Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs. R. D. Blackmore
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buy from his neighbour as gladly as from his born enemy.
Master John Shorne had a canvas bag on the right side of his breeches, hanging outside, full in sight, defying every cut-purse. That age was comparatively honest; nevertheless, John kept a club, cut in Mereworth wood, quite handy. And, at every sale he made, he rang his coin of the realm in his bag, as if he were calling bees all round the waggon. This generally led to another sale. For money has a rich and irresistible joy in jingling.
Hilary was delighted to watch these things, so entirely new to him. He had that fatal gift of sliding into other people’s minds, and wondering what to do there. Not as a great poet has it (still reserving his own strength, and playing on the smaller nature kindly as he loves it), but simply as a child rejoices to play with other children. So that he entered eagerly into the sudden changes of John’s temper, according to the tone, the bidding, and, most of all, the importance of the customers that came to him. By this time the cherries were all sold out, having left no trace except some red splashes, where an over-ripe sieve had been bleeding. But the Kentish man still had some bushels of peas, and new potatoes, and bunches of coleworts, and early carrots, besides five or six dozens of creamy cauliflowers, and several scores of fine-hearted lettuce. Therefore he was dancing with great excitement up and down his van, for he could not bear to go home uncleared; and some of his shrewder customers saw that by waiting a little longer they would be likely to get things at half-price. Of course he was fully alive to this, and had done his best to hide surplus stock, by means of sacks, and mats, and empty bushels piled upon full ones.
“Crusty, thou must come down, old fellow,” cried a one-eyed costermonger, winking first at John and then through the rails, and even at the springs of the van; “half the load will go back to Kent, or else to the cowkeeper, if so be you holds on so almighty dear.”
“Ha, then, Joe, are you waiting for that? Go to the cow-yard and take your turn. They always feeds the one-eyed first. Gentlemen, now—while there’s anything left! We’ve kept all the very best back to the last, ’cos they chanced to be packed by an Irishman. ‘First goes in, must first come out.’ Paddy, are you there to stick to it?”
“Be jabers, and how could I slip out, when the hape of you was atop of me? And right I was, be the holy poker; there it all is the very first in the bottom of the vhan!”
“Now, are you nearly ready, John?” asked Gregory, suddenly appearing through the laughter of the crowd; “here is the gentleman going with us, and I can’t have him kept waiting.”
“Come up, Master Greg, and help sell out, if you know the time better than I do.” John Shorne was vexed, or he would not so have spoken to his master’s son.
To his great surprise, with a bound up came not Gregory Lovejoy, who was always a little bit shy of the marketing, but Hilary Lorraine, declared by dress and manner (clearly marked, as now they never can be) of an order wholly different from the people round him.
“Let me help you, sir,” he said; “I have long been looking on; I am sure that I understand it.”
“Forty years have I been at ’un, and I scarcely knows ’un now. They takes a deal of mannerin’, sir, and the prices will go in and out.”
“No doubt; and yet for the sport of it, let me help you, Master Shorne. I will not sell a leaf below the price you whisper to me.”
In such height of life and hurry, half a minute is enough to fetch a great crowd anywhere. It was round the market in ten seconds that a grand lord was going to sell out of Grower Lovejoy’s waggon. For a great wager, of course it must be; and all who could rush, rushed to see. Hilary let them get ready, and waited till he saw that their money was burning. Meanwhile Crusty John was grinning one of his most experienced grins.
“Don’t let him; oh, don’t let him,” Gregory shouted to the salesman, as Hilary came to the rostrum with a bunch of carrots in one hand and a cauliflower in the other—“What would his friends say if they heard it?”
“Nay, I’ll not let ’un,” John Shorne answered, mischievously taking the verb in its (now) provincial sense; “why should I let ’un? It can’t hurt he, and it may do good to we.”
In less than ten minutes the van was cleared, and at such prices as Grower Lovejoy’s goods had not fetched all through the summer. Such competition arose for the honour of purchasing from a “nobleman,” and so enchanted were the dealers’ ladies, many of whom came thronging round, with Hilary’s bright complexion, gay address, and complaisancy.
“Well done, my lord! well done indeed!” Crusty John, to keep up the fiction, shouted when he had pouched the money—“Gentlemen and ladies, my lord will sell again next week; he has a heavy bet about it with the Prince Reg——tush, what a fool I am! they will send me to prison if I tell!”
As a general rule, the more suspicious people are in some ways, the more credulous are they in all the rest. Kentish Crust was aware of this, and expected and found for the next two months extraordinary inquiry for his goods.
“Friend Gregory, wherefore art thou glum?” said Hilary to young Lovejoy, while the horses with their bunched-up tails were being buckled to again. Lorraine was radiant with joy, both at his recent triumph in a matter quite unknown to him, and even more because of many little pictures spread before him by his brisk imagination far away from London. Every stamp of a horse’s hoof was as good as a beat of the heart to him.
“Lorraine,” the sensible Gregory answered, after some hesitation, “I am vexed at the foolish thing you have done. Not that it really is at all a disgrace to you, or your family, but that the world would take it so; and we must think as the world does.”
“Must we?” asked Hilary, smiling kindly; “well, if we must, let us think it on springs.”
At the word he leaped into the fruit-van so lightly that the strong springs scarcely shook; and Gregory could do no better than climb in calmly after him. “Gee-wugg,” cried Master Shorne; and he had no need to say it twice; the bright brass harness flashed the sun, and the horses merrily rang their hoofs, on the road to their native land of Kent.
CHAPTER XIII.
TO THE CHERRY-ORCHARDS.
Hilary Lorraine enjoyed his sudden delivery from London, and the fresh delight of the dewy country, with such loud approval, and such noisy lightsomeness of heart, that even Crusty John, perched high on the driving-box above him, could not help looking back now and then into the van, and affording the horses the benefit of his opinion. “A right down hearty one he be, as’ll make some of our maids look alive. And the worst time of year for such work too, when the May-Dukes is in, and the Hearts a colouring!”
Hilary was sitting on an empty “half sieve,” mounted on an empty bushel, and with his usual affability enjoying the converse of “Paddy from Cork,” as everybody called the old Irishman, who served alike for farm, road, or market, as the “lad of all work.” But Gregory Lovejoy, being of a somewhat grave and silent order, was already beginning to doubt his own prudence in bringing their impulsive friend so near to a certain fair cousin of his now staying at the hospitable farm, in whom he felt a tender interest. Poor Lovejoy feared that his chance would be small against this dashing stranger; and he balanced uncomfortably in his mind whether or not he should drop a hint, at the first opportunity, to Lorraine, concerning his views in that quarter. Often he almost resolved to do so; and then to his diffidence it seemed presumptuous to fancy that any young fellow of Hilary’s birth and expectations would entangle himself in their rustic world.
At Bromley they pulled up, to bait “man and beast,” three fine horses and four good men, eager to know the reason why they should not have their breakfast. Lorraine, although very short of cash (as he always found the means to be),