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There were crocks and boxes of cakes, a whole ice-chest just for cream and milk, another for cheeses and olives and pickles and salad-dressings.
Suffering a momentary disappointment, she went on, stepping silently, and passed through a door at the end of the hall into a large and barren looking dining-room, stiffly and skimpily furnished, but well-lighted, owing to the fact that one end of it had been transformed into a narrow "conservatory," a glass alcove now tenanted by two dried palms and a number of vacant jars and earthen crocks.
There were no servants there, but her mamma beat up things in crocks, and her great-aunty, a brisk little old woman with sharp eyes, made yeast cakes and dried them out under the arbour and milked the cow, too, and Emily's little brother, Oliver, carried milk to the neighbours.
The gipsy scowled at them, but said nothing as he lifted first the boy and then the girl on to the donkey. "There, now," he said, with a slight return to his falsely-smooth tones, "you'll be pleased at last, I should hope. To think of all the trouble we've had, the missus and me, a-unpacking of all the pots and crocks for you to ride on the donkey."
We followed tracks most of the way, neither party seeing the other except towards camping time. The crocks did well, all repeatedly. Either the whole sky has been clear, or the overhanging cloud has lifted from time to time to show the lower rocks. Had we been dependent on land marks we should have fared ill.
Jeanne, standing by the kitchen door, watching the familiar scene in the courtyard, could scarcely believe there had been a change. Now and again she caught herself wondering why she could not pick out any one of her Three Musketeers. There were two or three soldiers, as usual, helping Toinette with her crocks at the well.
"Do have that chair by the door, and let me give you a glass of milk," she hastened to add as she took up a cup and started for the crocks with a still greater accession of hospitality. "Sweet or buttermilk?" she paused to inquire over her shoulder.
There was even a reduced household selling off all their worldly goods, lamps, chairs, prayer-books, kettles, crocks, linen and a spinning-wheel. I looked lovingly, longingly at that spinning-wheel, and might have bought it for a franc and a half, and would have done so, had I not been encumbered with the hurdy-gurdy.
But one morning in the early fall he was confronted with a very grave charge one that was, if proved true, to cost him his life or his home: the little girl's mother, on going into the kitchen at sunrise to prepare breakfast, discovered all her crocks of milk disturbed and the shelf behind the stove, on which they stood in a long, yellow row, spattered with milk from end to end.
Hugh would undoubtedly sleep in the house in which he afterwards died. This lay at the back of Staple Inn, where the new bursar, whom the king had given him, bestowed the royal pots and crocks. Consecration like necessity brings strange bedfellows, and plain, cheap-habited Hugh, by gaudily trimmed William in his jewelled mitre, must have raised a few smiles that Sunday morning.
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