“You’re bound to stamp all deeds,” struck in the agent sullenly, realising that he was likely to undergo a severe snub for his ill-conditioned idiocy.
“We are bound to supply you with the stamps, Mr Tasker,” returned Mr Van Stolz, “but we are not bound to lick them for you. Therefore, if you want it done, you must do it yourself.”
The agent stared, then looked foolish.
“Can I change these for a 2 pound one, then?” he growled, but quite crestfallen.
“Well, you can this time; but we are not even bound to change them for you, once they have been delivered. You can oblige Mr Tasker in this way, Mr Musgrave.”
“Certainly,” said Roden blandly, and, the exchange being effected, the agent departed.
“It would have served him right to have made him pay for another stamp, Musgrave,” chuckled the magistrate, when they were alone together. “But the poor devil is generally so hard up that it’s doubtful if he could have mustered another 2 pounds.”
Now the foregoing incidents were only two out of many; which went to show that, if a man was unpopular in Doppersdorp, it was not necessarily his own fault.
Still there were some, though few, by whom Roden was well liked. Among these was Father O’Driscoll, the priest who shepherded the scanty and scattered Catholic inhabitants of the town and district, a genial and kindly-natured old man, and by reason of those qualities widely popular, even with some of the surrounding Boers, whose traditional detestation of the creed he represented it would be impossible to exaggerate. A native of Cork, and in his younger days a keen sportsman, it was with unbounded delight he discovered that the new official was well acquainted with a considerable section of his own country and the fishing streams thereof—and frequent were the evenings which these two would spend together, over a steaming tumbler of punch, killing afresh many a big salmon in Shannon, or Blackwater, or Lee. And with sparkling eyes the old priest would disinter brown and weather-beaten fly-books, turning over, almost reverently, the soiled parchment leaves, where musty relics of the insidious gauds which had lured many a noble fish to its undoing still hung together to carry back his mind to the far, far past.