Lord Blandamer flung the flapping cape of his overcoat over the left shoulder in a way that made the clerk think of foreigners, and of woodcuts of Italian opera in a bound volume of the Illustrated London News which he studied on Sunday evenings.
“I must be moving on,” said the visitor, with a shiver. “I must not keep you standing here; there is a very chill air this evening.”
Then Mrs. Janaway was seized with a sudden temerity.
“Will your lordship not step in and warm yourself for a moment?” she interposed. “We have a clear fire burning, if you will overlook the smell of cooking.”
The clerk trembled for a moment at his wife’s boldness, but Lord Blandamer accepted the invitation with alacrity.
“Thank you very much,” said he; “I should be very glad to rest a few minutes before my train leaves. Pray make no apology for the smell of cookery; it is very appetising, especially at suppertime.”
He spoke as if he took supper every evening, and had never heard of a late dinner in his life; and five minutes later he sat at table with Mr. and Mrs. Janaway. The cloth was of roughest homespun, but clean; the knives and forks handled in old green horn, and the piece-of-resistance tripe; but the guest made an excellent meal.
“Some folk think highly of squash tripe or ribbon tripe,” the clerk said meditatively, looking at the empty dish; “but they don’t compare, according to my taste, with cushion tripe.” He was emboldened to make these culinary remarks by that moral elevation which comes to every properly-constituted host, when a guest has eaten heartily of the viands set before him.
“No,” Lord Blandamer said, “there can be no doubt that cushion tripe is the best.”
“Quite as much depends upon the cooking as upon the tripe itself,” remarked Mrs. Janaway, bridling at the thought that her art had been left out of the reckoning; “a bad cook will spoil the best tripe. There are many ways of doing it, but a little milk and a leek is the best for me.”
“You cannot beat it,” Lord Blandamer assented—“you cannot beat it”—and then went on suggestively: “Have you ever tried a sprig of mace with it?”
No, Mrs. Janaway had never heard of that; nor, indeed, had Lord Blandamer either, if the point had been pushed; but she promised to use it the very next time, and hoped that the august visitor would honour them again when it was to be tasted.
“ ’Tis only Saturday nights that we can get the cushion,” she went on; “and it’s well it don’t come oftener, for we couldn’t afford it. No woman ever had a call to have a better husband nor Thomas, who spends little enough on hisself. He don’t touch nothing but tea, sir, but Saturday nights we treat ourselves to a little tripe, which is all the more convenient in that it is very strengthening, and my husband’s duties on Sunday being that urgent-like. So, if your lordship is fond of tripe, and passing another Saturday night, and will do us the honour, you will always find something ready.”
“Thank you very much for your kind invitation,” Lord Blandamer said; “I shall certainly take you at your word, the more so that Saturday is the day on which I am oftenest in Cullerne, or, I should say, have happened to be lately.”
“There’s poor and poor,” said the clerk reflectively; “and we’re poor, but we’re happy; but there’s Mr. Sharnall poor and unhappy. ‘Mr. Sharnall,’ says I to him, ‘many a time have I heard my father say over a pot of tenpenny, “Here’s to poverty in a plughole, and a man with a wooden leg to trample it down;” but you never puts your poverty in a plughole, much less tramples it down. You always has it out and airs it, and makes yourself sad with thinking of it. ’Tisn’t because you’re poor that you’re sad; ’tis because you think you’re poor, and talk so much about it. You’re not so poor as we, only you have so many grievances.’ ”
“Ah, you are speaking of the organist?” Lord Blandamer asked. “I fancy it was he who was talking with you in the minster this afternoon, was it not?”
The clerk felt embarrassed once more, for he remembered Mr. Sharnall’s violent talk, and how his anathema of all Blandamers had rang out in the church.
“Yes,” he said; “poor organist was talking a little wild; he gets took that way sometimes, what with his grievances, and a little drop of the swanky what he takes to drown them. Then he talks loud; but I hope your lordship didn’t hear all his foolishness.”
“Oh dear no; I was engaged at the time with the architect,” Lord Blandamer said; but his tone made Janaway think that Mr. Sharnall’s voice had carried further than was convenient. “I did not hear what he said, but he seemed to be much put out. I chatted with him in the church some days ago; he did not know who I was, but I gathered that he bore no very good will to my family.”
Mrs. Janaway saw it was a moment for prudent words. “Don’t pay no manner of attention to him, if I may make so bold as to advise your lordship,” she said; “he talks against my husband just as well. He is crazy about his organ, and thinks he ought to have a new one, or, at least, a waterworks to blow it, like what they have at Carisbury. Don’t pay no attention to him; no one minds what Sharnall says in Cullerne.”
The clerk was astonished at his wife’s wisdom, yet apprehensive as to how it might be taken. But Lord
