Chapter Nineteen.
At Home in Canada.
The family of Mr Merryboy was a small one. Besides those who assisted him on the farm—and who were in some cases temporary servants—his household consisted of his wife, his aged mother, a female servant, and a small girl. The latter was a diamond from the London diggings, who had been imported the year before. She was undergoing the process of being polished, and gave promise of soon becoming a very valuable gem. It was this that induced her employer to secure our two masculine gems from the same diggings.
Mrs Merryboy was a vigorous, hearty, able-bodied lady, who loved work very much for the mere exercise it afforded her; who, like her husband, was constitutionally kind, and whose mind was of that serious type which takes concern with the souls of the people with whom it has to do as well as with their bodies. Hence she gave her waif a daily lesson in religious and secular knowledge; she reduced work on the Sabbath-days to the lowest possible point in the establishment, and induced her husband, who was a little shy as well as bluff and off-hand, to institute family worship, besides hanging on her walls here and there sweet and striking texts from the Word of God.
Old Mrs Merryboy, the mother, must have been a merry girl in her youth; for, even though at the age of eighty and partially deaf, she was extremely fond of a joke, practical or otherwise, and had her face so seamed with the lines of appreciative humour, and her nutcracker mouth so set in a smile of amiable fun, and her coal-black eyes so lit up with the fires of unutterable wit, that a mere glance at her stirred up your sources of comicality to their depths, while a steady gaze usually resulted in a laugh, in which she was sure to join with an apparent belief that, whatever the joke might be, it was uncommonly good. She did not speak much. Her looks and smiles rendered speech almost unnecessary. Her figure was unusually diminutive.
Little Martha, the waif, was one of those mild, reticent, tiny things that one feels a desire to fondle without knowing why. Her very small face was always, and, as Bobby remarked, awfully grave, yet a ready smile must have lurked close at hand somewhere, for it could be evoked by the smallest provocation at any time, but fled the instant the provoking cause ceased. She seldom laughed, but when she did the burst was a hearty one, and over immediately. Her brown hair was smooth, her brown eyes were gentle, her red mouth was small and round. Obedience was ingrained in her nature. Original action seemed never to have entered her imagination. She appeared to have been born with the idea that her sphere in life was to do as she was directed. To resist and fight were to her impossibilities. To be defended and kissed seemed to be her natural perquisites. Yet her early life had been calculated to foster other and far different qualities, as we shall learn ere long.
Tim Lumpy took to this little creature amazingly. She was so little that by contrast he became quite big, and felt so! When in Martha’s presence he absolutely felt big and like a lion, a roaring lion capable of defending her against all comers! Bobby was also attracted by her, but in a comparatively mild degree.
On the morning after their arrival the two boys awoke to find that the windows of their separate little rooms opened upon a magnificent prospect of wood and water, and that, the partition of their apartment consisting of a single plank-wall, with sundry knots knocked out, they were not only able to converse freely, but to peep at each other awkwardly—facts which they had not observed the night before, owing to sleepiness.