“Hush Samuel,” interposed Joan nervously, looking at Giles.
“I aint a-going to be hushed like a baby,” said Samuel Ceely irritably; “I reckon if I don’t get my place, we can’t marry, and have a family, and where will my domestic happiness be? I tell you, them as chucked his lordship down the Cleave, chucked my family as was to be down with him, and if I can’t bring ’em into court for murdering his lordship, I can for murdering my family, of as healthy and red-cheeked children as might have been—all gone,” said the old man grimly. “All, head over heels down the Cleave, along of Lord Lamerton.”
“How can you talk so?” said Joan, reproachfully. “You know you have no children.”
“I might have had—a dozen of ’em—seven girls and five boys, and I’d got the names for them all in my head. I might have had if I’d got the sweeping and the broken victuals as I was promised. What’s the difference in wickedness, I’d like to know?” asked the old man sententiously, and figuring out his proposition on Saltren’s coat with his crooked fingers. “What’s the odds in wickedness, chucking over a horrible precipice a dozen sweet and innocent children as is, or as is to be, my family was as certain as new potatoes in June, and now all gone, chucked down the Cleave. It is wickedness.”
“What is that you hinted about Captain Saltren?” asked Giles gravely.
“Oh, I say nothing,” answered old Samuel sourly. “I don’t talk—I leave that to the woman.”
“It does seem a pity,” said Joan. “Samuel would have been so useful. He might have gone about the park picking up the sandwich-papers and the corks and bottles, after the public.”
“But,” said the young man, “I really wish to know what the talk is about in which my father’s name is introduced.”
“Sir, sir! folk’s tongues go like the clappers in the fields to drive away the blackbirds. A very little wind makes ’em rattle wonderfully.”
“But what have they said?”