The Cranston gardener, who had obtained his position of awe among the little community of his colleagues and dependents by mere bluster and bullying, was an arrant coward at heart, and simply dared not repeat his remarks.
“But, my dear sir,” began the other insinuatingly, cutting him short in the middle of a whining speech about poor men being denied their rights—“my dear sir, don’t you see—”
“I’m afraid not,” was the imperturbable reply. “At least I see this—that no good will come of discussing the concern any further. But—eh—by the way, Johnston, you didn’t poke at the dog at all—with a stick, for instance, did you?”
The man’s face changed colour, and Eustace, who was watching him narrowly, detected it at once. It was only a random shot, but it had evidently hit the mark.
“Ah! well,” he went on carelessly, “in any case it doesn’t much matter. And now, I suppose, we have nothing further to discuss. So I’ll say good-day—”
Both men stood irresolute for a moment. Then they turned to go.
“Aweel, sir, it’s a queer warrld,” said Johnston, “and, of course, we must just help each other. An’ if ever I get a chance o’ doing you a good turn I hope I’ll do it.”
“That I’m sure you will, Johnston,” carelessly assented Eustace, fully alive to the irony and veiled vow of vengeance in this speech, and hardly able to contain his mirth, so comic was the expression of baffled malice which the man strove to conceal. “Well, good-day, again!”
“Eusty,” said his sister, when they were out of earshot. “You’d better look out. I’m sure that horrid man will have his revenge, somehow.”
“Pooh! A couple of mean-spirited cads. For two pins I’d have chucked the pair of ’em into the fish-pond. The impudence of the dogs! The very sight of them evoked in me what old Medlicott defined in his sermon the other night as ‘a surging of the worst passions of our fallen human nature.’”