"If you durstn't lay finger 'pon your wedded wife,
These-an'-That, but let her an' that long-legged gamekeeper turn'ee
to doors, you must be no better'n a worm,--that's all I say."
I saw the man's face twitch as she spoke of the gamekeeper. But he
only answered in the same dull way.
"I'd as lief you didn' mention it, friends,--if 'tis all the same."
His real name was Tom Warne, as I learnt from Eli afterwards; and he
lived at St. Kit's, a small fruit-growing hamlet two miles up the
river, where his misery was the scandal of the place. The very
children knew it, and would follow him in a crowd sometimes, pelting
him with horrible taunts as he slouched along the road to the kitchen
garden out of which he made his living. He never struck one; never
even answered; but avoided the school-house as he would a plague; and
if he saw the Parson coming would turn a mile out of his road.
The Parson had called at the cottage a score of times at least: for
the business was quite intolerable. Two evenings out of the six, the
long-legged gamekeeper, who was just a big, drunken bully, would
swagger easily into These-an'-That's kitchen and sit himself down
without so much as "by your leave." "Good evenin', gamekeeper," the
husband would say in his dull, nerveless voice. Mostly he only got a
jeer in reply. The fellow would sit drinking These-an'-That's cider
and laughing with These-an'-That's wife, until the pair, very likely,
took too much, and the woman without any cause broke into a passion,
flew at the little man, and drove him out of doors, with broomstick
or talons, while the gamekeeper hammered on the table and roared at
the sport.
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