Mr. Christopher Jennifer came to the kitchen in the middle of all this fussing over the child, with his bill and his hedging-gloves and his boots caked with muck. He was a short, round-headed man with bowed legs and a broad chest, and, after hearing the truth of it all from his wife, he laid the child solemnly and deliberately across his knee. “Come now, Chris, man, he ben’t fit for ye yet.”
“Oh, ben’t he? I reckon it will make him livelier nor cakes.”
And he began in the same stolid and unflurried fashion to lay one of his hedging-gloves across the child, till the sound of his roaring sent Death out with ignominy by the back door.
The chastening of youth attended to, Mr. Jennifer and his woman began to make a great to-do over John Gore and Mr. Pepys. The farmer took John Gore upstairs to the best bedroom, fetched out his Sabbath suit of gray cloth with the silver buttons, and gave his guest a change of stockings and of underwear. Then he went and mixed him a glass of hot toddy, remarking, with grave solemnity:
His wife Winnie bustled about the kitchen, banking up the fire with fagots till it roared in the black throat of the chimney, pulling out her best table linen from the press, and talking to Mr. Pepys all the time as though she had known him all her life. The Secretary was just the genial soul for such an adventure. He turned to very gallantly, and pressed himself into Mrs. Winnie’s service, tramping to and fro to the larder with her—a larder that smelled of herbs and ale, carrying mugs and platters of hollywood, a chine of bacon, and a round of beef. He even filled the big, black jack for her from the barrel in the dark corner, taking a good pull to his own content, and declaring that he pledged Mrs. Jennifer’s health.
The farmer came down-stairs carrying John Gore’s wet clothes, followed by that gentleman himself in Chris Jennifer’s Sabbath suit. Mr. Pepys looked at him quizzically, and bunched out his own vest with a significant wink. The farmer’s shoes were inches too big for the sea-captain, so that the heels clacked upon the bricks of the kitchen floor.
Mrs. Winnie hung the wet clothes before the fire, while her man stared at the table with the critical eyes of a host whose gratitude meant to prove its warmth by persuading his guests to overeat themselves.