’Twas the usual scene: stout farmers’ wives marching about in the superior manner, the girls looking about in rows of rosy cheeks and giggles, and scandal everywhere; for at statute fairs the way in which the maids run down their old mistresses, and the way in which the mistresses run down their old maids, can easily be imagined.
In one quiet part of the market stood Lionel and Plunket, brothers and farmers.
These two personages had come to hire two servants; but whether the servants were of a very bad kind, or the farmers very difficult to please, certain it is that these latter were servantless, though the fair was half over.
They had not long lost their mother, a good mother, so they were not to be satisfied with any kind of servants.
I love to make all plain, and therefore I may as well say at once that these brothers were not brothers. If affection and sacrifice, and all that kind of thing, made men real brothers, they would have been brothers; but the same woman did not bear them. Plunket was the real son of the mother whose death we have just mentioned, and Lionel was the foundling, though as the mother had been a good woman, she had always had enough love for both her own son and the foundling, and some, indeed, left for the world in general. This old mother, in a year long gone to sleep, had opened her door late one night, for being good she had a stout heart, and there found a man and child upon the threshold. The man died, the child lived to be her foundling, and her second son. Who the man was they never learned. He died, and made no sign. Ah, yes—that little diamond ring given to the good woman in keeping for his son. If ever he was in trouble, this son of his, the ring was to be carried to the queen. But Lionel had never been in any trouble up to the time of the good woman’s death; soon after which the two farmers wanted two servants, and came to the fair to seek them.
And thus naturally are we brought back to the fair.
Neither Lionel nor Plunket could find a single servant to their mind, much less two, and so they went wandering about, and submitted to the hard sarcasm of the would-be hired.
Meanwhile, in another part of the fair the sheriff was doing his duty like a sheriff. Said duty being to announce, as usual, that all agreements between servants and masters were binding for twelve months—said binding to be a legal fact from the very moment the said servants took earnest money from the said masters. Also the sheriff was a blessed go-between, announcing to the servants the wants of the masters, and to the masters the wants of the servants. ’Twas surprising how clever all the servants were according to their own showing, and how doubtful the masters were in believing those same statements; and indeed, ’tis true these statements might have led an observer to surmise that all the good servants in the county had been discharged at one and the same moment.
And it was just at the precise moment when the sheriff was going to retreat, overwhelmed by numbers, that the Lady Henrietta—or Martha, rather—Nancy, and the troubled John—Lord Tristam—came upon the noisy scene.
Now, neither Martha nor Nancy were within a hundred yards of the sheriff, when Lionel and Plunket marked them both, and bore down upon them.