“He don’t like strangers,” said the mother, doubtfully. She was unused to hear her boy called either a jolly baby or a little chap; and she distrusted the abilities of a young man, plainly unmarried, moreover, who used such terms.
“I’ll hold him like a patent rocking-chair,” the stranger asserted. “Come on, sonny. You won’t howl at me, will you? Great land, what a weight you are! I never turned ayah before—yes, put my eye out, will you? What’s wrong besides the teeth?”
“He’s got a touch of bromtitus; I caught it washing-day, and he took it from me. Oh, it’s crool work washing in the winter; our houses hasn’t any coppers, and we has to do it all out at the back.”
“Do you mean you wash the clothes in the open air?”
“Every mite of ’em. My husband he’s been to the landlord times and again, but he won’t do nothing for us; and they’re the cheapest houses round, so we just have to put up with it.”
“What a beastly shame! Who’s your landlord?”
“Old Fane, up at Fanes. Ah, he is a hard man. Last time as Mr. Searle went to see him, ‘You can take or leave it,’ he says; ‘I can get plenty more as won’t complain. I will not be pestered with discontented gutter-birds,’ he says. So my husband he come away; there wasn’t nothing to be done.”
“Fane, I think you said,” said the brown-eyed stranger, upon whose face the tale had painted a gleeful anticipation, as he took down the name in a pocket-book. “I’m thinking I’d like a little friendly conversation with Mr. Fane. Whereabouts is your place?”
“Burnt House, they call it; right out in the fields it is. If he’d put in one copper for the six houses, you wouldn’t think he’d ever miss the money. But he don’t care about us poor folks. I wish we was in Farquhar’s houses, that I do.”
Conversation was here broken by Dr. Maude, who summoned Mrs. Searle and her sister and the baby. Her short interview left her in tears. The doctor had ordered milk, which seemed to her as far beyond her means as caviare or turtle-soup. It would be got, but meanwhile Mrs. Searle would starve, Mr. Searle would swear, and the debt at the shop would grow. The stranger gave her a shilling, and fled into the surgery to escape her thanks.