The Cricket on the Hearth | Page 7

behind the cart just now; and though they give more trouble, perhaps, still they pay as well; so we have no reason to grumble, have we? Besides, you have been delivering, I dare say, as you came along?"
"Oh, yes!" John said. "A good many."
"Why, what's this round box? Heart alive, John, it's a wedding-cake!"
"Leave a woman alone to find out that," said John admiringly. "Now, a man would never have thought of it! Whereas, it's my belief that if you was to pack a wedding-cake up in a tea-chest, or a turn-up bedstead, or a pickled-salmon keg, or any unlikely thing, a woman would be sure to find it out directly. Yes; I called for it at the pastrycook's."
"And it weighs I don't know what--whole hundredweights!" cried Dot, making a great demonstration of trying to lift it. "Whose is it, John? Where is it going?"
"Read the writing on the other side," said John.
"Why, John! My Goodness, John!"
"Ah! who'd have thought it?" John returned.
"You never mean to say," pursued Dot, sitting on the floor and shaking her head at him, "that it's Gruff and Tackleton the toymaker!"
John nodded.
Mrs. Peerybingle nodded also, fifty times at least. Not in assent--in dumb and pitying amazement; screwing up her lips, the while, with all their little force (they were never made for screwing up; I am clear of that), and looking the good Carrier through and through, in her abstraction. Miss Slowboy, in the meantime, who had a mechanical power of reproducing scraps of current conversation for the delectation of the baby, with all the sense struck out of them, and all the nouns changed into the plural number, inquired aloud of that young creature, Was it Gruffs and Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at Pastrycooks for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes when its fathers brought them home; and so on.
"And that is really to come about!" said Dot. "Why, she and I were girls at school together, John."
He might have been thinking of her, or nearly thinking of her, perhaps, as she was in that same school-time. He looked upon her with a thoughtful pleasure, but he made no answer.
"And he's as old! As unlike her!--Why, how many years older than you is Gruff and Tackleton, John?"
"How many more cups of tea shall I drink to-night, at one sitting, than Gruff and Tackleton ever took in four, I wonder?" replied John good-humouredly, as he drew a chair to the round table, and began at the cold ham. "As to eating, I eat but little; but that little I enjoy, Dot."
Even this, his usual sentiment at meal-times, one of his innocent delusions (for his appetite was always obstinate, and flatly contradicted him), awoke no smile in the face of his little wife, who stood among the parcels, pushing the cake-box slowly from her with her foot, and never once looked, though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her and rapped the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place behind the tea-board, laughing at her negligence. But not as she had laughed before. The manner and the music were quite changed.
The Cricket, too, had stopped. Somehow, the room was not so cheerful as it had been. Nothing like it.
"So, these are all the parcels, are they, John?" she said, breaking a long silence, which the honest Carrier had devoted to the practical illustration of one part of his favourite sentiment--certainly enjoying what he ate, if it couldn't be admitted that he ate but little. "So these are all the parcels, are they, John?"
"That's all," said John. "Why--no--I"--laying down his knife and fork, and taking a long breath--"I declare--I've clean forgotten the old gentleman!"
"The old gentleman?"
"In the cart," said John. "He was asleep among the straw, the last time I saw him. I've very nearly remembered him, twice, since I came in; but he went out of my head again. Halloa! Yahip there! Rouse up! That's my hearty!"
John said these latter words outside the door, whither he had hurried with the candle in his hand.
Miss Slowboy, conscious of some mysterious reference to The Old Gentleman, and connecting, in her mystified imagination, certain associations of a religious nature with the phrase, was so disturbed, that hastily rising from the low chair by the fire to seek protection near the skirt of her mistress, and coming into contact, as she crossed the doorway, with an ancient Stranger, she instinctively made a charge or butt at him with the only offensive instrument within her reach.