“Let him go. Fine morning, isn’t it?”
But Caleb held on sturdily by the pony’s bridle, and thrust the piece back with an air of sturdy independence.
“No, thankye, sir,” he said. “Me and my mates don’t want paying by a gentleman as comes to help one of us. ’Sides which, we’re a-going to pay you; aren’t we, lads?”
“Ay, that’s so,” growled the others. “Don’t take it.”
With the cleverness of a pickpocket, but the reverse action—say of a negative and not a positive pickpocket—the florin was thrust into Oldroyd’s vest, and the man drew back, leaving the doctor to pursue his way.
“Poachers even are not so black as they are painted,” he said to himself as he cantered along, and then he fell to thinking of the girl he had seen that morning. “They’ve better daughters than you would have suspected, more affectionate wives, the best of neighbours, and companions as honest and faithful as one could wish; and, all the while, they are a set of confounded scoundrels and thieves, for it’s just as dishonest to shoot and steal a man’s carefully-raised foreign birds—his pheasants—as it is to break into a hen-roost. As to partridges and hares, of course they are wild things; but, so long as they lived and bred on one’s land, they must be as genuine property as the apples and pears that grow upon a fellow’s trees. Yes, poachers are thieves; and I daresay my friend there, with the shot-hole in his body, is as great a scoundrel as the worst.”
He laughed as he cantered along the soft green beside the road.
“My practice is improving. I shall have my connection amongst the rogues and vagabonds mightily increased, for I certainly shall not go and inform the police: not my business to do that. They’re punished enough, even if I pull him through. And I shall,” he said aloud. “I must and will, for the sake of his pretty daughter. I wonder whether they’ll pay me after all,” he went on, as the pony ambled over the grass, and the naturally sordid ideas of the man often pressed for money and struggling for his income, came uppermost. “When people are in the first throes of excitement and gratitude for the help Doctor Bolus has rendered them, they almost worship him, and they’ll give, or rather they will promise, anything; but when time has had his turn, and the gratitude has begun to cool, it’s a different thing altogether; and, last of all, when the bill goes in—oh dear, for poor human nature, if the case had been left alone, A, B, C, or D would have got better without help.
“Well, never mind,” he said merrily, for the refreshment and the delicious morning air were telling upon his spirits, “the world goes round and round all the same, and human nature is one of the things that cannot be changed.”
He had to turn the pony out on to the road here, for the long green strands of the brambles were hanging right out over the grass, and catching at his legs as he cantered by. The soft mists were floating away as he began to descend the hilly slope, still at his feet the landscape seemed to be half hidden by clouds, through which hillocks, and hedge, and trees were visible, with here and there a house or a brown patch of the rough common land; and right away on the other side, stood up, grim and depressing of aspect, the ugly brick house upon the big hillock of sand, with the various and grim-looking edifices that Moray Alleyne had raised. Forming a background were the sombre fir trees with the column-topped slope and hill; and, even at that distance, he could make out, here and there, portions of the sandy lane that skirted the pine slope, which formed so striking an object in the surrounding landscape.