Whenever the engraver turned up the croft to the shop of Cole the clogger, he took with him some morsel for Jacko Macacco, the magpie—a biscuit, a hard-boiled egg, or a bit of sugar. The bird knew his coming, and, indeed, would answer nobody’s whistle but his; and Monjoy had taught it scraps of songs. Among these was an air of which the words began, “I don’t like a Dutchman, I’m damned if I do”; and he would cry, “No more we do, Jacko; we may as well have it as they, eh?”
One morning he came into the shop, not thinking of the magpie, but whistling the air of Johnny Cope. The bird took to it, and after a couple of days (the merry clogger saw to that) the diminutive step of the supervisor down the croft was accompanied by a shrilly whistled, “Hey, Johnny Cope, are ye waukin yet?”
One Wednesday evening, nearing the end of March, when the weavers had “felled” for the morrow’s market, and Sally Northrop was run nearly on her feet getting ready beef and bread and cheese, a company sat in the red-curtained parlour of the “Pipes.” Every time the door opened the rich smell and crackling of a roasting joint came along the passage from the kitchen, and it had been remarked that the care of the inn was work for more than one pair of hands. Arthur Monjoy, a-straddle on a bench in the middle of the parlour, fanned his face with his foxskin cap, for the room had grown hot and he had been laughing. Matthew Moon, in a corner of the fireplace, was reading bills and letters at arm’s-length. John Raikes smoked stolidly opposite him. Some nine or ten others sat round on benches, or in the recess of the window, and Cope’s chair was drawn, as usual, up to the table.
As they talked in desultory fashion, there came along the passage a whistled stave of Johnny Cope. Cole the clogger entered, and he stood for a moment wondering at the laughter that greeted him. Then he bethought him and laughed also.
“Nay, I must ha’ picked it up from th’ bird,” he said, as he took his seat; and then, somebody else remarking that it was a good song for all that, the talk drifted to the never-stale subject of the ’45. (By the way, Scotland itself did not contain a more rampant Jacobite than Dooina Benn. Not that she knew politics from a crow’s nest, but because Charles Edward, passing through Carlisle, had stilled his bagpipes opposite the house of a lady brought to bed, and had sent her his salutations and compliments. “When did yon t’other piece o’ pork ever do aught like that?” Dooina would demand.)
All at once, when, among other matters, mention had been made of Hawley’s misadventure at Falkirk, the excise officer was seen to be chuckling extraordinarily to himself. His narrow shoulders heaved, he sobbed with his private mirth, and the whole parlour watched in amazement his soft convulsion of delight.
“Come, out with it, Cope!” Monjoy cried, and the exciseman gave a sigh, took off and wiped his glasses, and the edges of his battered purple lids shone with tears.
“Hn! hn! hn! hn! It must seem extraordinary to you, gentlemen, but—hn! hn!—once in a while I cannot resist these attacks. When you spoke of General Hawley—hn! hn!—I was put in mind of a very droll circumstance when he was in France. I will relate it. One day, being among certain of his officers, he said—just as I might have said that our friend who came in whistling was at the door—he said, ‘There is a spy coming in from the French army’—no more than that; hn! hn! And so the officers formed themselves into a hasty court-martial, and in a very little while (this is what made me laugh) the man was brought in—on a gallows! Hn! hn! he! he! ho! ho! ho!... A little grim, to be sure, grim and droll at the same time, eh? ‘Came in!’ Yes, he came in ... ah!”
There was something abominable, unnameable, in his relish of it, and for the moment he himself seemed disconcerted by the dead silence with which his story was received. He still chuckled nervously, as if to outface some hostile impression he had created; and in a minute Monjoy said quietly, glancing towards the door, “You have an extraordinary turn of humour, Cope.”
The heavy lids drooped, and Cope’s hand patted the air away from his cheek. “La, Mr. Monjoy!” he murmured; but before the gesture was completed, Matthew Moon had advanced to the table, his brows contracted.