He paused, slowly rubbed his hands, chuckled again, and, finally bending down so that his face was on a level with Sharpe’s, said slowly and emphatically:
‘Isaac, you’ll be a-hearing summat on Sunday as ’ull surprise ye.’
Isaac, who from force of habit had replaced his empty pipe in his mouth, now took it out, gaped at his interlocutor for a full half-minute, and finally said:
‘What be I a-goin’ to hear o’ Sunday?’
‘Banns! My banns,’ announced Fiander, triumphant, but shamefaced too.
‘What!’ ejaculated Isaac, in a tone of immeasurable disgust. ‘Ye be at it again, be ye? I never did see sich a man for wedlock. Why, this here ’ull make the third of ’em.’
‘Come,’ returned Elias plaintively, ‘that’s none of my fault. My missuses don’t last—that’s where ’t is. I did think the last ’un ’ud ha’ done my time, but she goes an’ drops off just at our busiest season. If I be so much o’ a marryin’ man, ’t is because the Lord in His mystreerious ways has seen fit to deal hardly wi’ I. Ye know as well as me, don’t ye, Isaac, as a dairy-farmer can’t get on nohow wi’out a wife.’
‘Aye, ’t is what I’ve always said,’ agreed Isaac. ‘There may be profit in the dairy-farming, but there’s a deal o’ risk. What wi’ cows dyin’, and bein’ forced to toll a woman about, ’t is more bother nor it’s worth. Why did n’t ye do same as me, and keep sheep and grow roots? Ah, what with roots, and what with corn, a man can get on as well that way as your way—and there’s less risk.’
‘Well, I’ve a-been brought up to it, d’ye see, Isaac—that’s it. My father was a dairyman before me—in a less way, to be sure. Ah, it were a struggle for him, I tell ye. He did ha’ to pay thirteen pound for every cow he rented of old Meatyard, what was master then. Thirteen pound! Think of that. Why, I used to hear him say as pounds and pounds went through his hands before he could count as he’d made a penny.’
‘Ah!’ remarked Mr. Sharpe, with the placid interest of one who hears an oft-told tale. But then pastures and house-rent and all were counted in that—your father paid no rent for ’em, did he? And Meatyard found him in cows, and kept him in hay and oil-cake and that?’