“True enough, sure!” chimed in a third.
“We be sarry for ’ee,” summed up a fourth; “aye, we be very sarry for ’ee, Joseph, but ’tis the onfart’nate natur’ o’ things as pore folks d’ have to do the best they can.”
Then, amid a general chorus of regretful approval, spades were plied, and backs were bent as before.
Joe shambled back to the gate again, and stood for some time leaning over it and staring at the toilers. His face was very red, and his loose irregular under-lip trembled. A few furtive glances were cast in his direction, but no one spoke, and after a time he turned and went down the lane again, his bent form, clad in its shabby white coat, travelling slowly past gap after gap in the hedge until it drifted out of the range of vision of the workers. As he walked, however, his heart was hot within him with rage and disappointment and a bitter sense of injustice.
“They’ll lave me to starve,” he said to himself; “an’ I’ve a-lived among ’em for seventy-five year.”
His sense of injury deepened each time that he recalled this fact, and he shook his head vengefully.
As he tottered on his resentment gradually suggested to him a startling plan of action. He thought of it all the way down the lane and across the road, and along by the tithe-barn and the church, and by the time he came to the horse-pond his mind was made up.
“A man must live,” he said. “If other folks won’t help en he must help hisself.”
There was a fine moon that night, and had any one been abroad an hour or so after midnight, he would have marked a white shape creeping slowly up the lane which led to the allotments, and presently entering in at the gate already described, and moving from one newly planted patch of ground to another.
“Only three from Ed’ard because he’ve a-spoke me fair,” murmured Joseph to himself; “an’ I’ll not take ’em altogether, neither. I wouldn’t lave the pore chap wi’ a great gap in the rank.”