‘Has Picotee left Sandbourne entirely?’
‘O no; she is home for the holidays. Well, Mr. Julian, our road parts from yours just here, unless you walk into the next town along with us. But I suppose you get across to this station and go by rail?’
‘I am obliged to go that way for my portmanteau,’ said Christopher, ‘or I should have been pleased to walk further. Shall I see you in Sandbourne to-morrow? I hope so.’
‘Well, no. ’Tis hardly likely that you will see us—hardly. We know how unpleasant it is for a high sort of man to have rough chaps like us hailing him, so we think it best not to meet you—thank you all the same. So if you should run up against us in the street, we should be just as well pleased by your taking no notice, if you wouldn’t mind. ’Twill save so much awkwardness—being in our working clothes. ’Tis always the plan that Mrs. Petherwin and we agree to act upon, and we find it best for both. I hope you take our meaning right, and as no offence, Mr. Julian.’
‘And do you do the same with Picotee?’
‘O Lord, no—’tisn’t a bit of use to try. That’s the worst of Picotee—there’s no getting rid of her. The more in the rough we be the more she’ll stick to us; and if we say she shan’t come, she’ll bide and fret about it till we be forced to let her.’
Christopher laughed, and promised, on condition that they would retract the statement about their not being proud; and then he wished his friends good-night.
15. AN INNER ROOM AT THE LODGE
At the Lodge at this time a discussion of some importance was in progress. The scene was Mrs. Chickerel’s bedroom, to which, unfortunately, she was confined by some spinal complaint; and here she now appeared as an interesting woman of five-and-forty, properly dressed as far as visible, and propped up in a bed covered with a quilt which presented a field of little squares in many tints, looking altogether like a bird’s-eye view of a market garden.
Mrs. Chickerel had been nurse in a nobleman’s family until her marriage, and after that she played the part of wife and mother, upon the whole, affectionately and well. Among her minor differences with her husband had been one about the naming of the children; a matter that was at last compromised by an agreement under which the choice of the girls’ names became her prerogative, and that of the boys’ her husband’s, who limited his field of selection to strict historical precedent as a set-off to Mrs. Chickerel’s tendency to stray into the regions of romance.