“Well, it ain’t. So I must just let it go by the run, and hope the parson, who’ll never know, would forgive me if he did.”
“Well, then, what is it?”
“It’s my opinion that that parson o’ ours—you see, we knows about it, Mr Weir, though we’re not gentlefolks—leastways, I’m none.”
“Now, what DO you mean, Old Rogers?”
“Well, I means this—as how parson’s in love. There, that’s paid out.”
“Suppose he was, I don’t see yet what business that is of yours or mine either.”
“Well, I do. I’d go to Davie Jones for that man.”
A heathenish expression, perhaps; but Weir assured me, with much amusement in his tone, that those were the very words Old Rogers used. Leaving the expression aside, will the reader think for a moment on the old man’s reasoning? My condition WAS his business; for he was ready to die for me! Ah! love does indeed make us all each other’s keeper, just as we were intended to be.
“But what CAN we do?” returned Weir.
Perhaps he was the less inclined to listen to the old man, that he was busy with a coffin for his daughter, who was lying dead down the street. And so my poor affairs were talked of over the coffin-planks. Well, well, it was no bad omen.