“Please I’ve brought Sarah Jane Filler’s school money.” Then there were calls from a couple of itinerant vendors of wonderfully-got-up illustrated works, published in shilling and half-crown parts, to be continued to infinity, if the purchaser did not grow weary and give them up.
At last there came a more decided knock than any of the others, and Hazel’s heart seemed to stand still. She knew, without telling, that it was the churchwarden, and she was in no wise surprised at seeing him walk in with his hat on, without waiting to have the door opened, but displaying a certain amount of proprietorship only to be expected from an official of the church.
Mr Piper was the principal grocer of Plumton, and in addition to the sale of what he called “grosheries,” he dealt largely in cake—not the cake made with caraways or currants, but linseed oil-cake, bought by the farmers for fattening cattle and giving a help to the sheep. Mr Piper “did a little,” too, in corn, buying a lot now and then when it was cheap, and keeping it till it was dear. There were many other things in which Mr Piper “did a little,” but they were always bits of trading that meant making money; so that take him altogether, he was what people call “a warm man,” one who buttoned up his breeches-pockets tightly, and slapped them, as much as to say, “I don’t care a pin for a soul—I’m too independent for that.”
This was the gentleman who, tightly buttoned up in his best coat, and looking, all the same, as if he still had his shop-apron tied, walked importantly into the school with his hat on, and nodded shortly as the girls began to rise and make bobs, the curtseys being addressed to the broadcloth coat more than to Mr Piper himself, a gentleman of whom all the elder girls had bought sweets, and who was associated in their minds with the rattling and clinking of copper scales with their weights. For a goodly sum per annum was expended by the Plumton school children in delicacies, a fact due to the kindness of Mr William Forth Burge, who always went down the town with half-a-crown’s worth of the cleanest halfpennies he could get, a large supply of which was always kept for him by Mr Piper’s young man, who even went so far as to give them a-shake-up in a large worsted stocking with some sand and a sprinkling of vitriol, knowing full well that these halfpence were pretty sure to come to him again in the course of trade.
It was, then, to Mr Piper’s best coat that the girls made their bobs, that gentleman being held in small respect. In fact as soon as he entered Feelier Potts went round her class, insisting upon every girl accurately toeing the line; and then, whispering “Don’t laugh,” she began to repeat the words of the national poet who wrote those touching, interrogative lines beginning, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” and finishing off with, “Please, Mr Piper, I want a pen’orth of pickled peppers.”
“’Morning, Miss Thorne,” said Mr Piper importantly, and speaking in his best-coat voice, which was loud and brassy, and very different to his mild, insinuating, “what’s-the-next-article, ma’am, yes-it-is-a-fine-morning” voice, which was used behind the counter, and went with a smile.
“She ain’t ready with that money, I’ll lay a crown,” said Mr Piper to himself. Then aloud—“I have been getting Mr Chute’s school pence, Miss Thorne, to put in my accounts. I always collect the school money once a year.”
Just then the school-door opened quietly, unheard by Hazel and the churchwarden, and also unnoticed by Miss Feelier Potts, who, forgetting all promises of amendment, was delighting her class by asking Mr Piper in a low voice for half-ounces and pen’orths of all sorts of impossible articles suggested by her active young brain, beginning with sugared soap, and on through boiled blacklead to peppermint mopsticks.
The terrible moment had come, and Hazel said, as firmly as she could—
“I am not ready with the accounts, Mr Piper; but I will see to them at once, and—”