“He axed me to come,” said Mary Jane.
“Did he? Then ’tis him you’ve got to thank, not me. ’Tis only by the mercy of Heaven he ban’t a murderer.”
“You’d better look after him, then,” said Mary Jane, thoughtful like, “for I’ve told un to kill your bull.”
“Let un,” answered Nicholas, very cunning. “I’ve a good mind to shoot the old devil myself for daring to run after you.”
Then Mrs. Arscott struck the iron while it was hot, an’ afore she left that farm parlour, Mary Jane had named the day!
’Twas rather a funny case of a chap over-reaching himself in a love affair. You see, Ben Pearn was so blessed soft-headed, that he couldn’t look on to the end of the game like any cleverer man might. He said to his silly self, ‘I’ll make her hate the chap, so she’d like to scratch his eyes out’; but he never seed that the end must be differ’nt; he never remembered that Nicholas Yelland had a tongue in his head same as other people.
So Ben was sent off with a flea in his ear, an’ the world laughed at him, an’ he changed his opinion about marriage an’ growed to be a hard an’ fast bachelor, an’ a very great lover of saving money. But as for Mary Jane, she did her husband a power of good an’ enlarged his mind every way. An’ when they got a family, young Yelland’s nature comed very well through the usual ups an’ downs of life. He fancied hisself less, an’ thought of his little people an’ his good lady first, an’ growed a bit more like his faither before him. Not, of course, that he was the man his faither was. But what chap ever be, for that matter? I never see none.
CROSS WAYS
CHAPTER I
There is a desolation that no natural scene has power to invoke. The labour of Nature’s thousand forces upon earth’s face may awaken awe before their enduring record, but can conjure no sense of sorrow; for high mountains, huge waste places and rivers calling shall make us feel small enough, not sad; but cast into the vast theatre some stone that marks a man’s grave, some ruined aboriginal hut or roofless cottage, some hypæthral meeting-place or arena of deserted human activity, and emotions rise to accentuate the scene. Henceforth the desert is peopled with ghosts of men and women; and their hopes and ambitions, their triumphs, and griefs glimmer out of dream pictures and tune the beholder to a sentiment of mournfulness.