Hocken and Hunken Part 10

"That's close to Holsworthy, where I was brought up. 'Goldsworthy of Holsworthy' he liked to be known as, dropping the 'Sir': and _he_ always wore a top hat, rather flat in the brim. But he'd off with it to anything in woman's shape. . . . And that's what women value.

Respect. . . . It isn't a man's _age_--" She broke off and half closed her eyes in reverie. "And so particular, too, about his body-linen!

Always a high stock collar . . . and his cuffs!"

"Talkin' about cuffs, now--" Captain Cai dived a hand into a hip-pocket and drew forth a circlet of white lawn, much flattened.

"I found this in the garden last night--by the rose-bushes."

"Thank you--yes, it is mine, of course. I missed it on the way home."

Mrs Bosenna reached out her hand for it. "You must have set me down for a very careless person? But with all my responsibilities just now--"

She concluded the sentence with a sigh, and held open the gate, warning him to beware of the wet paint. "You see, there is so much to be looked after on a farm. One can never trust to servants--or at any rate not to the men kind. Dinah is different; but even with Dinah--" Mrs Bosenna let fall another, slightly fainter, sigh.

"That reminds me," said Captain Cai hardily entering, and for all his lack of observation falling at once under the spell of the little front garden--so scrupulously tidy it was, so trim and kempt, with a pathway of white pebbles leading up between clumps of daffodils and tulips to a neatly thatched porch: so homely too, with but a low fence of euonymus shutting off all that could offend in the court before the cow-byres; so fragrant already with scent of the just sprouting lemon verbena; so obviously the abode of cleanly health, with every window along the white-washed house front open to the April air. "That reminds me, I never mentioned the--the deceased--your late husband, I mean, ma'am--nor how sorry I was to hear of it."

"Did you know him?" asked Mrs Bosenna, scarcely glancing up as she pinched the fragrance out of an infant bud of the lemon verbena.

"Very slightly, ma'am. Indeed, I don't remember meetin' him but once, and that was at Summercourt Fair, of all places; me bein' home just then from a trip, an' takin' a day off, as you might say, just to see how things was gettin' on ash.o.r.e. As fate would have it I happened into a boxin' booth, which was twopence, and there, as I was watchin' a bout, some one says at my elbow, ''Tis a n.o.ble art, deny it who can!'

An' that was your late husband. We'd never met afore to my knowledge, an' we never met again; but his words have come back to me more'n once, an' the free manly way he spoke 'em."

"I feel sure," said Mrs Bosenna, "you and he would have found many things in common, had he been spared. . . Now, I dare say, you'd like to look around the place a bit before dinner. Where shall we begin?

With the live stock?"

"As you please, ma'am."

"Well, as we're to eat sucking-pig, we'll go and have a look at the litter he was one of; and then we'll take the cows; and then you'll have to excuse me for a few minutes while I attend to the apple-sauce, about which I'm very particular."

They visited the sow and her farrows--a family group which Captain Cai p.r.o.nounced to be "very comfortable-lookin'."

"But how stupid of me!" exclaimed Mrs Bosenna. "To forget that you sailors are tired to death with pork!"

"Not with this variety, ma'am," Captain Cai a.s.sured her.

They pa.s.sed on to the cow-houses, which were empty just then, but nevertheless worth visiting, being brick-floored, well-ventilated, and roomy, with straw generously spread in the stalls, fresh and ready for the cattle's return. There were two houses, one for Jerseys (as Mrs Bosenna explained), the other for Devons; and she drew his attention to their drainage system. "If I had my way, every cow in the land should be as cleanly lodged as a cottager. None of your infected milk for me!"

From the cow-houses she conducted him through the mowhay, where the number and amplitude of the ricks fairly took his breath away.

"Oh, we call Rilla quite a small farm!" said Mrs Bosenna carelessly.

"But I could never endure to be short of straw. Clean bedding is a craze with me." She halted and invited him to admire some details in the thatching--the work of an old man past seventy, she told him, and sighed. "Thatching's a lost art, almost. Too much education nowadays, and everybody in a hurry--that's what's the matter. . . . In a few years we shall all be thatching with corrugated iron."

"An' by that time every one will be in steam."

"Eh?"

"Shipping, ma'am."

"Ah, yes--to be sure. And everybody making b.u.t.ter with a County Council separator. 'All very scientific,' I tell them, 'so long as you don't ask me to eat it!' Why, look at this!" Captain Cai looked. She was holding out her hand palm uppermost, and a very pretty, plump hand it was to be sure.

"I should be sorry to say how many hundredweights of b.u.t.ter I've made wi' that very hand--or how many hundreds of persons have eaten it."

Captain Cai dived his own hands into the hip-pockets of his new coat, aimlessly searching for pipe and tobacco-pouch; not that he would have ventured to smoke in her presence!--but it gave his hands something to do.

"'Glad,' I think you must mean, ma'am," said he slowly.

She laughed. "If you're going to make pretty speeches, it's time for me to run indoors," and she left him with a warning that dinner would be ready in ten minutes, or at one o'clock to the tick.

This was by the gate of a broad-acred field ("Parc Veor" she had called it) in which her Jerseys browsed. Captain Cai counted them--they were five--while still half-consciously searching for pipe and pouch, which, in fact, he had left behind in the shop, in the pockets of his old coat.

By-and-by he realised this, and with a curious sense of helplessness--of having lost his bearings. . . .

Ten minutes later Dinah, coming across the mowhay to invite Captain Cai into the house, found him leaning against the gate, sunk in a brown study, contemplating the kine.

The smell of roasted sucking-pig dissipated this transient cloud upon his spirits. Mrs Bosenna (who had discarded her ap.r.o.n, and looked mighty genteel with a gold locket dependent from her throat) avowed, appealing to his sympathy, that it mightn't be sentimental, but she, for her part, adored the savour of crackling.

"And as for Robert--my late husband--he doted on it."

Captain Cai came within an ace of saying fatuously it was a pity the late Mr Bosenna couldn't be present to partake of this; but checked himself.

"To think that you should have met him! Well, it's a small world."

"There's a lot of folks attend Summercourt Fair--or used to," said Captain Cai, and added that the world was not so noticeably small, if you tried sailing up and down it a bit.

"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs Bosenna, dropping knife and fork and clasping her hands. "Yes, to be sure, the vastness of it--the great distances! . . .

And so you met my late husband in a boxing tent? Sport of all kinds appealed to him. But isn't boxing a-er--more or less degrading exhibition?"

"Nothing of the sort, ma'am. I never went in for it myself--worse luck; never had the time. But my friend 'Bias, now! He's past his prime, o'

course; but if only you'd seen him strip--in the old time--"

"Er--you're surely not referring to your friend Captain Hunken?"

"But I am, ma'am. . . . He had a way o' stepping back an' usin' his reach . . . a trifle slow with the left, always . . . that was his failin'. But the length of his arms would delight you--and he had a hug, too, of his own--if you happened to take an interest in such things."

"But I don't," protested Mrs Bosenna. "And you frighten me! If I'd guessed that my other tenant was a prize-fighter--"

"Prize-fighter, ma'am? What, 'Bias? . . . He's the gentlest you ever knew, and the easiest-goin': and for ladies' company--well, I don't know," confessed Captain Cai, "as he ever found himself in such, least-ways not to my knowledge. But I'll be bound he wouldn't be able to open his mouth."

"--Unless in defence of a friend," suggested Mrs Bosenna, laughing.

"You must bring him to call on me."

Captain Cai shook his head.

"Oh"--she nodded confidently--"I'll make him talk, never fear!

If he's half so true a friend to you as you are to him--"

"He's a truer."

"Then, as a last resource, I have only to run _you_ down. So it's easy."

The sucking-pig was followed by a delectable junket with Cornish cream; and the junket--when Dinah had removed the cloth--by a plate of home-made biscuits, flanked by decanters of port and sherry.

"Widow's port is the best, they say." Mrs Bosenna invited him to fill his gla.s.s without waiting for ceremony. "You smoke?" she asked.