“Oh,” said Arthur, taking in his meaning.
“No; I don’t particularly care about Liverpool. Indeed, I rather think I should like anywhere else better.” For he realised that through the information which might not improbably be got sooner or later from Mr Winthrop, Liverpool would be the first place in which he would be sought.
“Indeed,” said the farmer.
“I had no reason for choosing Liverpool,” Arthur went on. “It was on the way to America; I suppose that was why I thought of it,” he added innocently.
“Just so,” ejaculated his companion. Then, after a few more puffs at his pipe and a few more scrutinising glances at Arthur between times, he proceeded with what he had to say. He had a daughter, it appeared, married to a draper, the draper of the little town of Greenwell, not many miles off. She, or her husband, or both of them, were in search of a young man to help in the shop, and they had confided their anxieties to their father, knowing that he had a journey of some days to make, and there was no saying but what he might come across the person they were looking for.
“Eliza, she won’t have none of the lads thereabouts,” he explained. “They’re roughish-like, and Eliza she thinks a deal o’ genteelness, does Eliza. It strikes me, young man, you’d please her for that. And it’d be a good home, if you were honest and industrious.” Here he stopped and looked at his companion.
Arthur’s face was still redder than before.
“A shop-boy,” he said to himself—“a shop-boy!” But aloud he only said quietly—
“I don’t know anything whatever of the sort of work it would be. Does not your son-in-law need some one who knows something about it?” The farmer scratched his head.
“You can write a good hand, I’m thinking,” he said; “and you can soon learn how to make out the accounts. It’s not that; it’s who’s to speak for you;” and he looked up again more scrutinisingly than heretofore in Arthur’s face. It did not grow the less red on that account. “I have no one to speak for me,” he replied haughtily; “so there’s no use thinking about it. All the same,” he went on, recollecting himself, I thank you very much, very much indeed. I’m very tired, and I think I’ll go to bed and, rising, he held out his hand, with the gentle courtesy innate in him, to the farmer, who grasped it heartily in his horny palm, with a friendly “Good night.”