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Peckaby was not in her sober senses sufficiently to ask whether they were brothers from the New Jerusalem, or whether the style of costume they favoured might be the prevailing mode in that fashionable city; if so, it was decidedly more useful than elegant, consisting apparently of hop sacks, doubled over the head and over the back. "Ready, missus?"
Peckaby could not have told, then or afterwards; but the positive conviction that Brother Jarrum had been false, that the story of sending for her on a white donkey had only been invented to keep her quiet, fixed itself in her mind in that moment in the lonely wood. She sunk down amidst the trees and sobbed bitterly.
And what with her height and the low casement, their faces were really not many inches apart; but yet Peckaby appeared not to know her. "You be off, will you!" retorted he. "A pretty thing if tramps be to come to decent folks' doors and knock 'em up like this. Who's door did you take it for?" "It's me!" screamed Mrs. Peckaby. "Don't you know me? Come and undo the door, and let me come in.
Peckaby dodged out of her way, afraid. There is no knowing but Peckaby himself may have been the stumbling-block in the mind of Brother Jarrum. A man so dead against the Latter Day Saints as Peckaby had shown himself, would be a difficult customer to deal with. He might be capable of following them and upsetting the minds of all the Deerham converts, did his wife start with them for New Jerusalem.
"And what about the white donkeys, Grind?" added Peckaby. "Be they in plenty?" Grind was ignorant of the white donkey story, and took the question literally. "I never see none," he repeated. "There's nothing white there but the great Salt Lake, which strikes the eyes with blindness " "Won't I treat you to a basting!" The emphatic remark, coming from Mrs.
"I'm a'most sick of it, sir," she said. "I'm sick to the heart with looking and watching. My brain gets weary and my eyes gets tired. The white quadruple don't come, and Peckaby, he's a-rowing at me everlastin'. I'm come out here for a bit o' peace." "Don't you think it would be better to give the white donkey up for a bad job, Mrs. Peckaby?" "Give it up!" she uttered, aghast.
'Let Dan carry 'em up now, says Dame Peckaby, 'and ask her about the print, and then I'll take it home along o' me. And if I go in without the answer, she'll be the first to help mother to baste me! Hi! ho! hur! hur-r-r-r!" This last exclamation was caused by his catching sight of some small animal scudding along.
The prevalent opinion in Clay Lane was that this was quite as much as Peckaby deserved; and that it was a special piece of undeserved good fortune which had taken off the blacksmith's brother and assistant in the nick of time, Joe Chuff, to make room for him. Mrs. Peckaby, however, was in a state of semi-rebellion; the worse, that she did not know upon whom to visit it, or see any remedy.
"What! hasn't that there white donkey come yet?" demanded Polly Dawson; who, in conjunction with sundry others of her age and sex in the village, was not sparing of her free remarks to Mrs. Peckaby on the subject, thereby aggravating that lady considerably. "You hold your tongue, Polly Dawson, and don't be brazen, if you can help it," rebuked Mrs. Peckaby.
It's again human female natur. If you went angry mad with jealousy, just at fancying you see a innocent kiss give upon a girl's face, how 'ud you do, I ask, when it come to wives? Tales runs as them 'saints' have got any number a-piece, from four or five, up to seventy. If you don't come to your senses, Mrs. Peckaby, you'll get a walloping, to bring you to 'em; and that's about it.
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