Hocken and Hunken Part 34

"No, I shouldn'. I'd say, 'You rate me too high, my dear. Still,' I'd say, 'if you insist upon it, you just scribble down the main points on a sheet o' paper, and I'll take a walk and think it over.' Then I'd carry it off to Benny." 'Bias, who so far had held the better of the argument by keeping his temper, clinched his triumph with a nod and refilled his pipe.

"Benny's an old man, and might die at any moment," objected Cai.

"Now you're gettin' too far-fetched altogether. . . . Besides, 'twouldn't be any affair o' yours--would it?--after I'm married to her."

"Well, you won't be--now: and no more shall I," said Cai bitterly.

"Benny's seen to that!"

"'Tis a mess, sure enough," agreed 'Bias, lighting his pipe and puffing.

"She'll be affronted--oh, cuss the word! Just fancy it, to-morrow morning, when she opens her post! A nice pair of jokers she'll think us!" Cai paced the room. "Couldn't we go up to-night and explain?"

"Five minutes to ten," said 'Bias with a glance at the clock. "Ask her to get out o' bed and come down to hear we've made fools of ourselves?

I don't see myself. You can do what you like, o' course."

"I shan't sleep a wink," declared Cai, still pacing. "How on earth Benny--" He halted of a sudden. "You don't suppose Benny himself--"

"Ch't! a man of his age. . . . No, I'll tell you how it happened, as I allow: and, if so, Benny's not altogether to blame. First you goes to him, and wants a letter written. You give him no names, but he learns enough to guess how the wind sits . . . am I right, so far?"

Cai nodded.

"So he writes the letter and off you goes with it. Later on, in _I_ drops with pretty much the same request. I remember, now, the old fellow behaved rather funny: asked me something about bein' the 'first person,' and then wanted to know if I didn' wish the letter written for a friend. I wasn't what you might call at my ease with the job, and so--as the time was gettin' on for dinner, too--I let it go at that."

"You did? . . . But so did I!"

"Hey?"

"I let Benny think he was writin' it for a friend o' mine. Far as I remember, he suggested it. . . . Yes, he certainly did," said Cai with an effort of memory.

"It don't matter," said 'Bias after a few seconds' reflection. "He took it for granted that one of us was tellin' lies: and likely enough he's chucklin' now at the thought of our faces when the thing came to be cleared up. Come to consider, there was no vice about the trick, 'specially as he wouldn' take any money from me."

"Nor from me," Cai dropped into his chair and reached for the tobacco-jar. "Well," he sighed, "the man's done for both of us, that's all!"

"Not a bit," said 'Bias st.u.r.dily. "We'll walk up early to-morrow, and explain. Ten to one it'll put her in the best o' tempers, havin' such a laugh against us both."

PART II.

"He can't have known!" said Mrs Bosenna early next morning, sitting in a high-backed chair beside the kitchen-table. Her face was slightly flushed, and the toe of her right shoe kept an impatient tap-tap on the flagged floor. "He can't possibly have known."

"We'll hope not," said Dinah. "It's thoughtless, though--put it at the best: and any way it don't speak too well for his past."

"He may have _bought_ it, you know," urged Mrs Bosenna; "late in life."

"Well, he's no chicken," allowed Dinah; "since you put it like that."

"I wasn't referring to Captain Hunken, you silly woman. I meant _it_."

"Eh?" said Dinah. "Oh!--_him?_"

"'Him' if you like," Mrs Bosenna mused. "It can't possibly be a female, can it?"

"I should trust not, for the sake of a body's s.e.x . . . to say things like that. Besides, I've surely been told somewhere--in the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge,' it may have been--that the females don't talk at all."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Pretty sure. It was _something_ unnatural anyhow; or I shouldn' have remembered it."

"Well, and if so," said Mrs Bosenna, "one can see what Providence was driving at, which is always a comfort. . . . I was wondering now if you mind going and carrying him out to the garden somewhere. He couldn't take harm in this weather,--under the box-hedge, for instance."

Dinah shook her head. "I couldn', mistress; no really!"

"The chances are," said Mrs Bosenna persuasively, "he wouldn't say anything,--anything like that again, not in a blue moon."

"He said it to me first, and he said it to me again not ten minutes later. But, o' course, if you're so confident, there's nothing hinders your goin' and takin' him where you like. If you ask my opinion, though, he don't wait for no blue moons. He turns 'em blue as they come."

Mrs Bosenna tapped her foot yet more pettishly. "It's perfectly ridiculous," she declared, "to be kept out of one's own parlour by a bird! Go and call in William Skin, and tell him to take away the nasty thing."

"And him with a family?"

"He's hard of hearin'," said Mrs Bosenna.

"It's a hardness you can t depend on. I've knowed William hear fast enough,--when he wasn't wanted. He'll be wantin' to know, too, why we can't put the bird out for ourselves: his deafness makes him suspicious.

. . . And what's more," wound up Dinah, "it won't help us, one way or 'nother, whether he hears or not. We shall go about _thinkin_ he's heard; and I tell ye, mistress, I shan't be able to face that man again without a blush, not in my born life."

"It's perfectly ridiculous, I tell you!" repeated Mrs Bosenna, starting to her feet. "Am I to be forced to breakfast in the kitchen because of a bird?"

"Then, if so be as you're so proud as all that, why not go back to bed again, and I'll bring breakfast up to your room."

"Nonsense. Where d'ye keep the beeswax? And run you up to the little store-cupboard and fetch me down a fingerful of cotton-wool for my ears.

I'll do it myself, since you're such a coward."

"'Tisn't that I'm a coward, mistress--"

"You're worse," interrupted her mistress severely.

"You never ought to know anything about such words, and it's a revelation to me wherever you managed to pick them up."

Dinah smoothed her ap.r.o.n. "I can't think neither," she confessed, and added demurely, "It could never have been from the old master, for I'm sure he'd never have used such."

Mrs Bosenna wheeled about, her face aflame. But before she could turn on Dinah to rend her, the sound of a horn floated up from the valley.

Dinah's whole body stiffened at once. "The post!" she cried, and ran forth from the kitchen to meet it, without asking leave. Letters at Rilla Farm were rare exceedingly, for Mrs Bosenna made a point of paying ready-money (and exacting the last penny of discount) wherever it was possible; so that bills, even in the shape of invoices, were few.

She had no relatives, or none whom she encouraged as correspondents, for, as the saying is, "she had married above her." For the same reason, perhaps, she had long since stopped the flow of sentimental letters from the girl-friends she had once possessed in Holsworthy, Devon. If Mrs Bosenna now and again found herself lonely at Rilla Farm in her widowhood, it is to be feared the majority of her old acquaintances would have agreed in a.s.serting, with a touch of satisfied spite, that she had herself to blame,--and welcome!

"There's _two!_" announced Dinah, bursting back into the kitchen and waving her capture. "_Two!_--and the Troy postmark on both of 'em!"

"Put them down on the table, please. And kindly take a look at the oven. You needn't let the bread burn, even if I _am_ to take breakfast in the kitchen."