Mrs Slee thrust a great slice of the tempting bread and butter into her husband’s hand, and his fingers clutched it fiercely.
“Yeat that—yeat that?” he cried. “Yeat the bread of a brutal, Church—established tyrant? Yeat the husks of his leavings? Never! I’d sooner—sooner—sooner—sooner—Yah!”
Mr Simeon Slee’s words came more and more slowly, as he prepared to dash the bread and butter down; but as his eyes rested upon the slice, he hesitated, and as he hesitated he fell, for the temptation was too great for the hungry hero. He uttered a kind of snarling ejaculation, and then treating the bread as if it were an enemy, he bit out of it a great semicircle, while throwing himself into a chair, he sat and ate slice after slice with bacon, in silence, washing all down with cups of tea.
Mr Slee stirred his tea with a fork-handle, for it was noticeable that the silver teaspoons had disappeared—a line of procedure adopted by Sim as soon as his hunger was appeased, for he had certain meetings of his brotherhood to attend, so he told his wife; and he did not return till late, his coming being announced by sundry stumbles in the passage, and a peculiar thickness of utterance, due doubtless to the exhaustion consequent upon many patriotic utterances at the hostelry known as the Bull for short—the Bull and Cucumber in fact.
Seekers for derivations of signs had puzzled themselves a good deal over the connection between a bull and that familiar gourd of the cucurbitaceae known as a cucumber. It is perhaps needless to add that the learned were baffled, but the incongruity was never noticed by the people of Dumford, and as their pronunciation of the sign was the Bull and Cow-cumber, the connection did not sound at all out of place.
Mr Selwood heard Sim return, and lay for some time listening to his patriotic utterances—fragments, in fact, of the speech he had delivered at the meeting—and it became very evident to the new occupant of the vicarage that life with Mr Simeon Slee beneath his roof would not be very pleasant.
“I don’t like the idea of turning out the poor woman, either,” he said to himself, as he lay turning from side to side, courting the rest that would not come.
“I’ve been a bit excited to-day, I suppose,” he muttered; and then he tried all the known recipes short of drugs for obtaining rest, from saying a speech backwards to getting out of bed and brushing his hair.
But sleep would not come till close upon morning, for that face before him was the sweet appealing face of Eve Pelly, and in the stillness of the night he seemed to be hearing her words again and again—“Don’t judge dear Richard harshly from what you saw this morning.”
“Dear Richard, dear Richard, dear Richard”—he found himself repeating over and over again. “And she loves him, and believes in him. He is everything to her, and if she found out that he was a scoundrel it would break her heart.”