On his return to dinner, a few days after the suggestion about the dresses of the maids, he was astonished to find that Mrs. Graspacre had used her privilege with a vengeance; having with decided bad taste, put them all, at their own expense, to be deducted from their wages, into glaring cotton prints.
The girls were unhappy enough at this change, as well as at the expense thus incurred, and they could not enter the town without experiencing the ridicule of their friends and neighbours; the Cardiganshire maid, who considered such a change in the light of disowning her country, and like a renegade putting on the livery of the Saxon, in something of a termagant spirit, tendered her resignation to her master rather than comply with such an innovation.
This ungenerous invasion of his harmless rules, roused his indignation; and after venting a few “damns,” a la John Bull, against draggle-tail cotton rags, without a word of expostulation with his rib, he desired the girls to bring all their trumpery to him, which they gladly did, and he made them instantly into a bonfire in the farm-yard. Then in a firm undertone of subdued resentment, gave strict injunctions that no further liberties should be taken with their national costume; to which his lady made the polite and submissive reply, that the girls might all walk abroad without any dress at all if he chose, and go to the devil his own way.
At this juncture little Pembroke came in with rosy smiles, and told her master that Carmarthen Jack wanted to speak to him very particularly, on which the squire laughed, and asked on what important matter. “Why, sir,” said the rustic beauty, while arch smiles and blushes contended in her sweet oval face, “Parson Inco has found out that he has been courting in bed, with Catty the schoolmistress, and he has run here before the parson to say it is all a falsehood.”
“There’s an impious rascal for you!” cried the lady of the house, “to charge the clergyman with a falsehood; but I am sure ’tis true, for I long suspected it.”
“Madam, your own dignity and delicacy ought to suggest to you that the less you interfere in these matters the more creditable it will be to your own common sense,” said the squire, in a tone which was unmistakable. “I insist,” cried the imperious dame, “that he be put in the stocks, and be ducked in the river.”
“Neither shall be done,” said he firmly, “and from henceforward no person shall be annoyed or persecuted on that score, but everyone shall court as he or she pleases.” “What!” cried the indignant lady, “would you fill the country with bastards!”
“No, madam,” was the reply, “but with as happy a set of people as possible.”
Encouraged by the turn which affairs had taken, the Cardiganshire maid now asked her master for her discharge; as her mistress, she said, had thrown a slur on her brewing abilities, which had almost broken her heart; “for” said she, with a ludicrous whimper, “she says my brewing is unfit for the drinking of Christian people, and hardly worthy of the hogs!—but,” cried the sturdy little wench, raising her voice to an accusatory pitch, and at the same time a tone of triumph, “I came from Newcastle Emlyn, the country of good beer, the very home where the Cwrw da of Hen Gymru [50a] is bred and born, and I would rather die than be told that I can’t brew!”
“Indeed, Cardy,” said the squire, with a smile, “though your mistress may have been too severe in her censure, I must say that your two last brewings were unequal to the first.” “A good reason why, sir; who can brew without malt and hops? who can make bricks without straw? I hear some of the great London brewers do without either malt or hops, but I wouldn’t drink their brewings, I know; their brewings won’t do for us at Newcastle Emlyn! and your wheat, [50b] sir, which has grown by being cut in the wet harvest, so as to be unfit for bread, is but a poor make-shift for malt—it may do for the wish-wash paltry brewers’ ale of Haverfordwest and Fishguard, or the Swansea folk, Merthyr blacks, and Cardiff boys, but our ploughboys would turn up their noses at such stuff at Newcastle Emlyn!