“No, no,” she explained. “The wedding breakfast with fashionable folk is only a sort of bever or elevener at earliest.”
He chuckled. “Ye’re gooin’ to be rich and fashionable—won’t it wex that jackanips! Oi suspicioned ’twas you he war arter the fust time he come gawmin’ to the stable. Ye can’t deceive Daniel Quarles. On your hands and knees, ye pirate thief!” He cracked his whip fiercely. “Up ye git, Jinny, ye’ve got to titivate yerself. Oi’ve put the water in your basin.”
“But Gran’fer,” she said, acutely distressed, “it’s not my wedding.”
“Not your wedding!”
“Of course not.”
“Then whose wedding be it?” he demanded angrily. “ ’Tain’t mine, seein’ as Oi’m too poor to keep Annie though she’s riddy of her rascal at last.” He seized her wrists and shook her. “Why did you lie to me and make a fool o’ me?”
So this was why Gran’fer had embraced her so effusively last night when she avowed her programme for the morrow; this was why he had given her blessings in lieu of the expected reproaches for her projected absence; this was why he had gone up to bed humming his long-silent song: “Oi’m seventeen come Sunday.”
It was a mistake, she felt now, to have stayed at home for his sake on the Friday, changing the immemorial day of absence. He had been strange all day, without grasping what was the cause of his unrest, and Nip’s parallel uneasiness had reacted upon him. It was not, however, till she had incautiously remarked that Methusalem too was off his feed, that he cried out in horror that she had forgotten to go on her rounds. Smilingly she assured him she had not forgotten: indeed the void in her whole being occasioned by the loss of Mother Gander’s gratis meal had been a gnawing reminder since midday. But imagining—and not indeed untruly—that her work was gone, he had burst into imprecations on “the pirate thief.”
As she sat up now on her mattress, helpless in her grief, her mind raced feverishly through the episode, recalling every word of the dialogue, unravelling his senile misapprehension; half wilful it seemed to her now, in his eagerness to clutch at happier times.
“It’s nothing to do with the coach competition, Gran’fer. It’s only because I’ve got to be out to-morrow for a wedding!”