Part 8 (1/2)

This was it.

That same night, by a bright fire lighting up snowy walls, burnished copper, gleaming candlesticks, and a dinner-table floor, sat the mistress of the house, Christie Johnstone, and her brother, Flucker.

She with a book, he with his reflections opposite her.

”La.s.sie, hae ye ony siller past ye?”

”Ay, lad; an' I mean to keep it!” The baddish boy had registered a vow to the contrary, and proceeded to bleed his flint (for to do Christie justice the process was not very dissimilar). Flucker had a versatile genius for making money; he had made it in forty different ways, by land and sea, tenpence at a time.

”I hae gotten the life o' Jess Rutherford till ye,” said he.

”Giest then.”

”I'm seeking half a crown for 't,” said he.

Now, he knew he should never get half a crown, but he also knew that if he asked a s.h.i.+lling, he should be beaten down to fourpence.

So half a crown was his first bode.

The enemy, with anger at her heart, called up a humorous smile, and saying, ”An' ye'll get saxpence,” went about some household matter; in reality, to let her proposal rankle in Flucker.

Flucker lighted his pipe slowly, as one who would not do a sister the injustice to notice so trivial a proposition.

He waited fresh overtures.

They did not come.

Christie resumed her book.

Then the baddish boy fixed his eye on the fire, and said softly and thoughtfully to the fire, ”Hech, what a heap o' troubles yon woman has come through.”

This stroke of art was not lost. Christie looked up from her book; pretended he had spoken to her, gave a fict.i.tious yawn, and renewed the negotiation with the air of one disposed to kill time.

She was dying for the story.

Commerce was twice broken off and renewed by each power in turn.

At last the bargain was struck at fourteen-pence.

Then Flucker came out, the honest merchant.

He had listened intently, with mercantile views.

He had the widow's sorrows all off pat.

He was not a bit affected himself, but by pure memory he remembered where she had been most agitated or overcome.

He gave it Christie, word for word, and even threw in what dramatists call ”the business,” thus: