Hilary was delighted to watch these things, so entirely new to him. He had that fatal gift of sliding into other people’s minds, and wondering what to do there. Not as a great poet has it (still reserving his own strength, and playing on the smaller nature kindly as he loves it), but simply as a child rejoices to play with other children. So that he entered eagerly into the sudden changes of John’s temper, according to the tone, the bidding, and, most of all, the importance of the customers that came to him. By this time the cherries were all sold out, having left no trace except some red splashes, where an over-ripe sieve had been bleeding. But the Kentish man still had some bushels of peas, and new potatoes, and bunches of coleworts, and early carrots, besides five or six dozens of creamy cauliflowers, and several scores of fine-hearted lettuce. Therefore he was dancing with great excitement up and down his van, for he could not bear to go home uncleared; and some of his shrewder customers saw that by waiting a little longer they would be likely to get things at half-price. Of course he was fully alive to this, and had done his best to hide surplus stock, by means of sacks, and mats, and empty bushels piled upon full ones.
“Crusty, thou must come down, old fellow,” cried a one-eyed costermonger, winking first at John and then through the rails, and even at the springs of the van; “half the load will go back to Kent, or else to the cowkeeper, if so be you holds on so almighty dear.”
“Ha, then, Joe, are you waiting for that? Go to the cow-yard and take your turn. They always feeds the one-eyed first. Gentlemen, now—while there’s anything left! We’ve kept all the very best back to the last, ’cos they chanced to be packed by an Irishman. ‘First goes in, must first come out.’ Paddy, are you there to stick to it?”
“Be jabers, and how could I slip out, when the hape of you was atop of me? And right I was, be the holy poker; there it all is the very first in the bottom of the vhan!”
“Now, are you nearly ready, John?” asked Gregory, suddenly appearing through the laughter of the crowd; “here is the gentleman going with us, and I can’t have him kept waiting.”
“Come up, Master Greg, and help sell out, if you know the time better than I do.” John Shorne was vexed, or he would not so have spoken to his master’s son.
To his great surprise, with a bound up came not Gregory Lovejoy, who was always a little bit shy of the marketing, but Hilary Lorraine, declared by dress and manner (clearly marked, as now they never can be) of an order wholly different from the people round him.
“Let me help you, sir,” he said; “I have long been looking on; I am sure that I understand it.”
“Forty years have I been at ’un, and I scarcely knows ’un now. They takes a deal of mannerin’, sir, and the prices will go in and out.”
“No doubt; and yet for the sport of it, let me help you, Master Shorne. I will not sell a leaf below the price you whisper to me.”