We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the
thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah, so like our mother's!--averted
from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with
the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long
years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage--the mechanical
instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the
modelling hand--galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the
long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own
wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and
irrational persistence.
It is such a fond anxious mother's voice that you hear, as Lisbeth says,
"Well, my lad, it's gone seven by th' clock. Thee't allays stay till the
last child's born. Thee wants thy supper, I'll warrand. Where's Seth?
Gone arter some o's chapellin', I reckon?"
"Aye, aye, Seth's at no harm, mother, thee mayst be sure. But where's
father?" said Adam quickly, as he entered the house and glanced into the
room on the left hand, which was used as a workshop. "Hasn't he done the
coffin for Tholer? There's the stuff standing just as I left it this
morning."
"Done the coffin?" said Lisbeth, following him, and knitting
uninterruptedly, though she looked at her son very anxiously.
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