henceforward live on the ground floor and eat oaten cake and barley
bonnag and sleep alone in the cold room over the hall while Betsy Beauty
ate wheaten bread and apple tart and slept with her mother in the room
over the kitchen in which they always kept a fire.




FIFTH CHAPTER


The altered arrangements were a cause of grief to my mother, but I am
bound to confess that for me they had certain compensations. One of them
was the greater ease with which I could slip out to Tommy the Mate, who
had been a sailor before he was a gardener, and was still a fine old
salt, with grizzled beard and shaggy eyebrows, and a merry twinkle in
what he called his "starboard" eye.

I think Tommy was one of the few about my father's house who were really
fond of me, but perhaps that was mainly because he loathed aunt Bridget.
He used to call her the Big Woman, meaning that she was the master and
mistress of everything and everybody about the place. When he was told
of any special piece of her tyranny to servant or farmhand he used to
say: "Aw, well, she'll die for all"; and when he heard how she had
separated me from my mother, who had nothing else to love or live for,
he spat sideways out of his mouth and said:

"Our Big Woman is a wicked devil, I'm thinking, and I wouldn't trust
[shouldn't wonder] but she'll burn in hell."