“Ain’t no one looking after ’em?” asked he.
“Ye be over timid about that child, Mr. Wycombe,” she said. “Ye cosset ’er more than her mother would ha’ done. And ye didn’t ought to, ye know. You’ll make ’er that tender and fearsome, she won’t be fit to stand up to the world.”
The man did not reply; he turned away to give a last hoist to the hay as the waggon moved off. He was used to these remarks from kindly busy-bodies, and he never paid more than scant attention to them, but went his own way as he listed.
“’E be downright silly over ’er, that’s what ’e be,” declared the woman confidentially to a girl who had been working beside her.
“Be ’e ’er dad?” asked the girl, who was a stranger in the parish.
“Well,” said the girl, “’e looks old to be ’er dad. I thought ’e might be ’er gran-dad.”
“Oh, I see,” said the woman. “No, he ain’t ’er gran-dad.”
“Married a bit on in life p’r’aps,” said the other, tying the strings of her sun-bonnet and speaking without any particular interest.
“That’s it,” assented the woman, “and more fool ’e. ’E _would_ ’ave a young wife, and a pretty ’un too—and ’e turned forty.”
“Well, small blame to ’im there,” laughed the girl. “And so long as she were pleased....”
“She!” sneered the woman. “Why ’e was rich, and he married nothin’ but a shrimper’s darter down at the Harbour! ’Er face was ’er fortune if ever one was, for she ’adn’t a brass farthing beside.”
They had gathered their rakes and forks together, and were making their way across a little dyke into the road that wound across the marsh-land to the village on the hill.
“Then the little ’un be like her mother,” said the younger woman. “She don’t favour ’er father any way.”
“She be more like ’er mother than she be like Tom Wycombe, sartin sure,” laughed the woman. “But that ain’t saying much. ’Er mother were darker in the skin nor she be.”
“But they say she were rare ’andsome,” said the girl. “And now she’s dead and buried, and ’im alone!”
“Yes, died in childbed, and ’im alone this four years and more to mind that child. That’s what comes o’ marryin’,” said the woman, who was a spinster.
“Pore soul!” murmured the girl feelingly, thinking of her own pretty face and the pretty face that was underground. And added with keener interest: “But ’e doated on er, o’ course.”