But at the very moment he turned away he changed his mind again and
turned back. "I can’t rightly make out about yon car," he asked, almost
as if against his will. "What, in the name o’ fortune, made you behave
like yon?"
Simon muttered gloomily that he didn’t know, and shuffled his feet
uncomfortably on the step. Now that the shadow of the coming interview
was upon him, he was not so perfectly sure as he had been that the story
was a joke. He remembered his terror when the car was at his back, his
frantic certainty that there were strange things in the air. He took it
amiss, too, both as a personal insult and from superstition, that the
Town Hall chimes should be playing "There is no luck about the house"
just as he stepped inside.
"It was nobbut a hired car, wasn’t it," Will went on,--"wi’ two chaps in
it, they said, as come from Liverpool way?"
"That’s what they’ve tellt me since," Simon agreed, "though I never see
it plain.... Seems as if it might be a warning or summat," he added,
with a shamefaced air.
"Warning o’ what?" Will threw at him with a startled glance. "Nay, now!
Whatever for?"
"Death, happen," Simon said feebly,--"nay, it’s never that! I’m wrong
in my head, I doubt," he added, trying to laugh; "but there’s queerish
things, all the same. There’s some see coffins at the foot o’ their
beds, and you’ll think on when last Squire’s missis died sudden-like yon
hard winter, she had it she could smell t’wreaths in t’house every day
for a month before."
"Ay, well, you’d best put it out of your head as sharp as you can," Will
soothed him, moving away. "You’re bothering overmuch about the farm,
that’s what it is. A nip o’ frost in the air’ll likely set you right.
Weather’s enough to make anybody dowly, it’s that soft."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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