Patrick looked out also and the view of the road outside was certainly rather singular. He was used to crowds, large and small, collecting outside houses which he had honoured with the sign of “The Old Ship,” but they generally stared up at it in unaffected wonder and amusement. But outside this open door, some twenty or thirty persons in what Pump had called their night-gowns were moving to and fro like somnambulists, apparently blind to the presence of the sign; looking at the other side of the road, looking at the horizon, looking at the clouds of morning; and only occasionally stopping to whisper to each other. But when the owner of the house called to one of these ostentatiously abstracted beings and asked him hoarsely what the devil was the matter, it was natural for the milk-fed one to turn his feeble eye toward the sign. The gooseberry eyes followed his, and the face to which they belonged was a study in apoplectic astonishment.
“What the hell have you done to my house?” he demanded. “Of course they can’t come in if this thing’s here.”
“I’ll take it down, if you like,” said Dalroy, stepping out and picking it up like a flower from the front garden (to the amazement of the men in the road, who thought they had strayed into a nursery fairy-tale), “but I wish, in return, you’d give me some idea of what the blazes all this means.”
“Wait till I’ve served these men,” replied his host.
The goat-garbed persons went very sheepishly (or goatishly) into the now signless building, and were rapidly served with raw spirits, which Mr. Pump suspected to be of no very superior quality. When the last goat was gone, Captain Dalroy said:
“I mean that all this seems to me topsy-turvy. I understood that as the law stands now, if there’s a sign they are allowed to drink and if there isn’t they aren’t.”
“The Law!” said the man, in a voice thick with scorn. “Do you think these poor brutes are afraid of the Law as they are of the Doctor?”
“Why should they be afraid of the Doctor?” asked Dalroy, innocently. “I always heard that Peaceways was a self-governing republic.”
“Self-governing be damned,” was the illiberal reply. “Don’t he own all the houses and could turn ’em out in a snow storm? Don’t ’e pay all the wages and could starve ’em stiff in a month? The Law!” And he snorted. A moment after he squared his elbows on the table and began to explain more fully.
“I was a brewer about here and had the biggest brewery in these parts. There were only two houses which didn’t belong to me, and the magistrates took away their licenses after a time. Ten years ago you could see Hugby’s Ales written beside every sign in the county. Then came these cursed Radicals, and our leader, Lord Ivywood, must go over to their side about it, and let this Doctor buy all the land under some new law that there shan’t be any pubs at all. And so my business is ruined so that he can sell his milk. Luckily I’d done pretty well before and had some compensation, of course; and I still do a fair trade on the Q.T., as you see. But of course that don’t amount to half the old one, for they’re afraid of old Meadows finding out. Snuffling old blighter!”