“Better cut all that. You won’t tell me what you’ve come for, so I’ll tell you. You want me to promise not to move in this matter,—is that so?”
“Why, not ezackly. I want more ’n that. I never thought for a minute you would do it, now you’ve let the time pass so far. I knaw you’ll never act so ugly a paart now; but Will doan ’t, an’ he’ll never b’lieve me if I told un.”
The other made a sound, half growl, half mirthless laugh.
“You’ve taken it all for granted, then—you, who know more about what ’s in my mind than I do myself? You ’re a fond old man; and if you’d wanted to screw me up to the pitch of taking the necessary trouble, you couldn’t have gone a better way. I’ve been too busy to bother about the young rascal of late or he’d lie in gaol now.”
“Doan’t say no such vain things! D’ you think I caan’t read what your face speaks so plain? A man’s eyes tell the truth awftener than what his tongue does, for they ’m harder to break into lying. ’Tu busy’! You be foul to the very brainpan wi’ this job an’ you knaw it.”
“Is the hatred all on my side, d’ you suppose? Curse the brute to hell! And you’d have me eat humble-pie to the man who ’s wrecked my life?”
“No such thing at all. All the hatred be on your side. He’d forgived ’e clean. Even now, though you ’m fretting his guts to fiddlestrings because of waiting for ’e, he feels no malice—no more than the caged rat feels ’gainst the man as be carrying him, anyway.”
“You ’re wrong there. He’d kill me to-morrow. He let me know it. In a weak moment I asked him the other day how his mother was; and he turned upon me like a mad dog, and told me to keep his name off my lips, and said he’d have my life if I gave him up.”
“That’s coorious then, for he ’s hungry to give himself up, so soon as the auld woman ’s well again.”
“Talk! I suppose he sent you to whine for him?”