She turned to Will. “Do run after her—the men are so busy—she can’t be far, and she has to stop every now and again.”
He glared at her. Then something inside him whispered that that was the obvious thing to do—impishly to pretend to obey her, and then to keep her waiting for the drumstick—eternally. Yes, he would be revenged on behalf of his sex.
“Yoicks! Tally-ho!” he cried with an advent of glee that he felt justifiably malicious. And, waving his own stick wildly, he bounded with mock frenzy towards the field gate by which the cart had gone off.
“You won’t catch her like that,” bawled Miss Flippance after him. “Across the fields! Head her off!” But he would not take orders from any woman, he told himself, so feigning deafness he ran doggedly into the Long Bradmarsh road, and turning a sharp elbow, felt his heart leap up to see the now familiar cart at a standstill before a wayside cottage. But even as he gazed it started afresh.
He tore on madly. The back of the tilt vanished round another bend. “Following a drumstick” passed grotesquely across his mind. What an odd home-coming! What a queer renewal of acquaintance with Jinny—after that solemn oath-taking in the wagon!
Presently he heard a wild scampering through the bushes on his right, and his canine friend of the inn was leaping and frisking and joyously barking beside him. They ran together—owing to the dog’s leisurely tangents and curvatures he could just keep up with it. But with the sweat now pouring from his forehead, the inner imp began asking what he was running for, since he had already deceived and chastised Miss Flippance, left her eternally expectant. Why not now drop into the pleasant saunter home he had planned?
But the poor dog was panting in this heat—he answered the imp—it must have run miles since its meal in the parlour. Apoplexy threatened perhaps, hydrophobia even. Look at its lolling tongue! He snatched it up: it must be restored to its inconsiderate mistress, to whom, at the same time, a still more important rebuke could be administered, if indeed any vestiges of decency yet remained in the minx. But the little terrier struggled spasmodically in his arms—the ungrateful brute! He must save it from itself, then, just as he must save its mistress from herself. Clamping it to his breast with iron muscles, he toiled frenziedly forwards. Then the far, faint sound of a horn came like elfin mocking laughter on the sultry air, and with a sudden convulsion the animal wrested itself free, and Will was left hopelessly pursuing, not the cart, but the dog. He had indeed the pleasure of seeing the former slacken to receive the latter, but the vehicle was wafted away again so smoothly that to the poor perspiring pedestrian Methusalem appeared in his original Mazeppa rôle.
The chase ran along wide horizons—great ploughed lands or meadows with grazing cattle—the level broken only by ricks, roofs, and trees, mainly witch-elms, with a few poplars. Sometimes these elms clustered in groves, sometimes a few helped to make the hedge-line; as often they rose solitary in arrogant individualism. To the right was a delicious sense of the saltings and of mewing sea-birds; and mysteriously, as in the heart of the fields, red-brown barge sails or the tall, bare poles of vessels could be seen upstanding. And once where the road mounted, Will caught a glimpse of the Blackwater, and ships floating, and the dim, blue shore beyond.
But at the top of this hill he was too breathed to continue. He sat down, wiped his forehead, and surveyed the view; far from soothed, however, by its simple restfulness. If only his father had come to meet him, as his letter had requested, he thought savagely, all this wouldn’t have happened!