“Now? D’ye say now? My goodness! It’s always hemming and humming and a heise of the neck, and her head up like a Cochin-China, with a topknot, and ‘How d’ye do?’ and cetererar and cetererar. Aw, smooth as an ould threepenny bit—smooth astonishing. And partic’lar! My gough! You couldn’t call Tom to a cat afore her, but she’d be agate of you to make it Thomas.”
Lovibond smiled behind his big mustache.
“The rael ould Manx isn’t good enough for her now. Well, I wasn’t objecting, not me. She’s got the English tongue at her—that’s all right. Only I’ll stick to what I’m used of. Job’s patience went at last and so did mine, and I arn’t much of a Job neither.”
“And what has made all this difference,” said Lovibond.
“Why, the money, of coorse. It was the money that done it, bad sess to it,” said Davy, pitching the head of his pipe after the shank. “I went out yonder to get it and I got it. Middling hard work, too, but no matter. It was to be all for her. ‘I’ll come back, Nelly,’ says I, ‘and we’ll take Ballacry and have six craythurs and a pony, and keep a girl to do for you, and you’ll take your aise—only milking maybe, or churning, but nothing to do no harm.’ I was ten years getting it, and I never took notions on no other girls neither. No, honor bright, thinks I, Nelly’s waiting for you, Davy. Always dreaming of her, ‘cept when them lazy black chaps wanted leathering, and that’s a job that isn’t nothing without a bit of swearing at whiles. But at night, aw, at night, mate, lying out on the deck in that heat like the miller’s kiln, and shelling your clothes piece by piece same as a bushel of oats, and looking up at the stars atwinkling in the sky, and spotting one of them, and saying to yourself quietlike, so as them niggers won’t hear, ‘That’s star is atwinkling over Nelly, too, and maybe she’s watching it now.’ It seemed as if we wasn’t so far apart then. Somehow it made the world a taste smaller. ‘Shine on, my beauty,’ thinks I, ‘shine down straight into Nelly’s room, and if she’s awake tell her I’m coming, and if she’s asleep just make her dream that I’m loving nobody else till her.’ But, chut! It was myself that was dreaming. Drink up! She married me for my money, so I’m making it fly.”
“And when it’s gone—what then?” said Lovibond. “Will you go back to her!”
“Maybe so, maybe no.”
“Will anything be the better because the money’s spent?”
“God knows.”
“Will she be as sweet and good as she once was when you are as poor as you were?”