Our Frank | Page 2

brazen-faced clock ticked deliberately behind the door. On one of the settles in the chimney-corner sat Mrs Darvell's "man," as she called her husband, smoking a short pipe, with his feet stretched out on the hearth; his great boots, caked with mud, stood beside him. He was a big broad-shouldered fellow, about forty, with a fair smooth face, which generally looked good-tempered enough, and somewhat foolish, but which just now had a sullen expression on it, which Mrs Darvell's quick eye noted immediately. He looked up and nodded when his wife came in, without taking the pipe out of his mouth.
"Well, I'm proper tired," she said, bumping her basket down with a sigh of relief. "That Whiteleaf Hill do spend one so after a day's marketing." Then glancing at the muddy boots on the hearth: "Bin ploughin'?"
Mr Darvell nodded again, and looked inquiringly at his wife's basket. Answering this silent question she said:
"I sold 'em fairly well. Mrs Reuben got more; but hers was fatter."
Mr Darvell smoked on in silence, and his wife busied herself in preparing supper, consisting of cold bacon, bread, and tea without milk; it was not until they had both been seated at the meal for a little while that she set down her cup suddenly and exclaimed:
"Why, whatever's got our Frank? Isn't he home yet?"
Mr Darvell's mouth was still occupied, not with his pipe, but with a thick hunk of bread, on which was laid an almost equally thick piece of fat bacon. Gazing at his wife across this barrier he nodded again, and presently murmured somewhat indistinctly:
"Ah, he came home with me."
"Then," repeated Mrs Darvell, fixing her eyes sharply on him, "where is the lad?"
Mr Darvell avoided his wife's gaze.
"How should I know where he is?" he answered sullenly. "I haven't seen him, not for these two hours. He's foolin' round somewheres with the other lads."
"That's not like our Frank," said Mrs Darvell, giving an anxious look round at the tall clock. "Why, it's gone eight," she went on. "What can have got him?"
Her eyes rested suspiciously on her husband, who shifted about uneasily.
"Can't you let the lad bide?" he said; "ye'll not rest till ye make him a greater ninny nor he is by natur. He might as well ha' bin a gell, an better, for all the good he'll ever be."
"How did he tackle the ploughin'?" asked Mrs Darvell, pausing in the act of setting aside Frank's supper on the dresser.
"Worser nor ever," replied her husband contemptuously. "He'll never be good for nowt, but to bide at home an' keep's hands clean. Why, look at Eli Redrup, not older nor our Frank, an' can do a man's work already."
"Eli Redrup!" exclaimed Mrs Darvell in a shrill tone of disgust; "you'd never even our lad to a great fullish lout like Eli Redrup, with a head like a turmut! If Frank isn't just so fierce as some lads of his age, he's got more sense than most."
"I tell 'ee, he'll never be good for nowt," replied her husband doggedly, as he resumed his seat in the chimney-corner and lighted his pipe.
"Onless," he added after a moment's pause, "he comes to be a schoolmaster; and it haggles me to think that a boy of mine should take up a line like that."
Mrs Darvell made no answer; but as she washed up the cups and plates she cast a curious glance every now and then at her husband's silent figure, for she had a strong feeling that he knew more than he chose to tell about "our" Frank's absence.
"Our Frank" had more than once been the innocent cause of a serious difference of opinion between Mr and Mrs Darvell. He was their only child, and had inherited his father's fair skin and blue eyes, and his mother's quickness of apprehension; but here the likeness to his parents ended, for he had a sensitive nature and a delicate frame--things hitherto unknown in Green Highlands. This did not matter so much during his childhood, when he earned golden opinions from rector and schoolmaster in Danecross, as a fine scholar, and one of the best boys in the choir; but the time came when Frank was thirteen, when he had gone through all the "Standards," when he must leave school, and begin to work for his living. It was a hard apprenticeship, for something quite different from brain-work was needed now, and the boy struggled vainly against his physical weakness. It was a state of things so entirely incomprehensible to Mr Darvell, that, as he expressed it, "it fairly haggled him." Weakness and delicacy were conditions entirely unknown to him and all his other relations, and might, he thought, be avoided by everyone except very old people and women; so Frank must be hardened, and taught not to