“Well, you’ll have to spend the night on a chair. We’ve no beds here for strangers. ’Specially those as ain’t wanted.”
“Very well, my friend. Having settled the matter you may as well make yourself pleasant. Go out and put my horse under cover, and give him a feed of some sort—make a mash if you can.”
After giving the woman a quick glance as of warning, my scowling host lit a horn lantern, and went on the errand I suggested. I gladly sank into a chair, and warmed myself before a cheerful fire. The prospect of spending the night amid such discomfort was not alluring, but I had, at least, a roof over my head.
As a rule, the more churlish the nature, the more avaricious it is found to be. My promise of liberal remuneration was, after all, not without its effect upon the strange couple whose refusal to afford me refuge had so nearly endangered my life. They condescended to get me some tea and rough food. After I had disposed of all that, the man produced a bottle of gin. We filled our glasses, and then, with the aid of my pipe, I settled down to make the best of a night spent in a hard wooden chair.
I had come across strange people in my travels, but I have no hesitation in saying that my host was the sullenest, sulkiest, most boorish specimen of human nature I had as yet met with. In spite of his recent ill-treatment of me I was quite ready to establish matters on a friendly footing, and made several attempts to draw him into conversation. The brute would only answer in monosyllables, or often not answer at all. So I gave up talking as a bad job, and sat in silence, smoking and looking into the fire, thinking a good deal, it may be, of some one I should have met that morning at Lilymere had the wretched snow but kept off.
The long clock—that cumbrous eight-day machine which inevitably occupies one corner of every cottager’s kitchen—struck nine. The woman rose and left us. I concluded she was going to bed. If so, I envied her. Her husband showed no sign of retiring. He still sat over the fire, opposite me. By this time I was dreadfully tired: every bone in my body ached. The hard chair which an hour or two ago, seemed all I could desire, now scarcely came up to my ideas of the comfort I was justly entitled to claim. My sulky companion had been drinking silently but steadily. Perhaps the liquor he had poured into himself might have rendered his frame of mind more pleasant and amenable to reason.
“My good fellow,” I said, “your chairs are excellent ones of the kind, but deucedly uncomfortable. I am horribly tired. If the resources of your establishment can’t furnish a bed for me to sleep in, couldn’t you find a mattress or something to lay down before the fire?”
“You’ve got all you’ll get to-night,” he answered, knocking the ashes out his pipe.
“Oh, but I say!”
“So do I say. I say this: If you don’t like it you can leave it. We didn’t ask you to come.”