bend of sheen and shadow, led the eye to dwell with pleasure, and the heart with wonder. And across the wide water, sloping meadows, streaked and rounded with hedge and breastland, spread a green footing for the dark and distant hills.
“Let me see, to-day is Friday—an unlucky day, Kit, for you to come first to the house. If I had thought of that, we might have waited for to-morrow. But it can’t be helped now; and I am not superstitious. On Monday I’ll have Joe and Jimmy Andrews in, and put all these window-frames and doors to rights. Then we’ll have Tilbury from Hampton, to see to the papering and painting, and all that. By the end of the week, we’ll have it snug and tidy. I have sent all old Harker’s traps after him to-day. They tell me he has taken that tumbledown barn of Osborne’s, over by Halliford. I suppose I may whistle for my back rents. I ought to have distrained upon his sticks; but I laughed so, when I saw how he bolted, that I could not do it. But you’ll have to pay an improved rent, my lad. You can’t have it under five shillings a week, and cheap enough at that, I can tell you.”
“Why, what do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t want a house; and if I did, how am I to keep it up? I haven’t got a sixpence to call my own.”
“Then a pretty fellow you are, to make up to Captain Fairthorn’s daughter! Where did you intend to put her, I should like to know? But we’ll make that all right, between you and me and the bedpost. I have got a little nest-egg of your mother’s money for you, and a heel-tap of your father’s. Didn’t you know why I smoked that old rogue out? Why, that this might be a little home for Kit and Kitty.”
CHAPTER XX.
AUNT PARSLOW.
It is a bad thing for any man to be always beating his own bounds, and treading the track of his own grounds, and pursuing the twist of his own affairs—though they be even love affairs—as a dog spins round to catch his own tail. Under the hammer of incessant thought, and in the hot pincers of perpetual yearning, I was getting as flat as a horseshoe twice removed, when Sam Henderson gave a boy twopence to slip into our grounds, when my uncle’s back was turned, and put into my hand an envelope addressed to “Samuel Henderson, Esquire, The Paddocks, Halliford, Middlesex.” At first I thought, in my slow way, that his object was to let me see what deference he had won in racing circles; and I smiled at the littleness of the man. But the boy, who was shaking in his ventilated shoes, with dread of Uncle Corny, said—“’Tain’t that side; turn ’un over.” I obeyed his instructions, and beheld in pencil—“Come down the lane a bit. I have news for you, important.”
What mortal, dwelling wholly on his own affairs, would not have concluded that this concerned him, on his own account, and unselfishly? I hurried on my coat, which had been thrown off for a job of winter pruning, and in less than two minutes I had turned the corner and was face to face with the mighty Sam.