“Well now, Mother, you know they are, if you’d
only speak up honest. But you’re like
old Aunt Nancy Scott, you never say anything uncharitable
except in the way of business. You know the
Gordons ain’t like other people and never were
and never will be. They’re about the only
queer folks we have in Lindsay, Master, except old
Peter Cook, who keeps twenty-five cats. Lord,
Master, think of it! What chanct would a poor
mouse have? None of the rest of us are queer,
leastwise, we hain’t found it out if we are.
But, then, we’re mighty uninteresting, I’m
bound to admit that.”
“Where do the Gordons live?” asked Eric,
who had grown used to holding fast to a given point
of inquiry through all the bewildering mazes of old
Robert’s conversation.
“Away up yander, half a mile in from Radnor
road, with a thick spruce wood atween them and all
the rest of the world. They never go away anywheres,
except to church—they never miss that—and
nobody goes there. There’s just old Thomas,
and his sister Janet, and a niece of theirs, and this
here Neil we’ve been talking about. They’re
a queer, dour, cranky lot, and I will say it,
Mother. There, give your old man a cup of tea
and never mind the way his tongue runs on. Speaking
of tea, do you know Mrs. Adam Palmer and Mrs. Jim
Martin took tea together at Foster Reid’s last
Wednesday afternoon?”
“No, why, I thought they were on bad terms,”
said Mrs. Williamson, betraying a little feminine
curiosity.
“So they are, so they are. But they both
happened to visit Mrs. Foster the same afternoon and
neither would leave because that would be knuckling
down to the other. So they stuck it out, on
opposite sides of the parlour. Mrs. Foster says
she never spent such an uncomfortable afternoon in
all her life before. She would talk a spell
to one and then t’other. And they kept
talking to Mrs. Foster and at each other.
Mrs. Foster says she really thought she’d have
to keep them all night, for neither would start to
go home afore the other. Finally Jim Martin came
in to look for his wife, ’cause he thought she
must have got stuck in the marsh, and that solved
the problem. Master, you ain’t eating
anything. Don’t mind my stopping; I was
at it half an hour afore you come, and anyway I’m
in a hurry. My hired boy went home to-day.
He heard the rooster crow at twelve last night and
he’s gone home to see which of his family is
dead. He knows one of ’em is. He
heard a rooster crow in the middle of the night onct
afore and the next day he got word that his second
cousin down at Souris was dead. Mother, if the
Master don’t want any more tea, ain’t
there some cream for Timothy?”
Shortly before sunset that evening Eric went for a
walk. When he did not go to the shore he liked
to indulge in long tramps through the Lindsay fields
and woods, in the mellowness of “the sweet ’o
the year.” Most of the Lindsay houses were
built along the main road, which ran parallel to the
shore, or about the stores at “The Corner.”
The farms ran back from them into solitudes of woods
and pasture lands.
