She and her husband, an old army sergeant who was all through the Indian
Mutiny, are two very remarkable people; they keep a public-house where we
often get our beer when out for our Sunday walk. She owns to
sixty-seven, I should think she was a full seventy-five, and her husband,
say, sixty-five. She is a tall, raw-boned Gothic woman with a strong
family likeness to the crooked old crusader who lies in the church
transept, and one would expect to find her body scrawled over with dates
ranging from 400 years ago to the present time, just as the marble figure
itself is. She has a great beard and moustaches and three projecting
teeth in her lower jaw but no more in any part of her mouth. She moves
slowly and is always a little in liquor besides being singularly dirty in
her person. Her husband is like unto her.
For all this they are hard-working industrious people, keep no servant,
pay cash for everything, are clearly going up rather than down in the
world and live well. She always shows us what she is going to have for
dinner and it is excellent—“And I made the stuffing over night and the
gravy first thing this morning.” Each time we go we find the house a
little more done up. She dotes on Mr. Hicks—we never go there without
her wedding day being referred to. She has earned her own living ever
since she was ten years old, and lived twenty-nine and a half years in
the house from which Mr. Hicks married her. “I am as happy,” she said,
“as the day is long.” She dearly loves a joke and a little flirtation.
I always say something perhaps a little impudently broad to her and she
likes it extremely. Last time she sailed smilingly out of the room,
doubtless to tell Mr. Hicks, and came back still smiling.
When we come we find her as though she had lien among the pots, but as
soon as she has given us our beer, she goes upstairs and puts on a cap
and a clean apron and washes her face—that is to say, she washes a round
piece in the middle of her face, leaving a great glory of dirt showing
all round it. It is plain the pair are respected by the manner in which
all who come in treat them.
Last time we were there she said she hoped she should not die yet.
“You see,” she said, “I am beginning now to know how to live.”
These were her own words and, considering the circumstances under which
they were spoken, they are enough to stamp the speaker as a remarkable
woman. She has got as much from age and lost as little from youth as
woman can well do. Nevertheless, to look at, she is like one of the
witches in _Macbeth_.