“Father,” said Jen, “that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his porridge.”
“Doubtless—ah, doubtless,” said William Lyon; “but if he is to bide with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?”
Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder nearest my father had an indignant hump.
“Wheesht, William,” interposed grandmother good-naturedly, “if Jen rose betimes to get milk for the bairn, ye ken yoursel’ that ye think the better of her for it. And so do I. Jen’s not the first whose acts are kindlier than her principles.”
But Jen kept her thorns out and refused to be brought into the fold by flattery, till her father said, “Jen, have ye any of that fine homebrewed left, or did the lads drink it a’ to their porridges? I’m a kennin’ weary, and nothing refreshes me like that!”
Jen felt the artfulness of this, nevertheless she could not help being touched. The care of the still-room was hers, because, though my grandmother could go through twice the work in the day that her daughter could, the brewing of the family small beer and other labours of the still-room were of too exact and methodical a nature for a headlong driver like Mary Lyon.
My grandfather got his ale, of the sort just then beginning to be made—called “Jamaica,” because a quantity of the cheap sugar refuse from the hogsheads was used in its production. In fact, it was the ancestor of the “treacle ale” of later years. But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter lassitude and fatigue.
William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exactitude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity.
He sat back with an air of content in his great wide chair, the chair that had been handed down as the seat of the head of the house from many generations of Lyonses. He sipped and nodded his head, looking towards his daughter, and lifting the tankard with a courtly gesture as if pledging her health.
Jen was pleased, though for a while she did not allow it to be seen, and her only repentance was taking up the big empty goblet without being asked and going to the still-room to refill it.