CHAPTER XXIII
HOW GEORGE POTTER CIRCUMVENTED THE PREVENTIVES
Since that dim, far-distant day when pious hands first raised Alfriston Cross, it has endured much by stress of weather and the passing of so very many years. In its shadow may have stood Godwyn the great Jarl, and his feoffman Aelfric; about it lusty Saxon ceorls bartered and trafficked; past it may have reeled some of the bloody wrack of Harold’s army, desperate men weary from the fatal strife at Senlac. Here has it stood through the centuries, lashed by rain and wind, or drowsing in the sun, while England waxed great and powerful. And as it doubtless was once the place where Aelfric’s ceorls and villeins bartered and chatted, so has it been a familiar spot for lounging confabulation ever since, and has propped the backs of “all sorts and conditions of men” through countless generations.
And of all this untold host surely never was there a back so suggestive of conscious innocence, of gently-assertive rectitude and of guileful guilelessness as the broad back of Mr. George Potter as he leaned there this summer’s eve in murmurous, monosyllabic converse with Master Tom Pursglove, the Tanner.
“Couldn’t nowise be no better, Jarge!” remarked Mr. Pursglove.
“Nohow!” responded Mr. Potter, his limpid gaze upon a gathering bank of clouds to windward.
“Black daark ’twill be, Jarge, an’ a risin’ wind t’ kiver the tramp o’ the ponies ’ooves.”
“Aye!”
“Yonder comes Godby at last, an’ along wi’ Joe Muddle, Jarge.”
“I sees ’em.”