"What are you doing?" Tyson growled.
"Nothing much! Nothing much! You"ve not," looking up with greed in his eyes, "an old letter-back to spare?"
Tyson seldom came to the house unfurnished with one. He had long known that Hinkson belonged to the cla.s.s of misers who, if they can get a thing for nothing, are as well pleased with a sc.r.a.p of paper, a length of string, or a mouldy crust, as with a crown-piece. The poor land about the house, which with difficulty supported three or four cows, on the produce of which the Hinksons lived, might have been made profitable at the cost of some labour and a little money. But labour and money were withheld. And Tyson often doubted if the miser"s store were as large as rumour had it, or even if there were a store at all.
"Not that," he would add, "large or small, some one won"t cut his throat for it one day!"
He produced the old letter, and after showing it, held it behind him.
"What of the dog now?" he said.
"Na, na, I"ll not speak for that!"
"Then you won"t have it!"
But the old fellow only cackled superior.
"What"s--what"s--a pound-note a week? Is"t four pound a month?"
"Ay!" the doctor answered. "It is. That"s money, my lad!"
"Ay!"
The old man hugged himself, and rocked to and fro in an ecstasy.
"That"s money! And four pound a month," he consulted the stick he was notching, "is forty-eight pound a year?"
"And four to it," Tyson answered. "Who"s paying you that?"
"Na, na!"
"And what"s it to do with the dog?"
Hinkson looked knavish but frightened.
"Hist!" he said. "Here"s Bess. I"d use to wallop her, but now----"
"She wallops you," the visitor muttered. "That"s the ticket, I expect."
The girl entered by the mean staircase door and nodded to him coolly.
"I supposed it was you," she said slightingly.
And for the hundredth or two-hundredth time he felt with rage that he was in the presence of a stronger nature than his own. He could treat the old man, whose greed had survived his other pa.s.sions, and almost his faculties, pretty much as he pleased. But though he had sauntered through the gate a score of times with the intention of treating Bess as he had treated more than one village girl who pleased him, he had never re-crossed the threshold without a sense not only of defeat, but of inferiority. He came to strut, he remained to kneel.
He fought against that feeling now, calling his temper to his aid.
"What folly is this about the dog?" he asked.
"Father thinks," she replied demurely, "that if thieves come it can be heard better at the gate."
"Heard? I should think it could be heard in Bowness!"
"Just so."
"But your father----"
"Father!" sharply, "go to bed!" And then to the visitor, "Give him a ha"penny," she muttered. "He won"t go without!"
"But I don"t care----"
"I don"t care either--which of you goes!" she retorted. "But one of you goes."
Sullenly he produced a copper and put it in the old man"s quivering hand--not for the first time by several. Hinkson gripped it, and closing his hand upon it as if he feared it would be taken from him, he hobbled away, and disappeared behind the dingy hangings of the box-bed.
"And now what"s the mystery?" Tyson asked, seating himself on one of the stools.
"There is none," she answered, standing before him where the firelight fell on her dark face and gipsy beauty. "Call it a whim if you like.
Perhaps I don"t want my lads to come in till I"ve raddled my cheeks!
Or perhaps"--flippantly--"Oh, any "perhaps" you like!"
"I know no lad you have but me," he said.
"I don"t know one," she answered, seating herself on the settle, and bending forward with her elbows on her knees and her face between her hands. It was a common pose with her. "When I"ve a lad I want a man!"
she continued--"a man!"
"Don"t you call me a man?" he answered, his eyes taking their fill of her face.
"Of a sort." she rejoined disdainfully. "Of a sort. Good enough for here. But I shan"t live all my life here! D"you ever think what a G.o.d-forsaken corner this is, Tyson? Why, man, we are like mice in a dark cupboard, and know as much of the world!"
"What"s the world to us?" he asked. Her words and her ways were often a little beyond him.
"That"s it!" she answered, in a tone of contemptuous raillery. "What"s the world to us? We are here and not there. We must curtsey to parson and bob to curate, and mind our manners with the overseers! We must be proud if Madam inquires after our conduct, but we must not fancy that we are the same flesh and blood as she is! Ah, when I meet her," with sudden pa.s.sion, "and she looks at me to see if I am clean, I--do you know what I think of? Do you know what I dream of? Do you know what I hope"--she snapped her strong white teeth together--"ay, hope to see?"
"What?"
"What they saw twenty years ago in France--her white neck under the knife! That was what happened to her and her like there, I am told, and I wish it could happen here! And I"d knit, as girls knitted there, and counted the heads that fell into the baskets! When that time comes Madam won"t look to see if I am clean!"
He looked at her uncomfortably. He did not understand her.
"How the devil do you come to know these things?" he exclaimed. It was not the first time she had opened to him in this strain--not the first by several. And the sharp edge was gone from his astonishment. But she was not the less a riddle to him and a perplexity--a Sphinx, at once alluring and terrifying. "Who told you of them? What makes you think of them?" he repeated.
"Do you never think of them?" she retorted, leaning forward and fixing her eyes on his. "Do you never wonder why all the good things are for a few, and for the rest--a crust? Why the rector dines at the squire"s table and you dine in the steward"s room? Why the parson gives you a finger and thinks he stoops, and his ladies treat you as if you were dirt--only the apothecary? Why you are in one cla.s.s and they in another till the end of time?"
"D----n them!" he muttered, his face a dull red. She knew how to touch him on the raw.
"Do you never think of those things?" she asked.
"Well," he said, taking her up sullenly, "if I do?"