Our Frank | Page 2

industrious
hands, gave an air of comfort to the room, though the floor was
red-brick and bare of carpet; a tall 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