"Name it," said the shepherd.
"Porter."
It was three years since he had had a really stiff drink. He had never cared for liquor, indeed he had always been a man of singularly temperate life, a spare eater, a water drinker. But to-day a sudden desire consumed him—not only to drink, but to be drunken. He remembered the one occasion which he had been drunk. It was the day he had known definitely of the collapse of Wickham's scheme, and his own inevitable disgrace. He had sat in the kitchen at Sparrow Hall, drinking brandy till his head had fallen forward on the table and his legs trailed back behind his chair. Afterwards, there had been a shameful waking, but he could never forget how peace had crept in some mysterious physical way up his spine, from the base of his neck to his brain, with a soft tingling—it had been purely physical at first, then it had passed on to mental dulling and dimming.
To-day, as the frothy brown porter ran down his throat, he felt that gracious tingling, that creeping upwards of relief. He looked round the bar. It was full of labouring men and smallholders, who stared at him with round eyes that were curious and would be ingratiating—they wanted to know him, because in their opinion he was better worth knowing than before he went to gaol.
"This is Mus' Breame of Gulledge," said the Little Cow shepherd. "How are you, Mus' Breame?—This is Mus' Furlonger of Sparrow Hall."
Mus' Breame held out a dark and hairy hand. Nigel's lips were twitching. Somehow he felt much more humiliated by the beery approval of these men than by the cold looks of their betters. However, he gave his short, dry laugh, and shook hands.
"And here's Mus' Dunk of Golden Compasses, and Mus' Boorer of Kenthouse Hatch—this here is old Adam Harmer, as has been cowman at Langerish this sixty year."
Nigel had seen all the men before, and had once sold a calf to Adam Harmer, but he realised that now he was meeting them on new terms.
"I wur wunst in the lock-up meself for a week," drawled old Harmer. "'Twas summat to do wud poaching, but so long ago as I forget 'xactly wot. Surelye!"
"Reckon prisons have changed unaccountable since your day," said Dunk, throwing a glance at Nigel, as if to show that an opening had been tactfully made for him. But Harmer clung to speech.