The voice that replied struck me as being a notable one, well-bred and imperious.
“When I take a bare-footed slut out of a cabin, I don’t expect her to dictate to me what her duties are!”
Flurry jerked up his chin in a noiseless laugh. “It’s my grandmother!” he whispered. “I bet you Mrs. McDonald don’t get much change out of her!”
“If I set her to clean the pig-sty I expect her to obey me,” continued the voice in accents that would have made me clean forty pig-stys had she desired me to do so.
“Very well, ma’am,” retorted Mrs. McDonald, “if that’s the way you treat your servants, you needn’t come here again looking for them. I consider your conduct is neither that of a lady nor a Christian!”
“Don’t you, indeed?” replied Flurry’s grandmother. “Well, your opinion doesn’t greatly distress me, for, to tell you the truth, I don’t think you’re much of a judge.”
“Didn’t I tell you she’d score?” murmured Flurry, who was by this time applying his eye to the hole in the muslin curtain. “She’s off,” he went on, returning to his tea. “She’s a great character! She’s eighty-three, if she’s a day, and she’s as sound on her legs as a three-year-old! Did you see that old shandrydan of hers in the street a while ago, and a fellow on the box with a red beard on him like Robinson Crusoe? That old mare that was on the near side, Trinket her name is—is mighty near clean bred. I can tell you her foals are worth a bit of money.”
I had heard of old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas; indeed, I had seldom dined out in the neighbourhood without hearing some new story of her and her remarkable ménage, but it had not yet been my privilege to meet her.
“Well, now,” went on Flurry, in his low voice, “I’ll tell you a thing that’s just come into my head. My grandmother promised me a foal of Trinket’s the day I was one-and-twenty, and that’s five years ago, and deuce a one I’ve got from her yet. You never were at Aussolas? No, you were not. Well, I tell you the place there is like a circus with horses. She has a couple of score of them running wild in the woods, like deer.”