The Last Galley - Arthur Conan Doyle (best books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📗

expected that a duel will result from the affair, but no particulars have reached us up to the hour of going to press.’”

The landlord laid down the paper. “You’ve been moving in high life, Mr. Thomas Spring,” said he.

The pugilist passed his hand over his battered face. “Well, Mr. Cordery,” said he, “low life is good enough for me.”

OUT OF THE RUNNING

It was on the North Side of Butser on the long swell of the Hampshire Downs. Beneath, some two miles away, the grey roofs and red houses of Petersfield peeped out from amid the trees which surrounded it. From the crest of the low hills downwards the country ran in low, sweeping curves, as though some green primeval sea had congealed in the midst of a ground swell and set for ever into long verdant rollers. At the bottom, just where the slope borders upon the plain, there stood a comfortable square brick farmhouse, with a grey plume of smoke floating up from the chimney. Two cowhouses, a cluster of hayricks, and a broad stretch of fields, yellow with the ripening wheat, formed a fitting setting to the dwelling of a prosperous farmer.

The green slopes were dotted every here and there with dark clumps of gorse bushes, all alight with the flaming yellow blossoms. To the left lay the broad Portsmouth Road curving over the hill, with a line of gaunt telegraph posts marking its course. Beyond a huge white chasm opened in the grass, where the great Butser chalk quarry had been sunk. From its depths rose the distant murmur of voices, and the clinking of hammers. Just above it, between two curves of green hill, might be seen a little triangle of leaden-coloured sea, flecked with a single white sail.

Down the Portsmouth Road two women were walking, one elderly, florid and stout, with a yellow-brown Paisley shawl and a coarse serge dress, the other young and fair, with large grey eyes, and a face which was freckled like a plover’s egg. Her neat white blouse with its trim black belt, and plain, close-cut skirt, gave her an air of refinement which was wanting in her companion, but there was sufficient resemblance between them to show that they were mother and daughter. The one was gnarled and hardened and wrinkled by rough country work, .the other fresh and pliant from the benign influence of the Board School; but their step, their slope of the shoulders, and the movement of their hips as they walked, all marked them as of one blood.

“Mother, I can see father in the five-acre field,” cried the younger, pointing down in the direction of the farm.

The older woman screwed up her eyes, and shaded them with her hand.

“Who’s that with him?” she asked.

“There’s Bill.”

“Oh, he’s nobody. He’s a-talkin’ to some one.”

“I don’t know, mother. It’s some one in a straw hat. Adam Wilson of the Quarry wears a straw hat.”

“Aye, of course, it’s Adam sure enough. Well, I’m glad we’re back home time enough to see him. He’d have been disappointed if he had come over and you’d been away. Drat this dust! It makes one not fit to be seen.”

The same idea seemed to have occurred to her daughter, for she had taken out her handkerchief, and was flicking her sleeves and the front of her dress.

“That’s right, Dolly. There’s some on your flounces. But, Lor’ bless you, Dolly, it don’t matter to him. It’s not your dress he looks at, but your face. Now I shouldn’t be very surprised if he hadn’t come over to ask you from father.”

“I think he’d best begin by asking me from myself,” remarked the girl.

“Ah, but you’ll have him, Dolly, when he does.”

“I’m not so sure of that, mother.” The older woman threw up her hands. “There! I don’t know what the gals are coming to. I don’t indeed. It’s the Board Schools as does it. When I was a gal, if a decent young man came a-courtin’, we gave him a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No.’ We didn’t keep him hanging on like a half-clipped sheep. Now, here are you with two of them at your beck, and you can’t give an answer to either of them.”

“Why, mother, that’s it,” cried the daughter, with something between a laugh and a sob. “May be if they came one at a time I’d know what to say.”

“What have you agin Adam Wilson?”

“Nothing. But I have nothing against Elias Mason.”

“Nor I, either. But I know which is the most proper-looking young man.”

“Looks isn’t everything, mother. You should hear Elias Mason talk. You should hear him repeat poetry.”

“Well, then, have Elias.”

“Ah, but I haven’t the heart to turn against Adam.”

“There, now! I never saw such a gal. You’re like a calf betwixt two hayricks; you have a nibble at the one and a nibble at the other. There’s not one in a hundred as lucky as you. Here’s Adam with three pound ten a week, foreman already at the Chalk Works, and likely enough to be manager if he’s spared. And there’s Elias, head telegraph clerk at the Post Office, and earning good money too. You can’t keep ‘em both on. You’ve got to take one or t’other, and it’s my belief you’ll get neither if you don’t stop this shilly-shally.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want them. What do they want to come bothering for?”

“It’s human natur’, gal. They must do it. If they didn’t, you’d be the first to cry out maybe. It’s in the Scriptures. ‘Man is born for woman, as the sparks fly upwards.’” She looked up out of the corner of her eyes as if not very sure of her quotation. “Why, here be that dratted Bill. The good book says as we are all made of clay, but Bill does show it more than any lad I ever saw.”

They had turned from the road into a narrow, deeply rutted lane, which led towards the farm. A youth was running towards them, loose-jointed and long-limbed, with a boyish, lumbering haste, clumping fearlessly with his great yellow clogs through pool and mire. He wore brown corduroys, a dingy shirt, and a red handkerchief tied loosely round his neck. A tattered old straw hat was tilted back upon his shock of coarse, matted, brown hair. His sleeves were turned up to the elbows, and his arms and face were both tanned and roughened until his skin looked like the bark of some young sapling. As he looked up at the sound of the steps, his face with its blue eyes, brown skin, and first slight down of a tawny moustache, was not an uncomely one, were it not marred by the heavy, stolid, somewhat sulky expression of the country yokel.

“Please, mum,” said he, touching the brim of his wreck of a hat, “measter seed ye coming. He sent to say as ‘ow ‘e were in the five-acre lot.”

“Run back, Bill, and say that we are coming,” answered the farmer’s wife, and the awkward figure sped away upon its return journey.

“I say, mother, what is Bill’s other name?” asked the girl, with languid curiosity.

“He’s not got one.”

“No name?”

“No, Dolly, he’s a found child, and never had no father or mother that ever was heard of. We had him from the work’us when he was seven, to chop mangel wurzel, and here he’s been ever since, nigh twelve year. He was Bill there, and he’s Bill here.”

“What fun! Fancy having only one name. I wonder what they’ll call his wife?”

“I don’t know. Time to talk of that when he can keep one. But now, Dolly dear, here’s your father and Adam Wilson comin’ across the field. I want to see you settled, Dolly. He’s a steady young man. He’s blue ribbon, and has money in the Post Office.”

“I wish I knew which liked me best,” said her daughter glancing from under her hat-brim at the approaching figures. “That’s the one I should like. But it’s all right, mother, and I know how to find out, so don’t you fret yourself any more.”

The suitor was a well-grown young fellow in a grey suit, with a straw hat jauntily ribboned in red and black. He was smoking, but as he approached he thrust his pipe into his breast-pocket, and came forward with one hand outstretched, and the other gripping nervously at his watch-chain.

“Your servant, Mrs. Foster. And how are you, Miss Dolly? Another fortnight of this and you will be starting on your harvest, I suppose.”

“It’s bad to say beforehand what you will do in this country,” said Farmer Foster, with an apprehensive glance round the heavens.

“It’s all God’s doing,” remarked his wife piously.

“And He does the best for us, of course. Yet He does seem these last seasons to have kind of lost His grip over the weather. Well, maybe it will be made up to us this year. And what did you do at Horndean, mother?”

The old couple walked in front, and the other dropped behind, the young man lingering, and taking short steps to increase the distance.

“I say, Dolly,” he murmured at last, flushing slightly as he glanced at her, “I’ve been speaking to your father about—you know what.”

But Dolly didn’t know what. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what. She turned her pretty little freckled face up to him and was full of curiosity upon the point.

Adam Wilson’s face flushed to a deeper red. “You know very well,” said he, impatiently, “I spoke to him about marriage.”

“Oh, then it’s him you want.”

“There, that’s the way you always go on. It’s easy to make fun, but I tell you that I am in earnest, Dolly. Your father says that he would have no objection to me in the family. You know that I love you true.”

“How do I know that then?”

“I tell you so. What more can I do?”

“Did you ever do anything to prove it?”

“Set me something and see if I don’t do it.”

“Then you haven’t done anything yet?”

“I don’t know. I’ve done what I could.”

“How about this?” She pulled a little crumpled sprig of dog-rose, such as grows wild in the wayside hedges, out of her bosom. “Do you know anything of that?”

He smiled, and was about to answer, when his brows suddenly contracted, his mouth set, and his eyes flashed angrily as they focussed some distant object. Following his gaze, she saw a slim, dark figure, some three fields off, walking swiftly in their direction. “It’s my friend, Mr. Elias Mason,” said she.

“Your friend!” He had lost his diffidence in his anger. “I know all about that. What does he want here every second evening?”

“Perhaps he wonders what you want.”

“Does he? I wish he’d come and ask me. I’d let him see what I wanted. Quick too.”

“He can see it now. He has taken off his hat to me,” Dolly said, laughing.

Her laughter was the finishing touch. He had meant to be impressive, and it seemed that he had only been ridiculous. He swung round upon his heel.

“Very well, Miss Foster,” said he, in a choking voice, “that’s all right. We know where we are now. I didn’t come here to be made a fool of, so good day to you.” He plucked at his hat, and walked furiously off in the direction from which they had come. She looked after him, half frightened, in the hope of seeing some sign that he had relented, but he strode onwards with a rigid neck, and vanished at a turn of the lane.

When she turned again her other visitor was close upon her—a thin, wiry, sharp-featured man with a sallow face, and a