"Spoke like a man!" cried the landlord, joyfully: "and so be it—before these witnesses."
Griffith turned on Carrick: "This house is mine. Get out on't, ye jealous, mischief-making cur." And he took him by the collar and dragged him furiously out of the place, and sent him whirling into the middle of the road; then ran back for his hat and flung it out after him.
This done, he sat down boiling, and his eyes roved fiercely round the room in search of some other antagonist. But his strength was so great, and his face so altered with this sudden spasm of reviving jealousy, that nobody cared to provoke him farther.
After a while, however, Harry Vint muttered, drily, "There goes one good customer."
Griffith took him up sternly: "If your debts are to be mine, your trade shall be mine too, that you had not the head to conduct."
"So be it, son-in-law," said the old man; "only you go so fast: you do take possession afore you pays the fee."
Griffith winced. "That shall be the last of your taunts, old man." He turned to the ostler, "Bill, give Black Dick his oats at sunrise: and in ten days at farthest I'll pay every shilling this house and farm do owe. Now, Master White, you'll put in hand a new sign-board for this inn; a fresh 'Packhorse,' and paint him jet black, with one white hoof (instead of chocolate), in honour of my nag Dick; and in place of Harry Vint you'll put in Thomas Leicester. See that is done against I come back, or come you here no more." Soon after this scene he retired to tell Mercy: and on his departure, the suppressed tongues went like mill-clacks.
Dick came round saddled at peep of day; but Mercy had been up more than an hour, and prepared her man's breakfast. She clung to him at parting, and cried a little; and whispered something in his ear, for nobody else to hear: it was an entreaty that he would not be long gone, lest he should be far from her in the hour of her peril.
Thereupon he promised her, and kissed her tenderly, and bade her be of good heart; and so rode away northwards with dogged resolution.
As soon as he was gone, Mercy's tears flowed without restraint.