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"This Moratorium, you know. The War makes itself felt, even in this little place." If Nicky-Nan had known the meaning of the word Moratorium, it might have given him an opening. But he did not, and so he stood dumb. "You have come to say, I hope," hazarded Mr Pamphlett after a pause, "that you don't intend to give me any more trouble? . . . You've given me enough, you know.
Just now he would step around to boatbuilder Jago's and borrow or purchase a short length of eight-inch planking to repair the flooring of the bedroom cupboard. Jago had a plenty of such odd lengths to be had for the asking. "I'll make out the top of the water-butt wants mending," said Nicky-Nan to himself. "Lord! what foolishness folk talk about the contrivances of poverty.
The corporal a stout man walked into the porch-way and knocked. Mrs Penhaligon answered the knock, and after a short colloquy was heard to call back into the passage summoning Mr Nanjivell. In half a minute Nicky-Nan hobbled out. Meanwhile, their passage over the bridge being clear ahead, our two ladies had no good excuse for lingering. Yet they lingered.
At this distance o' time I can't be sure if 'twas 'Flee from the Wrath to Come' or 'The Wages o' Sin is Death' but I think the latter, as bein' less easily twisted into a threat. . . . That," added the corporal after a pause, "closed the correspondence." "And where," Nicky-Nan asked, "might all this have happened?"
The tunding of the drum up the valley seemed to Nicky-Nan to emphasise the loneliness all about him. Nicky-Nan hesitated: hung, indeed, for a moment, on the edge of flight. This was Bank Holiday, and until to-morrow's sunrise a constable was powerless as Satan in a charmed circle.
Nicky-Nan turned about and stared at the placard as Lippity-Libby smoothed it over the paste, whistling. At that moment Un' Benny Rowett, hands in trouser-pockets, came dandering along. He, too, taking the geniality of every one for granted, halted, spread his legs wide and conned the announcement. "Oh!" said he after a pause, wheeling about. "Still harpin' on they Germans?
"Struck your head, did you? fallin' against the cupboard, when they was huntin' for your money: which they can't deny. Did you want Mr Pamphlett to find your money?" "Him?" said Nicky-Nan bitterly. "Him? as I wouldn' trust not ha'f so far as a man could fling him by his eyebrows!"
"'Guineas'?" repeated Nicky-Nan, as the solid earth seemed to fail beneath his feet and his supporting stick. Miss Oliver, grasping the advantage of his evident distress, decided in a flash that here, before her, stood the wreck of a well-connected man, cleanly in person, not ill to look upon; and that she would a little longer withhold disclosure of the guinea.
"How should it be Samuel Penhaligon, when you know as well as I do that he's gone to the War? No: the man, I regret to say, was Nicholas Nanjivell." "Nicky-Nan? . . . Oh, come, ma'am, I say! Why, what capers could he been cuttin'?" "I feel justified in speaking of him as her partner, seeing that he avowed as much.
"And him in danger of submarines, that snatch a man before his Maker like a snuff of a candle, while you can find no better way of employing your holidays than scatterin' other folks' glass to the danger o' my ducks! You just wait till I've wiped my arms, here, and I'll be round to tell your mother about 'ee!" Nicky-Nan had recognised the voice at once.
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