He pulled up at the gate of a small farm, and asked Pamela to hold the mare while he went in. The farmer had a farrowing sow for sale.
She just clasped the slack reins. The farmhouse was so overgrown with fruit-trees and ivy that the mellow bricks were shrouded. By and by Jethro came swinging down the path, with a weak old man hobbling behind him. They went and leaned over the piggeries, which were on the left of the gate. She caught a word or two here and there; it was Greek to her. Jethro surveyed the huge black sow keenly before he closed the bargain. Then he swung open the gate in his familiar impetuous way, and just before he got up into the cart he turned to the old man and said with a kind of careless authority:
“You ought to get out of this. Sell up and go into lodgings. It isn’t good for a man to live alone.”
To Pamela he added in a bluff aside:
“Mansell has lost his missus.”
She leaned toward the straggling, shambling figure, and threw a faint smile of sympathy. He was a foolish-looking old man, with a face made more imbecile by a loose, slobbering lip and the short silvery spikes of a week-old beard. He began to pour out his misery and loneliness, perhaps because she, like his dead wife, was a woman.
“Missis died six months ago,” he said tremulously, as he twisted his dirty hands and gave his watery smile. “She was a good missis. But,” with a crowing cackle of laughter, “I was good, too. I never knocked her down, nor give her a black eye. I didn’t offen even scold her. Step inside.” His face and voice were eager. “I’d like you to have a look round.”
Pamela, oddly touched, said gently to Jethro:
“Let me go. You come too.”
They tied the mare to the gatepost, and went up the path to the brooding house in its tangle of ivy and its unpruned jungle of ancient plum-trees. The widower went first, chattering volubly all the time, his back bent, his hand heavy on the polished knob of his stick.