He pointed to one of the beery glasses she had left still standing. Commonplace as the glass looked with its lees, she was glad he had not pointed at it the evening before in the weird moonlight with her brain full of the poor dead Dap.
“Don’t tell me!” she said in a voice she tried in vain to make stern. “It wasn’t Sidrach that was drinking with you. Who was it?”
“It was Sidrach, Oi’m tellin’ ye,” he protested. “Oi put out his beer with his tumbler and his chair to be ready soon as ye brought him back, he bein’ a rare one for his liquor. But the hours passed slow as a funeral crawl, it got owl-light and you not back, ne yet a rumble of your cart upon the road, so at last molloncholy-like Oi lights the lamp and makes a roaring fire and drinks by myself, and then Oi locks and bolts up and stoops down to put on another log, and when Oi looks up, there he sets in his chair in his best Sunday smock, all clean and white.”
She thrilled again.
“But how could he get in, if you’d locked up?”
“That’s what Oi says to him. ‘Good Lord, Sidrach,’ Oi says, ‘how did you get here?’ ‘Come in the coach from Che’msford,’ says he. ‘The coach,’ says Oi, wexed, ‘ye didn’t want to back up the jackanips what’s come competitioning here, and Jinny gone to fetch ye, too. But how did ye get through the door?’ Oi says. ‘You draw me some beer, Danny,’ says he. ‘For Oi count ye’ve finished the jug.’ So Oi goos to the kitchen with the jug, and there sure enough stands the door wide open—happen Oi hadn’t shut it good tightly—and there passin’ along the road by the Common Oi catches sight of the coach, lookin’ all black in the dusk and glidin’ away wery quiet, same as ashamed to be in our cart-racks. ‘You pirate thief,’ Oi says, shakin’ my fist at the driver, ‘ye’ll never come into this house save on your hands and knees.’ But when Oi goos back with my jug brimmin’ over, Sidrach warn’t there. ‘Sidrach!’ Oi calls, ‘Sidrach!’ No answer. Oi goos about beat out and crazy ’twixt here and the kitchen and then the clock strikes, and that remembers me to look in the tother room, and there Oi hears him chucklin’ to hisself in one of they big empty boxes ye left at home this marnin’. ‘Out ye come,’ says Oi, laughin’ too, for he was allus up to his pranks, was Sid. ‘And Oi’m proper glad to see you, old chap,’ Oi says. With that he comes out of his box, with a little o’ the dust on his white smock, and he hugs and coases me—wery cowld his hands and face was from the long jarney—and Oi drinks his health and he drinks mine, and we clinks they glasses together and has rare sport gammickin’ of the times when Oi was in my twenties and he taken me to see the cock-fightin’ and that old Christmas Day his dog won the silver spoon in the bear-baitin’ at ‘The Black Sheep,’ and Oi told him as Annie were free now but seein’ as he was come to stay, Oi dedn’t want nobody else and he needn’t be afeared he’d be tarned out ef Oi died, bein’ as Oi’d left the house to him by will and testament. ‘Little Danny,’ says he, ‘you’re a forthright brother, but no fear o’ the poorhouse for neither on us, for Oi was born with that silver spoon in my mouth, and Oi’ve got a stockin’ chock-full o’ gold,’ and he shows me it, hunderds of spade guineas, each with the head of Gearge III, fit to warm the cockles of your heart, and we clinked glasses agen and sang three-times-three, merry as grigs, and then the devil possesses him to pull out his pipe and baccar. ‘No, ye don’t,’ says Oi, ‘not for all the gold in Babylon,’ and Oi runs to pocket the flint and steel on the mantelpiece, and to block out the fire, and he laughs and howds his pipe over the lamp and draws like a demon. Oi rushes to the lamp and tarns it out and then back to the fire, but aldoe that give a goodish light, Sidrach, he warn’t there no more.” He was almost blubbering.
“But how did he look?” said Jinny, whose kindlings had long since slid from her apron.
“A hansum bonkka man, Oi keep tellin’ ye. Ain’t ye seen him nowhere? Where’s he got to? Just there he sat singin’ with his great old woice:
‘Two bony Frenchmen and one Portugee,
One jolly Englishman can lick all three.’ ”