The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy [best big ereader .txt] 📗

mine worthy host, firm and well set up on his limbs, smoking his long churchwarden and caring nothing for nobody at home, and despising everybody abroad. He wore the typical scarlet waistcoat, with shiny brass buttons, the corduroy breeches, and grey worsted stockings and smart buckled shoes, that characterised every self-respecting innkeeper in Great Britain in these days⁠—and while pretty, motherless Sally had need of four pairs of brown hands to do all the work that fell on her shapely shoulders, worthy Jellyband discussed the affairs of nations with his most privileged guests.

The coffee-room indeed, lighted by two well-polished lamps, which hung from the raftered ceiling, looked cheerful and cosy in the extreme. Through the dense clouds of tobacco smoke that hung about in every corner, the faces of Mr. Jellyband’s customers appeared red and pleasant to look at, and on good terms with themselves, their host and all the world; from every side of the room loud guffaws accompanied pleasant, if not highly intellectual, conversation⁠—while Sally’s repeated giggles testified to the good use Mr. Harry Waite was making of the short time she seemed inclined to spare him.

They were mostly fisher-folk who patronised Mr. Jellyband’s coffee-room, but fishermen are known to be very thirsty people; the salt which they breathe in, when they are on the sea, accounts for their parched throats when on shore, but the Fisherman’s Rest was something more than a rendezvous for these humble folk. The London and Dover coach started from the hostel daily, and passengers who had come across the Channel, and those who started for the “grand tour,” all became acquainted with Mr. Jellyband, his French wines and his home-brewed ales.

It was towards the close of September, 1792, and the weather which had been brilliant and hot throughout the month had suddenly broken up; for two days torrents of rain had deluged the south of England, doing its level best to ruin what chances the apples and pears and late plums had of becoming really fine, self-respecting fruit. Even now it was beating against the leaded windows, and tumbling down the chimney, making the cheerful wood fire sizzle in the hearth.

“Lud! did you ever see such a wet September, Mr. Jellyband?” asked Mr. Hempseed.

He sat in one of the seats inside the hearth, did Mr. Hempseed, for he was an authority and important personage not only at the Fisherman’s Rest, where Mr. Jellyband always made a special selection of him as a foil for political arguments, but throughout the neighborhood, where his learning and notably his knowledge of the Scriptures was held in the most profound awe and respect. With one hand buried in the capacious pockets of his corduroys underneath his elaborately-worked, well-worn smock, the other holding his long clay pipe, Mr. Hempseed sat there looking dejectedly across the room at the rivulets of moisture which trickled down the window panes.

“No,” replied Mr. Jellyband, sententiously, “I dunno, Mr. ’Empseed, as I ever did. An’ I’ve been in these parts nigh on sixty years.”

“Aye! you wouldn’t rec’llect the first three years of them sixty, Mr. Jellyband,” quietly interposed Mr. Hempseed. “I dunno as I ever see’d an infant take much note of the weather, leastways not in these parts, an’ I’ve lived ’ere nigh on seventy-five years, Mr. Jellyband.”

The superiority of this wisdom was so incontestable that for the moment Mr. Jellyband was not ready with his usual flow of argument.

“It do seem more like April than September, don’t it?” continued Mr. Hempseed, dolefully, as a shower of raindrops fell with a sizzle upon the fire.

“Aye! that it do,” assented the worthy host, “but then what can you ’xpect, Mr. ’Empseed, I says, with sich a government as we’ve got?”

Mr. Hempseed shook his head with an infinity of wisdom, tempered by deeply-rooted mistrust of the British climate and the British Government.

“I don’t ’xpect nothing, Mr. Jellyband,” he said. “Pore folks like us is of no account up there in Lunnon, I knows that, and it’s not often as I do complain. But when it comes to sich wet weather in September, and all me fruit a-rottin’ and a-dying’ like the ’Guptian mother’s first born, and doin’ no more good than they did, pore dears, save to a lot more Jews, pedlars and sich, with their oranges and sich like foreign ungodly fruit, which nobody’d buy if English apples and pears was nicely swelled. As the Scriptures say⁠—”

“That’s quite right, Mr. ’Empseed,” retorted Jellyband, “and as I says, what can you ’xpect? There’s all them Frenchy devils over the Channel yonder a-murderin’ their king and nobility, and Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox and Mr. Burke a-fightin’ and a-wranglin’ between them, if we Englishmen should ’low them to go on in their ungodly way. ‘Let ’em murder!’ says Mr. Pitt. ‘Stop ’em!’ says Mr. Burke.”

“And let ’em murder, says I, and be demmed to ’em,” said Mr. Hempseed, emphatically, for he had but little liking for his friend Jellyband’s political arguments, wherein he always got out of his depth, and had but little chance for displaying those pearls of wisdom which had earned for him so high a reputation in the neighbourhood and so many free tankards of ale at the Fisherman’s Rest.

“Let ’em murder,” he repeated again, “but don’t lets ’ave sich rain in September, for that is agin the law and the Scriptures which says⁠—”

“Lud! Mr. ’Arry, ’ow you made me jump!”

It was unfortunate for Sally and her flirtation that this remark of hers should have occurred at the precise moment when Mr. Hempseed was collecting his breath, in order to deliver himself one of those Scriptural utterances which made him famous, for it brought down upon her pretty head the full flood of her father’s wrath.

“Now then, Sally, me girl, now then!” he said, trying to force a frown upon his good-humoured face, “stop that fooling with them young jackanapes and get on with the work.”

“The work’s gettin’ on all ri’, father.”

But Mr. Jellyband was peremptory. He had other views for his buxom daughter, his only child, who would in God’s good time become the owner of the Fisherman’s Rest, than to see her married to one of these young