The men on the barge fished Blake out with ropes and a hook. He was none the worse evidently, for he climbed to his seat and started Florence homeward under a harsh hand.
Until then Mrs. Mearely had had the grace to resist the temptation to laugh. Now the storm took her, and shook her the worse for her repression. She laughed until she was so limp that she was obliged to hang on to the gate to keep from falling, and then she laughed until she was so limp that she could no longer hold to the gate. She collapsed in a bed of mignonette and sweet alyssum, green parasol and all, exactly as if some one had broken off a big bunch of lilac and tossed it there. In the end, she turned over on her side, laid her head on a white close-growing pillow of alyssum and wept quietly, because flesh and blood could bear no more.
Thus Blake found her, when dripping coachman and foaming mare stopped at the gate.
“By the Lud! Mrs. Mearely, mum, are ye in a swound? The dundered ’oss ’ll kill us all afore she’s contented.”
“No, Blake. I—I’m all right now,” Rosamond answered weakly. “What—what do you suppose is the matter with the mare?”
“The mare,” he exploded wrathfully. “Well, mare she may be, an’ mare she is; but a lady she ain’t, nor never will be! She’s a wicious, a indecent, an’ a cavortin’ female—an’ ’eadstrong, also, like all of her sect. I never saw a female of any specie that was wuth her salt; an’ they’re that irksome they wears a man out with chastisin’ of ’em. Soon as I’ve got a dry change on me, I’m a-goin’ to take this she-himp of Satan out to the farm; and I’ll give her such a what-for on the road as’ll tone down her ’abits, or I’m but a ol’ feeble liar.”
“You’ll bring Marquis back?”
“Ay, mum. Marquis is a gentleman. But I won’t be bringin’ ’im till to-morrow afternoon, or mebbe next day. It’s accordin’. Look at her—the deceiver! To see her now, you’d say she wouldn’t steal oats. Ugh! You ’ap’azard critter! Did you see what she done, mum? Did you see what she done to his honour, the Jodge—to his honour, Jodge Giffen? ‘As she got any rev’rence to her? Not a penn’orth! She prances on to the werry dignity of the Court, an’ rares up an’ bites his Sycle-hops. Ugh! You ’eretic! Bitin’ the werry dignity of the Court in his Sycle-hops!”
“Bites? Blake, what on earth do you mean?” She asked the question in trepidation, lest the strange word prove a disguise for some indelicacy, Blake being simple and rustic of speech.
“His Sycle-hops. His ’oss, mum. His brown ’oss is named ‘Seep-yer’—for the colour, he says; w’ich is some sort of a ’igh-tone joke befittin’ a Jodge, no doubt. An’ the flea-bitten w’ite he calls Sycle-hops, says he, account of him bein’ sech a ’uge ’oss an’ one eye a bit better’n t’other.” Mrs. Mearley’s recently acquired knowledge of mythology came to her aid.