“But, Sam, she’s starving herself, and ’Orace is in rags.”
“Send her in a rump-steak and a suit of my old togs by the housemaid,” said Sam; “or else do as you like, and don’t blame me if you’re sorry for it.”
Mrs Shuckleford knew it was no use trying to extract any more lucid information from her legal offspring, and did not try, but she made another effort to soften his heart with regard to the Widow Cruden and her son.
“After all they’re gentlefolk in trouble, as we might be,” said she, “and they do behave very nice at the short-’and class to Jemima.”
“Gentlefolk or not,” said Sam decisively, spreading a slice of toast with jam, “I tell you you’d better draw off, ma—and Jim must chuck up the class. I’m not going to have her mixing with them.”
“But the child’s ’eart would break, Sam, if—”
“Let it break. She cares no more about shorthand than she does about county courts. It’s all part of her craze to tack herself on that lot. She’s setting her cap at him while she’s making up to his ma; any flat might see that; but she’s got to jack up the whole boiling now—there. We needn’t say any more about it.”
And, having finished his tea, Mr Samuel Shuckleford went down to his “club” to take part in a debate on “Cruelty to Animals.”
Now the worthy captain’s widow, Mrs Shuckleford, had lived long enough in this world to find that human nature is a more powerful law even than parental obedience; she therefore took to heart just so much of her son’s discourse as fitted with the one, and overlooked just so much as exacted the latter. In other words, she was ready to believe that Reginald Cruden was a “bad lot,” but she was not able to bring herself on that account to desert her neighbour at the time of her trouble.
Accordingly that same evening, while Samuel was pleading eloquently on behalf of our dumb fellow-creatures, and Jemima, having recovered from her tears, was sitting abstractedly over a shorthand exercise in her own bedroom, Mrs Shuckleford took upon herself to pay a friendly call at Number 6.