“He’s t’ last i’ t’ world,” admitted Baldwin, appeased at once by this evidence of his companion’s discrimination.
“I don’t see at this minute how it’s to be managed,” continued Inman, “but it’ll come to me. There’s always ways and means for those who’re prompt to handle ’em. All we’ve got to do is to bide our time, and as you say, keep the sawdust out of our eyes.”
They had reached the shop by this time and the subject was necessarily dropped; but Inman remained thoughtful during the remainder of the day, and paid no attention to the rough handling the other man received, and especially the incompetent Abe, at the hands of the master.
CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH NANCY SPEAKS HER MIND
ALTHOUGH Keturah had been up and busy for the better part of two hours, and Nancy was in the habit of rising at the same time and taking a subordinate share in such household duties as the older woman’s methodical housewifery allocated to the period before breakfast, the girl still lay in bed with her eyes wide open and her arms behind her head, and listened unmoved to the clatter downstairs, the increasing volume of which told her quite plainly that mistress Keturah was in a bad temper. The result of the ebullition she could have foretold with accuracy; and she smiled as it occurred to her that in similar circumstances, if she had been living in a city like Airlee, she could have found a café within a hundred yards of her home which would have spared her the trouble of preparing a meal for herself. That everything would be cleared away, and the kettle cold upon its iron stand when she should presently appear in the kitchen was as certain as the tides.
The thought amused her, but set no machinery in motion save that of the brain which, indeed had been running for some time. For a few minutes Nancy let her mind contrast the conditions of town and country life. At her uncle’s a maid had brought her an early cup of tea at an hour when in Mawm the breakfast things had all been washed up and put away; and had drawn back the curtains, perhaps in order that the sight of bricks and chimney-pots through a smoke-laden atmosphere might beget a desire to rise and escape. To Nancy that “early” cup was just softness and a nuisance, not to be compared with the breezes that blew straight from the moors upon her bed, through the window which was never closed except when northerly gales drove rain before them.
From the maid Nancy turned her thoughts to the master, and admitted to herself, not for the first time, that she would have liked Uncle John better if he had held up his head and looked at people like a man, instead of glancing at them sideways with the look of a dog that has been in mischief and is afraid somebody knows. His own daughter, her cousin Ellen, said he was a “screw”; but Nancy saw no signs of that characteristic in the home; and he had always seemed fond of her and treated her as generously as could be expected of a man of his type. Still there was something—and because of that indefinable something Nancy banked her profits in Keepton, and allowed her uncle—who was too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to trouble himself about hers—to think she was as extravagant as her cousin. Aunt Eleanor, on the other hand, was a downright nice woman, with only one fault worth speaking of, and which she had transmitted to her daughter—that she looked upon country places as “holes,” and upon Mawm as the least endurable of them all. Aunt and cousin were towns-women through and through, and the latter had certain superficialities of education that Nancy lacked and despised; but though they had money, “society” closed its doors to them, and their friends were all of the lower middle classes from which both parents had sprung and to which by every right save that of money they still belonged. That was how she had made the acquaintance of Inman, with whose mother Uncle John had lodged when he began business for himself, and whom the so-called “banker” held in high esteem as a young fellow who knew how to use his elbows in “pushing along.”
She was stopping in bed to think about Inman and to try to determine what her relations with him in these new circumstances were to be; where too she must place him in her scale of values. Apart from his rough wooing and the complacency with which he took its rejection she had nothing against the man; there was, indeed, something in his sturdy independence and almost impudent conceit that appealed to her moorwoman’s spirit; though her lips curled scornfully as she recalled the air of calm certainty with which on two occasions—once in Airlee and again on the night of his arrival in the village—he had received her cold refusal. It was evident enough that he thought he had only to wait, and the bird would be found in the snare. Would it! The curl on the girl’s lips straightened into a thin line of defiance at the mental suggestion. It would have paid the man, she said to herself, to be a little less cocksure, and a little more humble; to have given the leaven time to work instead of wanting to bake his cake and eat it within five minutes. Then, perhaps—
That was a greater concession than she had made before; and it startled her to discover how far and how quickly she had advanced since her last interview with Jagger. Jagger was in disgrace. He had developed a quite unaccountable stubbornness that she was determined to punish, and she quite forgot in her vexation how often she had called him a “lad in leading-strings,” and bidden him shake a loose leg. Nancy’s objection to leading-strings did not extend to those she held in her own hands.