“He’s an ungrateful, ill-tempered fellow,” Elijah commented, picking up his bag, and changing his collar as he talked. “I don’t call him a gentleman. He can’t forgive that his arm was set by a vet., and he sits about like a broody hen. Asked me not to mention it, which, of course, as a gentleman, I won’t. What good do you suppose it would do me to have it known—I said to him—seeing I’ve already got the family connexion with Maria? But he got very cross,” Elijah wound up innocently, “though I said I wouldn’t even charge pig’s price, but would swap the fee and Maria’s too against his horses, provided I could recover the carcases.”
“I’ve got to stay here,” cried Martha, reappearing hysterically at the window. “He won’t come.”
“What nonsense!” cried Jinny, losing her temper. “We’ll all go and pull him out.”
“He’s locked himself in my bedroom—the one with the side window—you can’t get in from here.” She wrung her hands; these days of durance and danger had evidently told upon her nerves.
“I’ll smash the door in and his head too!” growled Ravens, his foot on the window-sill.
“No, no,” Jinny commanded, swinging herself suddenly past him. “You take your wife down, Mr. Flynt. She’s too excited. I’ll rout him out.”
Martha protested shrilly that where she had failed, a stranger could not succeed. No, she must stay with her boy, tend his poor arm! But the men overruled her and were returning her gently but firmly to the footboard of the cart when she cried desperately:
“Wait! Wait! I’ve forgotten something under my pillow.” “I’ll get it!” Jinny promised. “What is it?”
But Martha refused to say. It was very precious. It was in an envelope. It wasn’t for Jinny to see. In vain Jinny declared she wouldn’t open the envelope. Martha’s hysteric protests mingled with the frenzied cackling of the fowls that Ephraim Bidlake was still chasing.
Leaving the males to pacify Martha and deposit her in the cart, Jinny stooped under the barge-rope and threaded the litter betwixt the bed and the right-hand door—the other door, she knew, gave on the bedroom bisected by Frog Cottage. Pausing but a moment to look down the now literal well of the staircase, in which dead mice floated, she rapped imperiously at the connubial chamber under the gable.