Need it be said that the amiable Merryboys did not fail of their duty on that occasion? That Hetty and Matty took violently to brown-eyed Martha at first sight, having heard all about her from Bob long ago—as she of them; that Mrs Merryboy was, we may say, one glowing beam of hospitality; that Mrs Frog was, so to speak, one blazing personification of amazement, which threatened to become chronic—there was so much that was contrary to previous experience and she was so slow to take it in; that Mr Merryboy became noisier than ever, and that, what between his stick and his legs, to say nothing of his voice, he managed to create in one day hubbub enough to last ten families for a fortnight; that the domestics and the dogs were sympathetically joyful; that even the kitten gave unmistakeable evidences of unusual hilarity—though some attributed the effect to surreptitiously-obtained cream; and, finally, that old granny became something like a Chinese image in the matter of nodding and gazing and smirking and wrinkling, so that there seemed some danger of her terminating her career in a gush of universal philanthropy—need all this be said, we ask? We think not; therefore we won’t say it.
But it was not till Bob Frog got his mother all to himself, under the trees, near the waterfall, down by the river that drove the still unmended saw-mill, that they had real and satisfactory communion. It would have been interesting to have listened to these two—with memories and sympathies and feelings towards the Saviour of sinners so closely intertwined, yet with knowledge and intellectual powers in many respects so far apart. But we may not intrude too closely.
Towards the end of their walk, Bob touched on a subject which had been uppermost in the minds of both all the time, but from which they had shrunk equally, the one being afraid to ask, the other disinclined to tell.
“Mother,” said Bob, at last, “what about father?”
“Ah! Bobby,” replied Mrs Frog, beginning to weep, gently, “I know’d ye would come to that—you was always so fond of ’im, an’ he was so fond o’ you too, indeed—”
“I know it, mother,” interrupted Bob, “but have you never heard of him?”
“Never. I might ’ave, p’r’aps, if he’d bin took an’ tried under his own name, but you know he had so many aliases, an’ the old ’ouse we used to live in we was obliged to quit, so p’r’aps he tried to find us and couldn’t.”
“May God help him—dear father!” said the son in a low sad voice.
“I’d never ’ave left ’im, Bobby, if he ’adn’t left me. You know that. An’ if I thought he was alive and know’d w’ere he was, I’d go back to ’im yet, but—”
The subject was dropped here, for the new mill came suddenly into view, and Bob was glad to draw his mother’s attention to it.