“Danged if ye bain’t altered now, malster,” said a voice with the vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkably evident truism. It came from the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and spiteful ways were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he contributed to general laughs.
“Don’t ye play no more shepherd,” said Susan Tall’s husband, the young married man who had spoken once before. “I must be moving, and when there’s tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires. If I thought after I’d left that music was still playing, and I not there, I should be quite melancholy-like.”
“What’s yer hurry then, Laban?” inquired Coggan. “You used to bide as late as the latest.”
“Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she’s my vocation now, and so ye see. . . .” The young man halted lamely.
“New Lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose,” remarked Coggan, with a very compressed countenance; that the frigidity implied by this arrangement of facial muscles was not the true mood of his soul being only discernible from a private glimmer in the outer corner of one of his eyes—this eye being nearly closed, and the other only half open.
“Ay, ’a b’lieve—ha, ha!” said Susan Tall’s husband, in a tone intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding them at all. The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.
Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his glance alighted by accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass’s face.
“Oh—what’s the matter, what’s the matter, Henery?” said Joseph, starting back.
“What’s a-brewing, Henrey?” asked Jacob and Mark Clark.
“Baily Pennyways—Baily Pennyways—I said so; yes, I said so.”
“Stealing it is. The news is, that after Miss Everdene got home she went out again to see all was safe, as she usually do, and coming in found Baily Pennyways creeping down the granary steps with half a bushel of barley. She flewed at him like a cat—never such a tom-boy as she is—of course I speak with closed doors?”