“’Tis very unseemly for a maid to talk so,” declared the stranger, gravely. “Them as flout spirits often have to pay an ugly reckoning.”
Others were also of this mind and Mr. Cramphorn gave instances.
“My stars! You’m makin’ me cream with fear, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Pearn, after supping full on their horrid recollections; “best to go up the hill, Jonathan Godbeer, an’ find the wench. ’Tis your work, seeing you’m tokened to her.”
The stranger started and cast a sharp glance where sat the man addressed. Merry Jonathan was a tall and square-built sailor with a curly head and an eye that looked all people squarely in the face. A crisp beard served to hide his true expression, and the cloak of a smile, usually to be found upon his lips, concealed the tremendous determination of his countenance. Indeed he habitually hid behind a mask of loud and somewhat senseless laughter. But those who served him at his secret work and in times of peril, knew a different Jonathan, not to be described as “Merry.” Now the man rose and grinned at the stranger amiably until his grey eyes were quite lost in rays of crinkled skin. He out-stared the other seafarer, as he made it a rule to out-stare all men; then he prepared to obey his future mother-in-law.
“Mustn’t let my sweetheart be drove daft by—” he began, when the inn door opened and a girl, with her hair fallen down her back and a terrified white face, appeared and almost dropped into Godbeer’s arms. “Gude powers! What’s the matter, my dear maid?” he cried. “Who’ve hurt ’e? Who’ve dared? Tell your Jonathan an’ he’ll smash the man like eggshells—if ’tis a man.”
Jenifer clung to him hysterically and her teeth chattered. They took her to the fire and her mother brought a tumbler of spirits and water at Mr. Cramphorn’s direction.
“Oh my God, I knawed how ’twould be,” wailed the old woman. “Her’ve seed what her didn’t ought, an’ now her’ll suffer for it!”
Jenifer was on her lover’s lap by the fire and tears at last came to her eyes. Then she wept bitterly and found her tongue.
“Put your arm around me,” she said; “close—close—Jonathan. I’ve seed it—Lady Emma’s death-coach—creeping awver the frozen ground up-along. It passed wi’in ten yards of where I was cutting cabbages, an’ never such cold I felt. It have got to my heart an’ I’ll die—I knaw it.”
“You might have been mistook, young woman,” said the blue-muzzled man, civilly; but she shook her head.