He roused himself to greater attention when Simon reached the account of his interview with Mr. Dent. Accustomed as he was to more or less traditional behaviour under the traditional circumstances which govern such lives as his, he fastened at once on the puzzling attitude of the agent.
"It fair beats me what Mr. Dent could think he was at," he observed thoughtfully. "Once you'd settled to quit there was no sense in keeping you hanging on. Best make a job and ha' done wi' it, seems to me. 'Tisn't like Mr. Dent, neither, to carry on in such a fashion. I wonder what made him act so strange?"
Simon wore his original air of injured dignity as he leaned against the cow.
"Nay, I don't know, I'm sure, but he was terble queer! You might ha' thought he was badly or summat, but he seemed all right. Come to that, he looked as fit as a fiddle and as pleased as a punch! You might ha' thought he'd had a fortune left him, or the King's Crown!"
"Happen it was some private business," Will said, "and nowt to do wi' you at all.... What did you think o' doing when you've quit the farm?"
Simon poked the flags harder than ever, and from injured dignity sank to sulks. The sudden pressure of his arm moved the somnolent cow to a sharp kick. When he spoke it was in a surly tone, and with his eyes turned away from Will's.
"I'll have to get a job o' some sort, I reckon, to keep us going. I'm over old for most folk, but I could happen do odds and ends,--fetching milk and siding up, and a bit o' gardening and suchlike. The trouble is the missis won't be able to do for herself before so long. The doctor tellt her to-day she was going blind."
His brother's face filled at once with sympathy and dismay. In that forbidden compartment of his mind where he sometimes ventured to criticise his wife, he saw in a flash how she would take the news. This latest trouble of Sarah's would indeed be the summit of Eliza's triumph. Poverty Sarah had withstood; blindness she might have mastered, given time; but poverty and blindness combined would deliver her finally into the enemy's hand.
"I never thought it would be as bad as that," he murmured pityingly. "It's a bad business, is that! ... Didn't doctor say there was anything could be done?"
"There was summat about an operation, but it'll get no forrarder," Simon said. "They fancy things is hardly in Sarah's line."