In such height of life and hurry, half a minute is enough to fetch a great crowd anywhere. It was round the market in ten seconds that a grand lord was going to sell out of Grower Lovejoy’s waggon. For a great wager, of course it must be; and all who could rush, rushed to see. Hilary let them get ready, and waited till he saw that their money was burning. Meanwhile Crusty John was grinning one of his most experienced grins.
“Don’t let him; oh, don’t let him,” Gregory shouted to the salesman, as Hilary came to the rostrum with a bunch of carrots in one hand and a cauliflower in the other—“What would his friends say if they heard it?”
“Nay, I’ll not let ’un,” John Shorne answered, mischievously taking the verb in its (now) provincial sense; “why should I let ’un? It can’t hurt he, and it may do good to we.”
In less than ten minutes the van was cleared, and at such prices as Grower Lovejoy’s goods had not fetched all through the summer. Such competition arose for the honour of purchasing from a “nobleman,” and so enchanted were the dealers’ ladies, many of whom came thronging round, with Hilary’s bright complexion, gay address, and complaisancy.
“Well done, my lord! well done indeed!” Crusty John, to keep up the fiction, shouted when he had pouched the money—“Gentlemen and ladies, my lord will sell again next week; he has a heavy bet about it with the Prince Reg——tush, what a fool I am! they will send me to prison if I tell!”
As a general rule, the more suspicious people are in some ways, the more credulous are they in all the rest. Kentish Crust was aware of this, and expected and found for the next two months extraordinary inquiry for his goods.
“Friend Gregory, wherefore art thou glum?” said Hilary to young Lovejoy, while the horses with their bunched-up tails were being buckled to again. Lorraine was radiant with joy, both at his recent triumph in a matter quite unknown to him, and even more because of many little pictures spread before him by his brisk imagination far away from London. Every stamp of a horse’s hoof was as good as a beat of the heart to him.
“Lorraine,” the sensible Gregory answered, after some hesitation, “I am vexed at the foolish thing you have done. Not that it really is at all a disgrace to you, or your family, but that the world would take it so; and we must think as the world does.”
“Must we?” asked Hilary, smiling kindly; “well, if we must, let us think it on springs.”
At the word he leaped into the fruit-van so lightly that the strong springs scarcely shook; and Gregory could do no better than climb in calmly after him. “Gee-wugg,” cried Master Shorne; and he had no need to say it twice; the bright brass harness flashed the sun, and the horses merrily rang their hoofs, on the road to their native land of Kent.