Having granted a new life of slaughter to that continually insolvent butcher, who exhibited the body of a sheep once more, with an eye to the approach of Christmas, this universal factor made it a point of duty to encourage him. In either saddle-bag he bore a seven-pound leg of mutton—a credit to a sheep of that district then—and to show himself no traitor to the staple of the place, he strapped upon his crupper, in some oar-weed and old netting, a twenty-pound cod, who found it hard to breathe his last when beginning to enjoy horse-exercise.
“There is a lot of mouths to fill,” said Mr. Mordacks, with a sigh, while his landlady squeezed a brown loaf of her baking into the nick of his big sword-strap; “and you and I are capable of entering into the condition of the widow and the fatherless.”
“Hoonger is the waa of them, and victuals is the cure for it. Now mind you coom home afore dark,” cried the widow, to whom he had happened to say, very sadly, that he was now a widower. “To my moind, a sight o' more snaw is a-coomin'; and what mah sard or goon foight again it? Captain Moordocks, coom ye home arly. T' hare sha' be doon to a toorn be fi' o'clock. Coom ye home be that o'clock, if ye care for deener.”
“I must have made a tender impression on her heart,” Mr. Mordacks said to himself, as he kissed his hand to the capacious hostess. “Such is my fortune, to be loved by everybody, while aiming at the sternest rectitude. It is sweet, it is dangerously sweet; but what a comfort! How that large-hearted female will baste my hare!”
CHAPTER XLIII
A PLEASANT INTERVIEW
Cumbered as he was of body, and burdened with some cares of mind, the general factor ploughed his way with his usual resolution. A scowl of dark vapor came over the headlands, and under-ran the solid snow-clouds with a scud, like bonfire smoke. The keen wind following the curves of land, and shaking the fringe of every white-clad bush, piped (like a boy through a comb) wherever stock or stub divided it. It turned all the coat of the horse the wrong way, and frizzed up the hair of Mr. Mordacks, which was as short as a soldier's, and tossed up his heavy riding cape, and got into him all up the small of his back. Being fond of strong language, he indulged in much; but none of it warmed him, and the wind whistled over his shoulders, and whirled the words out of his mouth.
When he came to the dip of the road, where it crosses the Dane's Dike, he pulled up his horse for a minute, in the shelter of shivering fir-trees. “What a cursed bleak country! My fish is frozen stiff, and my legs are as dead as the mutton in the saddle-bags. Geoffrey, you are a fool,” he said. “Charity is very fine, and business even better; but a good coal fire is the best of all. But in for a penny of it, in for a pound. Hark! I hear some fellow-fool equally determined to be frozen. I'll go at once and hail him; perhaps the sight of him will warm me.”
He turned his horse down a little lane upon the left, where snow lay deep, with laden bushes overhanging it, and a rill of water bridged with bearded ice ran dark in the hedge-trough. And here he found a stout lusty man, with shining red cheeks and keen blue eyes, hacking and hewing in a mighty maze of brambles.