’Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me
any evening if he brings liquor for two with him,’
returned Durdles, with a penny between his teeth and
certain halfpence in his hands; ’or if he likes
to make it twice two, he’ll be doubly welcome.’
‘I shall come. Master Deputy, what do
you owe me?’
‘A job.’
’Mind you pay me honestly with the job of showing
me Mr. Durdles’s house when I want to go there.’
Deputy, with a piercing broadside of whistle through
the whole gap in his mouth, as a receipt in full for
all arrears, vanished.
The Worshipful and the Worshipper then passed on together
until they parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful’s
door; even then the Worshipper carried his hat under
his arm, and gave his streaming white hair to the
breeze.
Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked
at his white hair in the gas-lighted looking-glass
over the coffee-room chimneypiece at the Crozier,
and shook it out: ’For a single buffer,
of an easy temper, living idly on his means, I have
had a rather busy afternoon!’
Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory
address, with the accompaniments of white-wine and
pound-cake, and again the young ladies have departed
to their several homes. Helena Landless has
left the Nuns’ House to attend her brother’s
fortunes, and pretty Rosa is alone.
Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer
days, that the Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show
as if their strong walls were transparent. A
soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather
than upon them from without, such is their mellowness
as they look forth on the hot corn-fields and the
smoking roads that distantly wind among them.
The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit.
Time was when travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering
parties through the city’s welcome shades; time
is when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between haymaking
time and harvest, and looking as if they were just
made of the dust of the earth, so very dusty are they,
lounge about on cool door-steps, trying to mend their
unmendable shoes, or giving them to the city kennels
as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles
that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles
swathed in bands of straw. At all the more public
pumps there is much cooling of bare feet, together
with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand
to spout on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham
police meanwhile looking askant from their beats with
suspicion, and manifest impatience that the intruders
should depart from within the civic bounds, and once
more fry themselves on the simmering high-roads.
On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral
service is done, and when that side of the High Street
on which the Nuns’ House stands is in grateful
shade, save where its quaint old garden opens to the
west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs
Rosa, to her terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see
her.
