It seemed an unfortunate thing for me, and unfavorable to my purpose, that my host, and even my hostess too, should be so engrossed with their new estate, its beauties and capabilities. Mrs. Hockin devoted herself at once to fowls and pigs and the like extravagant economies, having bought, at some ill-starred moment, a book which proved that hens ought to lay eggs in a manner to support themselves, their families, and the family they belonged to, at the price of one penny a dozen. Eggs being two shillings a dozen in Bruntsea, here was a margin for profit — no less than two thousand per cent, to be made, allowing for all accidents. The lady also found another book, divulging for a shilling the author’s purely invaluable secret — how to work an acre of ground, pay house rent, supply the house grandly, and give away a barrow-load of vegetables every day to the poor of the parish, by keeping a pig — if that pig were kept properly. And after that, pork and ham and bacon came of him, while another golden pig went on.
Mrs. Hockin was very soft-hearted, and said that she never could make bacon of a pig like that; and I answered that if she ever got him it would be unwise to do so. However, the law was laid down in both books that golden fowls and diamondic pigs must die the death before they begin to overeat production; and the Major said, “To be sure. Yes, yes. Let them come to good meat, and then off with their heads.” And his wife said that she was sure she could do it. When it comes to a question of tare and tret, false sentiment must be excluded.
At the moment, these things went by me as trifles, yet made me more impatient. Being older now, and beholding what happens with tolerance and complacence, I am only surprised that my good friends were so tolerant of me and so complacent. For I must have been a great annoyance to them, with my hurry and my one idea. Happily they made allowance for me, which I was not old enough to make for them.
“Go to London, indeed! Go to London by yourself!” cried the Major, with a red face, and his glasses up, when I told him one morning that I could stop no longer without doing something. “Mary, my dear, when you have done out there, will you come in and reason — if you can — with Miss Wood. She vows that she is going to London, all alone.”
“Oh, Major Hockin — oh, Nicholas dear, such a thing has happened!” Mrs. Hockin had scarcely any breath to tell us, as she came in through the window. “You know that they have only had three bushels, or, at any rate, not more than five, almost ever since they came. Erema, you know as well as I do.”
“Seven and three-quarter bushels of barley, at five and ninepence a bushel, Mary,” said the Major, pulling out a pocket-book; “besides Indian corn, chopped meat, and potatoes.”
“And fourteen pounds of paddy,” I said — which was a paltry thing of me; “not to mention a cake of graves, three sacks of brewers’ grains, and then — I forget what next.”
“You are too bad, all of you. Erema, I never thought you would turn against me so. And you made me get nearly all of it. But please to look here. What do you call this? Is this no reward? Is this not enough? Major, if you please, what do you call this? What a pity you have had your breakfast!”
“A blessing — if this was to be my breakfast. I call that, my dear, the very smallest egg I have seen since I took sparrows’ nests. No wonder they sell them at twelve a penny. I congratulate you upon your first egg, my dear Mary.”
“Well, I don’t care,” replied Mrs. Hockin, who had the sweetest temper in the world. “Small beginnings make large endings; and an egg must be always small at one end. You scorn my first egg, and Erema should have had it if she had been good. But she was very wicked, and I know not what to do with it.”
“Blow it!” cried the Major. “I mean no harm, ladies. I never use low language. What I mean is, make a pinhole at each end, give a puff, and away goes two pennyworth, and you have a cabinet specimen, which your egg is quite fitted by its cost to be. But now, Mary, talk to Miss Wood, if you please. It is useless for me to say any thing, and I have three appointments in the town”— he always called it “the town” now —“three appointments, if not four; yes, I may certainly say four. Talk to Miss Wood, my dear, if you please. She wants to go to London, which would be absurd. Ladies seem to enter into ladies’ logic. They seem to be able to appreciate it better, to see all the turns, and the ins and outs, which no man has intellect enough to see, or at least to make head or tail of. Good-by for the present; I had better be off.”
“I should think you had,” exclaimed Mrs. Hockin, as her husband marched off, with his side-lights on, and his short, quick step, and well-satisfied glance at the hill which belonged to him, and the beach, over which he had rights of plunder — or, at least, Uncle Sam would have called them so, strictly as he stood up for his own.
“Now come and talk quietly to me, my dear,” Mrs. Hockin began, most kindly, forgetting all the marvel of her first-born egg. “I have noticed how restless you are, and devoid of all healthy interest in any thing. ‘Listless’ is the word. ‘Listless’ is exactly what I mean, Erema. When I was at your time of life, I could never have gone about caring for nothing. I wonder that you knew that I even had a fowl; much more how much they had eaten!”
“I really do try to do all I can, and that is a proof of it,” I said. “I am not quite so listless as you think. But those things do seem so little to me.”
“My dear, if you were happy, they would seem quite large, as, after all the anxieties of my life, I am able now to think them. It is a power to be thankful for, or, at least, I often think so. Look at my husband! He has outlived and outlasted more trouble than any one but myself could reckon up to him; and yet he is as brisk, as full of life, as ready to begin a new thing tomorrow — when, at our age, there may be no tomorrow, except in that better world, my dear, of which it is high time for him and me to think, as I truly hope we may spare the time to do.”
“Oh, don’t talk like that,” I cried. “Please, Mrs. Hockin, to talk of your hens and chicks — at least there will be chicks by-and-by. I am almost sure there will, if you only persevere. It seems unfair to set our minds on any other world till justice has been done in this.”
“You are very young, my child, or you would know that in that case we never should think of it at all. But I don’t want to preach you a sermon, Erema, even if I could do so. I only just want you to tell me what you think, what good you imagine that you can do.”
“It is no imagination. I am sure that I can right my father’s wrongs. And I never shall rest till I do so.”
“Are you sure that there is any wrong to right?” she asked, in the warmth of the moment; and then, seeing perhaps how my color changed, she looked at me sadly, and kissed my forehead.
“Oh, if you had only once seen him,” I said; “without any exaggeration, you would have been satisfied at once. That he could ever have done any harm was impossible — utterly impossible. I am not as I was. I can listen to almost any thing now quite calmly. B............