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Updated: June 4, 2025
With that she turned her back on them, and Peke, pulling Helmsley by the arm, took him into the common room of the inn, where there were several men seated round a long oak table with "gate-legs" which must have been turned by the handicraftsmen of the time of Henry the Seventh. Here Peke set down his basket of herbs in a corner, and addressed the company generally. "'Evenin', mates!
Arsk 'im to shut up 'is brewery an' sell no more ale wi' pizon in't to the poor! That'll do more for Temp'rance than the early closin' o' the 'Trusty Man." "Ye're right enough," said Matt Peke, who had refrained from taking any part in the conversation, save by now and then whispering a side comment to Helmsley.
"Ay, now there ye treads on my fav'rite corn!" and Peke shook his head with a curious air of petulance. "That's what I'm a-lookin' for day an' night, for the Wise One 'as got a bit in 'is book which 'e's cropped out o' another Wise One's savin's, a chap called Para-Cel-Sus" and Peke pronounced this name in three distinct and well-divided syllables.
He seemed to have gained the courage to talk on more intimate topics than at any time since their acquaintanceship had begun. "I guess you know," he observed, "that most all the money Uncle Peke left me after what the lawyers got I put into that schooner. There's a mortgage on her, too. You see, although the old place will come to me by and by, Aunt Lucretia has rights in it while she lives.
"Got any o' the King's pictures about ye?" asked Peke. Helmsley looked, as he felt, bewildered. "The King's pictures?" he echoed "You mean ?"
Yer shoulders is millingterry, but yer 'ead is business. Ye might be a gentleman if 'twornt for yer clothes." Helmsley heard this definition of himself without flinching. "I might be a thief," he said "or an escaped convict. You've been kind to me without knowing whether I am one or the other, or both. And I want to know why?" Peke stopped in his walk.
"That's right! That's quite right, Miss!" said Peke with propitiatory deference. "You 'se allus right whatsoever ye does an' sez! But yer knows me, yer knows Matt Peke, don't yer?" Miss Tranter smiled sourly, and her knitting needles glittered like crossed knives as she finished a particular row of stitches on which she was engaged before condescending to reply. Then she said:
"That means you're half-starved without knowing it," she said decisively. "Go in yonder," and she pointed with one of her knitting needles to the room beyond the bar whence the hum of male voices proceeded. "I'll send you some hot soup with plenty of stewed meat and bread in it. An old man like you wants more than the road food. Take him in, Peke!"
"Brought yer father along wi' ye, Matt?" suddenly asked a wizened little man of about sixty, with a questioning grin on his hard weather-beaten features. "I aint up to 'awkin' dead bodies out o' their graves yet, Bill Bush," answered Peke. "Unless my old dad's corpsy's turned to yerbs, which is more'n likely, I aint got 'im.
We're off the main road to towns an' sich like this is a bye, an' 'ere it stops. We'll 'ave to git over yon stile an' cross the fields 'taint an easy nor clean way, but it's the best goin'. We'll see the lights o' the 'Trusty Man' just over the brow o' the next hill." Helmsley drew a long breath, and sat down on a stone by the roadside. Peke surveyed him critically. "Poor old gaffer!
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