At last he moved his eyes from mine; but without any word, or sign, to show whether he believed, or disbelieved. Then he went to a chair, and sat with his chin upon the ledger-desk; as if the effort of probing me had been too much for his weary brain. “Dreamed of! All the gold ever dreamed of! As if it were but a dream!” he muttered; and then he closed his eyes to think.
“Good Uncle Reuben,” I said to him, “you have been a long way today, sir. Let me go and get you a glass of good wine. Cousin Ruth knows where to find it.”
“How do you know how far I have been?” he asked, with a vicious look at me. “And Cousin Ruth! You are very pat with my granddaughter’s name, young man!”
“It would be hard upon me, sir, not to know my own cousin’s name.”
“Very well. Let that go by. You have behaved very badly to Ruth. She loves you; and you love her not.”
At this I was so wholly amazed—not at the thing itself, I mean, but at his knowledge of it—that I could not say a single word; but looked, no doubt, very foolish.
“You may well be ashamed, young man,” he cried, with some triumph over me, “you are the biggest of all fools, as well as a conceited coxcomb. What can you want more than Ruth? She is a little damsel, truly; but finer men than you, John Ridd, with all your boasted strength and wrestling, have wedded smaller maidens. And as for quality, and value—bots! one inch of Ruth is worth all your seven feet put together.”
Now I am not seven feet high; nor ever was six feet eight inches, in my very prime of life; and nothing vexes me so much as to make me out a giant, and above human sympathy, and human scale of weakness. It cost me hard to hold my tongue; which luckily is not in proportion to my stature. And only for Ruth’s sake I held it. But Uncle Ben (being old and worn) was vexed by not having any answer, almost as much as a woman is.
“You want me to go on,” he continued, with a look of spite at me, “about my poor Ruth’s love for you, to feed your cursed vanity. Because a set of asses call you the finest man in England; there is no maid (I suppose) who is not in love with you. I believe you are as deep as you are long, John Ridd. Shall I ever get to the bottom of your character?”
This was a little too much for me. Any insult I could take (with goodwill) from a white-haired man, and one who was my relative; unless it touched my love for Lorna, or my conscious modesty. Now both of these were touched to the quick by the sentences of the old gentleman. Therefore, without a word, I went; only making a bow to him.
But women who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy. And there was Ruth, as I took my horse (with a trunk of frippery on him), poor little Ruth was at the bridle, and rusting all the knops of our town-going harness with tears.
“Goodbye dear,” I said, as she bent her head away from me; “shall I put you up on the saddle, dear?”
“Cousin Ridd, you may take it lightly,” said Ruth, turning full upon me, “and very likely you are right, according to your nature”—this was the only cutting thing the little soul ever said to me—“but oh, Cousin Ridd, you have no idea of the pain you will leave behind you.”
“How can that be so, Ruth, when I am as good as ordered to be off the premises?”
“In the first place, Cousin Ridd, grandfather will be angry with himself, for having so ill-used you. And now he is so weak and poorly, that he is always repenting. In the next place I shall scold him first, until he admits his sorrow; and when he has admitted it, I shall scold myself for scolding him. And then he will come round again, and think that I was hard on him; and end perhaps by hating you—for he is like a woman now, John.”
That last little touch of self-knowledge in Ruth, which she delivered with a gleam of some secret pleasantry, made me stop and look closely at her: but she pretended not to know it. “There is something in this child,” I thought, “very different from other girls. What it is I cannot tell; for one very seldom gets at it.”
At any rate the upshot was that the good horse went back to stable, and had another feed of corn, while my wrath sank within me. There are two things, according to my experience (which may not hold with another man) fitted beyond any others to take hot tempers out of us. The first is to see our favourite creatures feeding, and licking up their food, and happily snuffling over it, yet sparing time to be grateful, and showing taste and perception; the other is to go gardening boldly, in the spring of the year, without any misgiving about it, and hoping the utmost of everything. If there be a third anodyne, approaching these two in power, it is to smoke good tobacco well, and watch the setting of the moon; and if this should only be over the sea, the result is irresistible.
Master Huckaback showed no especial signs of joy at my return; but received me with a little grunt, which appeared to me to mean, “Ah, I thought he would hardly be fool enough to go.” I told him how sorry I was for having in some way offended him; and he
