“If all I hear be true,” said my Aunt Jen, pursing up her mouth as if she had bitten into a crab apple, “the lassie is little likely to be feared of you or any mortal on the earth!”
“Maybe aye—maybe no,” snapped my grandmother, “at any rate be off with you into the back kitchen and see that the dishes are washed, so as not to be a show to the public. You and Meg have so little sense that whiles I wonder that I am your mother.”
“You are not Meg’s mother that I ken of!” her daughter responded acridly.
“I am her mistress, and the greater fool to keep such a handless hempie about the house! You, Janet, I have to provide for in some wise—such being the will of the Lord—His and your father’s there. Now then, clear! Be douce! Let me get on my cloak and leghorn bonnet.”
My grandmother being thus accoutred, and I invested with a black jacket, knee-breeches, shoes, and the regulation fluffy tie that tickled my throat and made me a week-day laughing stock to all who dared, Mistress Mary Lyon and I started to make our first call at the Great House of Marnhoul.
CHAPTER V
THE CENSOR OF MORALS
As my grandmother and I went down the little loaning from Heathknowes Farm she had an eye for everything. She “shooed” into duty’s path a youngling hen with vague maternal aspirations which was wandering off to found a family by laying an egg in the underbrush about the saw-mill. She called back final directions to her daughter Jen and maidservant Meg, and saw that they were attended to before she would go on. She looked into the saw-mill itself in the by-going, and made sure that Rob McTurk was in due attendance on the whirling machinery which was turning off the spools, as it seemed to me, with the rapidity of light. She inquired as to the whereabouts of her husband.