Janice Meredith Part 4

For the first time the fellow looked away from Janice, fixing his eyes on Mrs. Meredith. Then he bowed easily and gracefully, saying, "Thank you." Apparently unconscious that for a moment he had left the Somerset burr off his tongue and the rustic pretence from his manner, he followed Peg to the kitchen.

If he were unconscious of the slip, it was more than were his auditors, and for a moment they all exchanged glances in silent bewilderment.

"Humph!" finally growled the squire. "I like the look of him still less."

"He holds himself like a gentleman," a.s.serted Tabitha.

"This fellow will need close watching," predicted Mr. Meredith.

"He 's no yokel. He moves like a gentleman or a house-servant. Yet he had to make his mark on the covenant."

"I think, dadda," said Miss Meredith, in her most calmly judicial manner, "that the new man is a born villain, and has committed some terrible crime. He has a horrid, wicked face, and he stares just as--as--so that one wants to shiver."

Mrs. Meredith rose. "Janice," she chided, "thou 't too young to make thy opinions of the slightest value. Go to thy spinet, child, and don't let me hear any more such foolish babble. Charles has a good face, and will make a good servant."

"I don't care what mommy thinks," Miss Meredith confided to Tabitha in the parlour, as the one took her seat at an embroidery frame and the other at the spinet. "I know he's a bad man, and will end by killing one of us and stealing the silver and a horse, just as Mr. Vreeland's bond-servant did. He makes me think of the villain in 'The Tragic History of Sir Watkins Stokes and Lady Betty Artless.'"

IV AN APPLE OF DISCORD

In the week following his advent the new servant was the cause of considerable discussion, and, regrettably, of not a little controversy, among the members of the household of Greenwood. The squire maintained that "the fellow is a bad-tempered, lazy, deceitful rogue, in need of much watching."

Mrs. Meredith, on the contrary, invariably praised the man, and promptly suppressed her husband whenever he began to rail against him. To Janice, with the violent prejudices of youth still unmodified by experience and reason, Charles was almost a special deputy of the individual she heard so unmercifully thrashed to tatters each Sunday by the Rev. Mr. McClave.

And again, to the contrary, Tabitha insisted with growing fervour that the servant was a gentleman, possessed of all the qualities that word implied, plus the most desirable attribute of all others to eighteenth-century maidens, a romantic possibility.

As a matter of fact, these diverse and contradictory views had a crossing-point, and accepting this as their mean, Charles proved himself to be a knowing man with horses, an entirely ignorant and by no means eager labourer in the little farm work there was to do, a silent though easily angered being with every one save Mrs. Meredith, and so clearly above his station that he was viewed with disfavour, tinctured by not a little fear, by house-servants, by field hands, and even by Mr. Meredith's overseer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Nay, give me the churn."]

For the most part, Fownes spoke in the West of England dialect; but whenever he became interested, this instantly slipped from him, as did his still more ineffective attempt to move and act the rustic. Indeed, the ease of his movements and the straightness of his carriage, with a certain indefinable precision of manner, led to a common agreement among his fellow-labourers that he had earlier in life accepted the king's shilling.

Granting him to be but one and twenty years of age, as his covenant stated, and as in fact he looked, his service must have been shorter than the act of Parliament allowed, and this seeming bar to their hypothesis caused many winks and shrugs over the tankards of ale consumed of an evening at the King George tavern in the village of Brunswick. Furthermore, for some months the deserter columns of such stray numbers of the "London Gazette" as occasionally drifted to the ordinary were eagerly scanned by the loungers, on the possibility that they might contain some advertis.e.m.e.nt of a fellow standing five feet ten, with broad shoulders, light brown hair, straight nose, and gray eyes, whose whereabout was of interest to His Majesty's War Office, Whitehall. Neither from this source, however, nor from any other, did they gain the slightest clue to the past history of the bond-servant, spy upon the fellow who would.

Nor was talk of the man limited to farm hands and tavern idlers, for dearth of new topics in the little community made him a subject of converse to the two girls during the hours of spinet practice, embroidery, and sewing, which were their daily occupations between breakfast and dinner, and, even extended into the afternoon, if the stint was not completed. Yet all their discussion brought them no nearer to agreement, Janice maintaining that Fownes was a villain in posse, if not in esse, while Tabitha contended that Charles had been disappointed in a love which he still, none the less, cherished, and which to her mind accounted in every particular for his conduct. As such a theory allowed considerable scope to the imagination, she promptly created several romances about him, in all of which he was of n.o.ble birth, with such other desirable factors as made him a true hero; and having thus endowed him with a halo of romance, she could not find words strong enough to express her thorough-going contempt for the woman whose disregard and cruelty had driven him across the seas.

"Thee knows, Janice," she argued, when the latter expressed scepticism, "that the Earl of Anglesey was kidnapped, and sold in Maryland, so it 's perfectly possible for a n.o.bleman to be a bond-servant."

"That 's the one case," answered Janice, sagely.

"But things like it are very common in novels," insisted Tabitha. "And what is more likely for a man disappointed in love than, in desperation, to indenture himself?"

"I can easily credit a female of taste--yes, any female-- refusing the ill-mannered, bold-staring rogue," said Janice, giving the coa.r.s.e osnaburg shirt she was working upon a fretted jerk; "but to suppose him to be capable of a grand, devoted pa.s.sion is as bad as expecting--expecting faithfulness in a dog like Clarion."

"Clarion?" questioned Tabitha.

"Yes. Have n't you seen how--how--that he--the man, has taken possession of him? Thomas says the two sneak off together every chance they get, and sometimes are n't back till eleven or twelve. I wish dadda would put a stop to it.

Like as not, 't is for pilfering they are bound." Miss Meredith began anew on the b.u.t.tonhole, and had she been thrusting her needle into either man or dog, she could not have sewed with a more vicious vigour.

"That must be the way he got those rabbits for thy mother."

"I should know he had been a poacher," a.s.serted Janice, as she contemptuously held up and surveyed at arms-length the completed shirt. Then she laid it aside with another, and sighed a weary, "Heigh-ho, those are done. Here I have to work my fingers to the bone making shirts for him, just because mommy says he has n't enough clothes,"--a sentence which perhaps partly accounted for the maiden's somewhat jaundiced view of Charles.

"Are those for him?" cried Tabitha. "Why didst thou not tell me? I would have helped thee with them."

"You 'd have been welcome to the whole job. As it is, I've done them so carelessly that I know mommy will scold me.

But I wasn't going to work myself to death for him!"

"I should have loved--I like shirt-making," fibbed Tabitha.

"And I hate it! Forty-two have I made this year, and mommy has six more cut out."

There was a moment's silence, and then Tabitha said, "Janice."

For some reason the name seemed to embarra.s.s her, for the moment it was spoken she coloured.

"What?"

"Dost thee not think--perhaps--if we steal out and take the shirts to the stable, thy mother will never--?"

"Tibbie Drinker! Go out of the house in a sack? I'd as soon go out in my night-rail."

"Thee breakfasts in a negligee, even when Philemon is here,"

retorted Miss Drinker. "Wouldst as lief breakfast in thy shift?"

"No," said Miss Janice, with a wicked sparkle in her eyes, "because if I did Philemon would come oftener than ever."

"Fie upon thee, Janice Meredith!" cried her friend, "for a froward, indelicate female."

"And why more indelicate than the men who'd come?"

demanded Janice.

"'Immodest words admit of no defence, For want of modesty is want of sense,'"

quoted Miss Drinker.

"Rubbish!" scoffed Janice, but whether she was referring to the stanza of the reigning poet of the eighteenth century, or simply to Miss Tabitha's application of it, cannot be definitely known. "You know as well as I, Tibbie, that I'd rather have Philemon, or any other man, see me in my shroud than in my rail. Come, we'll change our frocks and take a walk."

A half hour later, newly clothed in light dimity gowns, cut short for walking, and which, in combination with slippers, then the invariable footgear of ladies of quality, served to display the "neatly turned ankles" that the beaux of the period so greatly admired, the girls sallied forth. First a visit was paid to the stable, to smuggle the shirts from the criticism of Mrs. Meredith, as well as to entice Clarion's companionship for the walk.

But Thomas, with a grumble, told them that Fownes had stolen away from the job that had been set for him after dinner, and that the hound had gone with him.

Their rambling walk brought the girls presently to the river, but just as they were about to force their way through the fringe of willows and underbrush which hid the water from view, a sudden loud splashing, telling of some one in swimming, gave them pause. Yelps of excitement from Clarion a moment later served to tell the two who it probably was, and the probability was instantly confirmed by the voice of Charles, saying:

"'T is sport, old man, is 't not? To get the dirt and transpiration off one! 'S death! What a climate! 'Twixt the sun and osnaburg and fustian my skin feels as if I'd been triced up and had a round hundred."

Exchanging glances, the girls stole softly away from the bank, neither venturing to speak till out of hearing. As they retired they came upon a heap of coa.r.s.e garments, and Tabitha, catching the arm of her friend, exclaimed:--

"Oh, Jan, look!"

What had caught her eye was the end of a light gold chain that appeared among the clothes, and both girls halted and gazed at it as if it possessed some quality of fascination. Then Tabitha tip-toed forward, with but too obvious a purpose.

"Tibbie!" rebuked Janice, "you shouldn't!"

"Oh, but Jan!" protested Eve, junior. "'T is such a chance!"