This morning, according to Effie, he caught at the cloth that covered the pan of evenly risen bread dough that Martha was about to mould into loaves, upset it, falling backward into the wreck that made a most comfortable air-cushion.
Timothy’s bed has been moved upstairs, as the children have never been “trained rightly to sleep in their beds,” as Martha expresses it, and the process is painful to a listener, who, as Martha says of Timothy, is “a bachelor boiled through, and hasn’t maternal instinks!”
_August 12._ The twins babble away at a great rate between themselves, and Martha, anxious to find meaning in their utterances, called me in to translate. “It sounds to me like broad Yorkshire they do be trying for, Mrs. Evan,” she said in perfect earnest; “but then, again, it mought be Lancaster; that talk is so overlappin’ ’tis hard to reach.”
To my ear, even with the echo of Ian and Richard’s baby talk in it, the sounds are wholly alien and barbaric, a fit match for the carnal appetites of the youngsters. All in a minute, when Martha’s back was turned, Victoria hastily devoured the contents of the dish wherein food had been put on the stoop for the hounds, while Albert howled and kicked with symptoms of a fiendish temper because he was not quick enough to get any of the scraps.
“The ’ounds make too free!” ejaculated Martha, wrathfully (she who had raised many a fall litter by tiding them over cold days in the corner of our spotless kitchen). “Timothy must keep them off and fodder them at the stables and not put temptation in the way of Christian babes!”
By the way, I had almost forgotten to record that the twins were christened down at the Rectory yesterday afternoon. There was a difficulty about their second name that threatened to disrupt Martha’s plans.
Timothy, who has been strangely mild and unassertive of late, crossing Martha in nothing, refused to lend the honoured name of Saunders to what he persists in calling “the aliens.” Martha argued, but to no purpose; his name, he said, was his own; if he had shared it with her, she had no right to peddle it outside the family.
This, even the Rector was obliged to agree was just. Then an inspiration seized Martha. If not Saunders, why not Corkle? The late Corkle could raise no objection, and it would be a sort of belated compliment, and at the same time a delicate way of keeping his name in the ears of his successor!