Kit and Kitty. R. D. Blackmore
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Название: Kit and Kitty

Автор: R. D. Blackmore

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия:

isbn: 4064066233761

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СКАЧАТЬ quietly and are not flurried; and my good Uncle Corny possessed in his way every one of these elements of honesty.

      “Good morning, Mr. Orchardson!” said Rasp the baker. “What a pleasure it is to see a glimpse of sun at last! And what a fine colour these red bricks do give you!”

      “As good as the bakehouse,” said my Uncle shortly. “But look out where you are treading, Rasp. I want every one of them strawberry-runners. What brings you here? I am rather busy now.”

      “Well, I happened to see as your door was open, so I thought I’d just jog your memory, to have them potatoes put up in the dry, while I’ve got my copper lighted.”

      “Potatoes! Why, you would not have them, Rasp. You said fifteen pence a bushel was a deal too much, and potatoes were all water such a year as this. And now I’ve got a better customer.”

      “Well, it don’t matter much either way,” said the baker; “but I always took you, Mr. Orchardson, to be a man of your word, sir—a man of your word.”

      “So I am. But I know what my words are; and we came to no agreement. Your very last words were—‘A shilling, and no more.’ Can you deny that, Rasp?”

      “Well, I didn’t put it down, sir, and my memory plays tricks. But I told my wife that it was all settled; and she said, ‘Oh, I do like to deal with Mr. Orchardson, he gives such good measure.’ So I brought round the money in this little bag, thirty-seven shillings and sixpence. Never mind for a receipt, sir; everybody knows what you are.”

      “Yes, so they do,” answered Uncle Corny; “they’d rather believe me than you, Master baker. Now how much is flour gone up this morning, and floury potatoes to follow it? Never a chat goes out of my gate, under one and sixpence a bushel.”

      “This sort of thing is too much for me. There is something altogether wrong with the times. There is no living to be made out of them.” Mr. Rasp shook his head at the peaches on the wall, as if they were dainties he must not dare to look at.

      “Rasp, you shall have a peach,” declared my Uncle Corny, for he was a man who had come to a good deal of wisdom; “you shall have the best peach on the whole of this wall, and that means about the best in England. I will not be put out with you, Rasp, for making a fine effort to cheat me. You are a baker; and you cannot help it.”

      If any other man in Sunbury was proud of his honesty, so was Rasp; and taking this speech as a compliment to it, he smiled and pulled a paper-bag from his pocket, to receive the best peach on the wall for his wife.

      “What a difference one day’s sun has made! At one time I doubted if they would colour, for it is the worst summer I have known for many years. But they were all ready, as a maiden is to blush, when she expects her sweetheart’s name. With all my experience, I could scarcely have believed it; what a change since Saturday! But ‘live and learn’ is the gardener’s rule. Galande, the best peach of all, in my opinion, is not yet ripe; but Grosse Mignonne is, and though rather woolly in a year like ’57, it is first-rate in a cool season. Observe the red spots near the caudal cavity—why bless my heart, Rasp, I meant that for your wife!”

      “My wife has a very sad toothache to-day, and she would never forgive me if I made it worse. But what wonderful things they are to run!”

      This baker had a gentle streak of juice in either runnel of his chin, which was shaped like a well-fed fleur-de-lis; and he wiped it all dry with the face of the bag, upon which his own name was printed.

      “I knows a good thing, when I sees it; and that’s more than a woman in a hundred does. Don’t believe they can taste, or at least very few of them. Why, they’d sooner have tea than a glass of good beer! Howsoever, that’s nought to do with business. Mr. Orchardson, what’s your lowest figure? With a wall of fruit coming on like them, sixpence apiece and some thousands of them, you mustn’t be hard on a neighbour.”

      My Uncle sat down on his four-legged stool (which had bars across the feet, for fear of sinking, when the ground was spongy), and he pulled his bag of vamp-leather to the middle of his waistcoat, and felt for a shred and a nail. He had learned that it never ends in satisfaction, if a man grows excited in view of a bargain, or even shows any desire to deal. Then he put up his elbow, and tapped the nail in, without hitting it hard, as the ignorant do.

      “Come, I’ll make a fair offer,” the baker exclaimed, for he never let business do justice to itself; “an offer that you might call handsome, if you was looking at it in a large point of view. I’ll take fifty bushels at fifteen pence, pick ’em over myself, for the pigs and the men; and if any crusty people turn up, why here I am!”

      “Rasp, you make a very great mistake,” said my Uncle, turning round upon his stool, and confronting him with strong honesty, “if you suppose that I have anything to do with the use you make of my potatoes. I sell you my goods for the utmost I can get, and you take good care that it is very little. What you do with them afterwards is no concern of mine. I owe you no thanks, and you know me not from Adam the moment you have paid me. This is the doctrine of free-trade—you recognize everything, except men.”

      “Tell you what it is,” replied the baker; “sooner than vex you, Mr. Orchardson, I’ll give sixteen pence all round, just as they come out of the row. Who could say fairer than that now?”

      “Eighteen is the money. Not a farthing under. From all that I can hear, it will be twenty pence to-morrow. Why, here’s another fine peach fit to come! I shall send it to your wife, and tell her you ate hers.”

      The gardener merrily nailed away, while the baker was working his hands for nothing. “You would never do such a thing as that,” he said; “a single man have no call to understand a woman; but he knows what their nature is, or why did he avoid them? My wife is as good a woman as can be; but none of them was ever known to be quite perfect. If it must be eighteen, it must—and I’ll take fifty.”

      “Ah, couldn’t I tell you a bit of news?” said the baker, as he counted out the money. “You are such a silent man, Mr. Orchardson, that a man of the world is afraid of you. And the young fellow, your own nevvy—well, he may take after you in speech, but not about the ladies—ah, you never would believe it!”

      “Well, then, keep it to yourself, that’s all. I don’t want to hear a word against young Kit. And what’s more—if I heard fifty, I wouldn’t believe one of them.”

      “No more wouldn’t I. He’s as steady a young fellow as ever drove a tax-cart. And so quiet in his manners, why, you wouldn’t think that butter—”

      “His mother was a lady of birth and breeding. That’s where he gets his manners from; though there’s plenty in our family for folk that deserve them. Out with your news, man, whatever it is.”

      “Well, it don’t go again him much,” the baker replied, with some fear—for my Uncle’s face was stern, and the wall-hammer swung in his brown right hand; “and indeed you might take it the other way, if he had done it all on his road home from church. You know the bridge over the Halliford brook, or at least where it was, for it’s all washed away, as you heard very likely this morning. What right had your nevvy there, going on for dark?”

      My Uncle was a rather large-minded man; but without being loose, or superior. “Rasp, if it comes to that,” he said, “what right have you and I to be anywhere?”

      “That’s neither here nor there,” answered the baker, having always been a man of business; “but wherever I go, I pay my way. СКАЧАТЬ