“We have been very sadly for a long time now,” said the farmer, as he knocked at his own porch door with the handle of his bill-hook. “There used to be one as was always welcome here; and a pleasure it was to see him make himself so pleasant, sir. But ever since the Lord took him home from his family, without a good-by, as a man might say, my wife hath taken to bar the doors whiles I am away and out of sight.” Stephen Anerley knocked harder, as he thus explained the need of it; for it grieved him to have his house shut up.
“Very wise of them all to bar out such weather,” said Mordacks, who read the farmer's thoughts like print, “Don't relax your rules, sir, until the weather changes. Ah, that was a very sad thing about the captain. As gallant an officer, and as single-minded, as ever killed a Frenchman in the best days of our navy.”
“Single-minded is the very word to give him, sir. I sought about for it ever since I heard of him coming to an end like that, and doing of his duty in the thick of it. If I could only get a gentleman to tell me, or an officer's wife would be better still, what the manners is when a poor lady gets her husband shot, I'll be blest if I wouldn't go straight and see her, though they make such a distance betwixt us and the regulars.—Oh, then, ye've come at last! No thief, no thief.”
“Father,” cried Mary, bravely opening all the door, of which the ruffian wind made wrong by casting her figure in high relief—and yet a pardonable wrong—“father, you are quite wise to come home, before your dear nose is quite cut off.—Oh, I beg your pardon, sir; I never saw you.”
“My fate in life is to be overlooked,” Mr. Mordacks answered, with a martial stride; “but not always, young lady, with such exquisite revenge. What I look at pays fiftyfold for being overlooked.”
“You are an impudent, conceited man,” thought Mary to herself, with gross injustice; but she only blushed and said, “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“You see, sir,” quoth the farmer, with some severity, tempered, however, with a smile of pride, “my daughter, Mary Anerley.”
“And I take off my hat,” replied audacious Mordacks, among whose faults was no false shame, “not only to salute a lady, sir, but also to have a better look.”
“Well, well,” said the farmer, as Mary ran away; “your city ways are high polite, no doubt, but my little lass is strange to them. And I like her better so, than to answer pert with pertness. Now come you in, and warm your feet a bit. None of us are younger than we used to be.”
This was not Master Anerley's general style of welcoming a guest, but he hated new-fangled Frenchified manners, as he told his good wife, when he boasted by-and-by how finely he had put that old coxcomb down. “You never should have done it,” was all the praise he got. “Mr. Mordacks is a business man, and business men always must relieve their minds.” For no sooner now was the general factor introduced to Mistress Anerley than she perceived clearly that the object of his visit was not to make speeches to young chits of girls, but to seek the advice of a sensible person, who ought to have been consulted a hundred times for once that she even had been allowed to open her mouth fairly. Sitting by the fire, he convinced her that the whole of the mischief had been caused by sheer neglect of her opinion. Everything she said was so exactly to the point that he could not conceive how it should have been so slighted, and she for her part begged him to stay and partake of their simple dinner.