“I fear me, Joseph, that you must go saddle your horse in a minute. I shall be wanting you to take a message to a certain place I wot of.”
The landlord pulled forth his watch and began to count the seconds dramatically. The woman seemed petrified to stone.
“I ask you for the last time, madam, what you know of this fellow,” said the implacable landlord. “Refuse to tell me, and it is your unhappy husband, not yourself, who pays the price.”
None knew more perfectly than the landlord how to torture her. Again he had the wretched creature on her knees before him; and again he had the privilege of laughing in her face.
“Rise, madam,” said Will Jackson.
The landlord turned towards him and gazed at him in blank astonishment. It was not so much the drawer’s words, audacious as they were, that had this electrical effect on Gamaliel Hooker. It was the manner of their utterance. They were spoken in a full, calm voice, quiet and self-contained, and one that sounded mighty odd from the mouth of a servant. For, above all, it had a tone that even a bold man would have found it hard to disobey.
“Rise, madam,” said the serving-man, and, bending forward towards her, he assisted her to do so.
She trembled so violently when she got upon her feet that she could hardly stand. But she kept her face averted from the audacious servitor in a singularly painful way. She seemed afraid to look at him.
“We will have done with play-acting, if you please,” said the drawer, addressing his master, but, strangely enough, in the same authoritative voice. “After all, is it not a little vulgar, and a little cowardly?”
The astonished landlord spluttered out a string of oaths. But he was almost inarticulate with anger and bewilderment. A frank sparkle of amusement showed at the same time in Will Jackson’s eyes. The transformation of his voice was extending to his face; nay, to his person and his bearing too. Where a minute ago there had been stolid inanimation and indifference, were intelligence and vivacity. Where there had been lumpishness and awkwardness of gait, were graciousness and breeding. The fellow still wore his coarse rustic clothes, his face was still bedaubed with dirt, but he was no longer the same person. The landlord was slowly beginning to recognise the fact.