Sink or Swim? A Novel (Complete)
9781465684936
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“If I hadn’t heard it from Mrs. Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who’s a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Honor Blake was English-born now, one wouldn’t blame him so much; but to choose a girl that comes of people who, as everyone knows, you can’t trust farther than you can see them, is what I call a sin and a shame.” The speaker was a woman of low stature, elderly, and sharp of voice and feature. She was seated at a round old-fashioned mahogany table, on which a teapot of the material known as Britannia metal steamed with a pleasant warmth, while the odour of buttered toast, “hot and hot,” filled the little room in which she and a chosen chum and gossip had met together to talk over the domestic affairs of their friends and neighbours. The name and title of the first-mentioned lady was Mrs. Thwaytes, and she, being at the present time a widow, and highly respected, kept a small general shop in an old-fashioned village, to which I shall give the name of Switcham. This village, situated near the grandest and most imposing of England’s rivers, could be reached by express train in something a little under an hour and a half from London. It was, considering this proximity, rather a behindhand village. Progress had not hitherto made any gigantic strides in the old-world-looking place, where not a single house was less than a century old, and where the aged inhabitants of the quiet spot had not as yet ceased to speak of crinoline as an abomination, and the absence (on young women’s heads) of that decent article called a cap as a sign and symbol of a lost and abandoned soul. The guest of the widow Thwaytes was qualified in many ways to be that highly-respected personage’s confidential friend and favourite gossip. A widow indeed she was, forlorn and desolate by her own account, but comfortable withal in outward circumstances, and possessed of a portly person, and a complexion indicative of good cheer and inward content. Mrs. Tamfrey, for that was the relict’s name, had been left (like the congenial friend above named) with an only daughter to solace her declining years; and, after duly casting that young woman upon her own resources as a domestic servant, she—the widow of the deceased Mr. Tamfrey, a journeyman carpenter in a comfortable way of business—had entered upon the attractive career of a monthly nurse. In this lucrative profession she had met with marked and flattering success. Endowed with a low voice, a caressing manner, and a universal fund of anecdote, as well as considerable powers of invention, “Mrs. Tam,” as she was habitually called, made her way very successfully among the matrons, young and middle-aged, of the district; and over a cup of a “woman’s best restorer, balmy tea,” the widow Tamfrey was very generally allowed to be—during the pauses between her professional engagements—very excellent company.
