Bethia burst out crying. “Oh, Jacob,” she cried, “why couldn’t you have done it before? If you had asked me kindly—if you had told me to give up for your sake, I—I—I——”
She broke off, sobbing bitterly.
“’Tis true,” said Jacob regretfully, “I mid ha’ axed ye a bit softer—I mid ha’ spoke a bit more kind—but you did go and put my back up with stickin’ to the notion so obstinate. Says I to myself, ‘So soon as ever she gives in I’ll ax her—but she must give in’—and you wouldn’t. So then I thought—‘Dally! I’ll ax her first and then we’ll see.’ And then you go and put the law on me afore I’ve time to open my mouth.”
“Oh, Jacob! I waited a whole month,” protested Bethia, almost inarticulately; “and you never said anything, and I thought you didn’t care about me, and it seemed to be my duty.”
She covered her face with her hands. Jacob stared at her for a moment, and then suddenly slapped his thigh and burst into a roar of laughter.
“I d’ ’low the maid done it out o’ pique,” he cried ecstatically, “I d’ ’low she did! She did do it along of her feelin’s bein’ hurt with me a-holdin’ back so long. That’s a different story, my dear—a different story altogether! I bain’t one to bear malice along o’ that; ’twas but nat’ral arter all. E-es, I d’ ’low I be a terrible slow-coach; but, ye see, I’d a-got set i’ my bachelor ways, and it did take I a long time for to make up my mind; and then, as I do tell ’ee, I wur a-waitin’ and expectin’ for you to give in. But I’ve spoke now, and if you’ll say the word, my dear, all can be forgive and forgot.”
Bethia presumably did speak the word, for she resigned her post as tax-collector that very evening, and she and her Jacob were “asked in church” on the following Sunday.
As for that matter of the summons, it was settled “out of court”.
THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT.
Daniel Chaffey stood poised on a step-ladder nailing up the fine Gloire de Dijon rose which was trailed over the wall of his house. He had already performed the same operation for the jessamine which grew over the porch and for the purple clematis on the right of it. He had tied his dahlias so tightly and firmly to a variety of newly cut stakes, that each individual scarlet bloom reminded one in some measure of a choleric old gentleman suffering from a tight and high shirt-collar. He had scraped the little path till the cobble-stones of which it was composed stood revealed each almost in its entirety. From his exalted position he could survey the whole frontage of his own roof—a sight in which an artist would have revelled, for not only was the thatch itself mellowed by time and weather to the most exquisite variety of tones, but on its mouldering surface had sprung up a multitude of blooms, vying in brightness with those of the garden beneath—not merely your common everyday mosses and lichens, though patches of these were to be found in every shade of emerald and topaz and silver, but flowers, real flowers, seemed to thrive there; saxifrages, toad-flax, snap-dragon, and, just where the bedroom gable jutted out, a flaming bunch of poppies. It will be seen from this that Daniel Chaffey’s house was an old one; it bore a date over the door, cut roughly in the weather-beaten stone—1701. It had mullioned windows with diamond panes, and an oaken door studded with nails. It had indeed once been the village schoolhouse, though the Chaffey family had been in possession of it now for many generations, and had farmed, more or less successfully, the small holding attached to it.