Now, at Thorn, Simon Pinniger sat on a tree-stump in an out-house lazily splitting billets of wood with the axe edge of a pick. It was growing dusk, and a pile of white wood lay beside him, with here and there the pink core of an old apple trunk amid the billets of oak and ash. Simon Pinniger was tired of the job, and, filling a basket with split logs, he shouldered it and crossed the court-yard into the kitchen, and dumped the basket down beside the hearth with the air of a man whose day’s work was done.
The woman Nance was at the table, peeling apples for a pie, her lips pressed intently together, and three hard lines running across her forehead. The man looked at her a little furtively, and then went to draw some beer from a cask that stood in the corner. He put the jug on the floor under the tap, so that the ale should have a head on it, and stood there watching the liquor flow with the stupid slouching pose of a man whose body was too big for his brain.
The sharp rasp of the woman’s voice brought him round as though she had clouted him on the ear.
The red-lidded eyes behind the eyelet-holes in the linen looked capable of expressing nothing but fleshly things.
“Well, you’ll wait for it. Quick, you fool, the liquor’s running over.”
He turned and put a hand to the spigot, muttering as a rivulet of good ale curled across the floor.
“It’s always my tongue, Sim, and never your lumpishness. Wipe that slop up; I’m not going to soil my shoes in it.”
He obeyed her, and then sat himself on the three-legged stool before the fire, taking the jug with him, and standing it on the hearth.
“There’s comfort in the stuff,” he said, sullenly.
“Courage, you mean, you six feet and a half of fat and folly! You would run away from it all but for me.”
“You want a week of the branks, my dear. Give me my money and my liquor, and I’m the bully for any man.”
“Oh, you’re a fine fat falcon—you! Keep a little courage in the cask, Sim, till the business comes. Three days’ grace and no countermand. What’s it to be—a mattress, or a fathom of rope, or a soft scarf? What are you looking so sulky about?”
For the man had bunched himself over the fire, and was rocking backward and forward on two legs of the stool.