“If you be ahungered or athirst, there’s cold bacon and bread on th’ dresser there; and she you call your wife can draw you a mug of ale.”
He said, drawing himself up to his splendid height, and using a tone of cold civility that somehow cut his mother to the quick as his fierce upbraidings had failed to do:
“No, ma’am, I thank you!”
She found herself urging, as Nelly opened and shut drawers and cupboards overhead, and was heard to drag a box across the floor:
“You have had a day’s journey, and started with but a dew-bit. You’d better take something to stay you. ’Twill be wise!”
Her bowels yearned over him, knowing him unfed. He said, as a stranger answers a stranger:
“I thank you kindly, but I could not, ma’am.”
She began to tremble at the thing that she had done. She said, almost entreatingly, and with the metallic resonance quite gone out of her voice:
“’Twould be a want of common Christian kindness to let you go fasting!”
A red-hot spark of resentment burned in his blue eye. He said, measuring his words to the tap-tap of Nelly’s little thick-soled shoes, descending the short carpetless stair: