“And after you giving that old f——”—Sam checked himself—“body a whole ounce of your own tobacco only last week—it’s outrageous! But he has a niece stopping with him from Bardswell that’s a hot Primitive, and there you are!”
“Poor old chap, surely he has a right to do what he likes with his own apples—he can’t eat ’em, more’s the pity,” said Andy.
“He can!” retorted Sam. “Anybody can with a scoop made out of a mutton bone. But it’s the principle of the thing I hate.” He paused. “Then you won’t go to see him about it, sir?”
“Certainly not,” said Andy, returning to his work.
Sam closed the door and retreated thoughtfully down the passage.
The next morning—the day before the harvest festival—was one of those autumn mornings when the world seems full of a cool sparkle, and the sunshine is to summer sunshine as champagne a little iced is to some still, golden wine which you drink under heavy-leaved trees at a Spanish inn. There’s a quality in it that makes the dullest want to be a little jolly—and those who are jolly already, like young Sam Petch, feel a little drunk with the clear exhilaration of it. They are buoyantly ready for anything, and not to be beaten even by Fate or nieces who are hot Primitives safely in possession of a desired object.
Anyway this was how Sam felt as he picked up Andy’s fallen apples which were only tame green and yellow, and he meditated, whistling, on the lovely red clusters which hung in a little garden at the other end of the village.
By and by out came Mrs. Jebb, ostensibly to fetch apples for a pudding, but really for conversation and fresh air, for she too felt the prickling stir of this lovely autumn morning.
Sam’s eyes lightened and grew younger than ever under his grizzled mop as he caught sight of her, and after a moment of that tense quietude in which men await a growing, fine idea, he slapped his thigh and muttered—
“I’ve got it!”