Under the Greenwood Tree

"Why don't your stap-mother come down, Fancy?" said Geoffrey. "You'll excuse her, Mister Dick, she's a little queer sometimes."

"O yes,--quite," said Richard, as if he were in the habit of excusing people every day.

"She d'belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a rum class rather."

"Indeed," said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.

"Yes; and 'tis trying to a female, especially if you've been a first wife, as she hey."

"Very trying it must be."

"Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob's-a-dying at the least thing in the world. And when I'd married her and found it out, I thought, thinks I, "'Tis too late now to begin to cure 'e;" and so I let her bide. But she's queer,--very queer, at times!"

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o' society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."

Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household moralizing, which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the conversation.

"Did Fred Shiner send the cask o' drink, Fancy?"

"I think he did: O yes, he did."

"Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!" said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of the potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a spill.

Now Geoffrey's eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous four or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them to the spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its transit, necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the route.

Just as intently as the keeper's eyes had been fixed on the spoon, Fancy's had been fixed on her father's, without premeditation or the slightest phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened. This was the reason why:

Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of the table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand lightly down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm Dick, after dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason, flung down his own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy's with it, and keeping it there. So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling her hand from the trap, settled her eyes on her father's, to guard against his discovery of this perilous game of Dick's. Dick finished his mouthful; Fancy finished, her crumb, and nothing was done beyond watching Geoffrey's eyes. Then the hands slid apart; Fancy's going over six inches of cloth, Dick's over one.

Geoffrey's eye had risen.

"I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller," he repeated, more emphatically.

"He is; yes, he is," stammered Dick; "but to me he is little more than a stranger."

"O, sure. Now I know en as well as any man can be known. And you know en very well too, don't ye, Fancy?"

Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at present about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed literally.

Dick looked anxious.

"Will you pass me some bread?" said Fancy in a flurry, the red of her face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as a human being could look about a piece of bread.

"Ay, that I will," replied the unconscious Geoffrey. "Ay," he continued, returning to the displaced idea, "we are likely to remain friendly wi' Mr. Shiner if the wheels d'run smooth."

"An excellent thing--a very capital thing, as I should say," the youth answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his thoughts, instead of following Geoffrey's remark, were nestling at a distance of about two feet on his left the whole time.

"A young woman's face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my heart if 'twon't."

Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in earnest at these words. "Yes; turn the north wind," added Geoffrey after an impressive pause. "And though she's one of my own flesh and blood . . . "

"Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil' cheese from pantry-shelf?" Fancy interrupted, as if she were famishing.

"Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking last Saturday night . . .

cheese you said, Fancy?"

Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr. Shiner,--the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy's heart went not with her father's--and spoke like a stranger to the affairs of the neighbourhood. "Yes, there's a great deal to be said upon the power of maiden faces in settling your courses," he ventured, as the keeper retreated for the cheese.

"The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that _I_ have ever done warrants such things being said!" murmured Fancy with emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick's ears.