Rather less than a week later, on a darkening night, a van left the town
of Bursley by the Moorthorne Road on its way to Axe-in-the-Moors, which
is the metropolis of the wild wastes that cut off northern Staffordshire
from Derbyshire. This van was the last of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai, and
almost the last to leave the Fair. Owing to popular interest in the
events of Jock-at-a-Venture's public career, in whose meshes Mrs Clowes
had somehow got caught, the booth of Mrs Clowes had succeeded beyond any
other booth, and had kept open longer and burned more naphtha and taken
far more money. The other vans of the stout lady's enterprise (there
were three in all) had gone forward in advance, with all her elder
children and her children-in-law and her grandchildren, and the heavy
wood and canvas of the booth. Mrs Clowes, transacting her own business
herself, from habit, invariably brought up the rear of her procession
out of a town; and sometimes her leisurely manner of settling with the
town authorities for water, ground-space and other necessary
com-modities, left her several miles behind her tribe.
The mistress's van, though it would not compare with the glorious
vehicles that showmen put upon the road in these days, was a roomy and
dignified specimen, and about as good as money could then buy. The front
portion consisted of a parlour and kitchen combined, and at the back was
a dormitory. In the dormitory Kezia, Sapphira and the youngest of their
brothers were sleeping hard. In the parlour and kitchen sat Mrs Clowes,
warmly enveloped, holding the reins with her right hand and a shabby,
paper-covered book in her left hand. The book was the celebrated play,
_The Gamester_, and Mrs Clowes was studying therein the rôle of
Dulcibel. Not a rôle for which Mrs Clowes was physically fitted; but her
prolific daughter, Hephzibah, to whom it appertained by prescription,
could not possibly play it any longer, and would, indeed, be
incapacitated from any rôle whatever for at least a month. And the
season was not yet over; for folk were hardier in those days.
The reins stretched out from the careless hand of Mrs Clowes and
vanished through a slit between the double doors, which had been fixed
slightly open. Mrs Clowes's gaze, penetrating now and then the slit,
could see the gleam of her lamp's ray on a horse's flank. The only
sounds were the hoof-falls of the horse, the crunching of the wheels on
the wet road, the occasional rattle of a vessel in the racks when the
van happened to descend violently into a rut, and the steady murmur of
Mrs Clowes's voice rehearsing the grandiloquence of the part of
Dulcibel.
And then there was another sound, which Mrs Clowes did not notice until
it had been repeated several times; the cry of a human voice out on the
road:
"Missis!"
She opened wide the doors of the van and looked prudently forth.
Naturally, inevitably, Jock-at-a-Venture was trudging alongside, level
with the horse's tail! He stepped nimbly--he was a fine walker--but none
the less his breath came short and quick, for he had been making haste
up a steepish hill in order to overtake the van. And he carried a bundle
and a stick in his hands, and on his head a superb but heavy beaver hat.
"I'm going your way, missis," said Jock.
"Seemingly," agreed Mrs Clowes, with due caution.
"Canst gi' us a lift?" he asked.
"And welcome," she said, her face changing like a flash to suit the
words.
"Nay, ye needna' stop!" shouted Jock.
In an instant he had leapt easily up into the van, and was seated by her
side therein on the children's stool.
"That's a hat--to travel in!" observed Mrs Clowes.
Jock removed the hat, examined it lovingly and replaced it.
"I couldn't ha' left it behind," said he, with a sigh, and continued
rapidly in another voice: "Missis, we'n seen a pretty good lot o' each
other this wik, and yet ye slips off o'this'n, without saying good-bye,
nor a word about yer soul!"
Mrs Clowes heaved her enormous breast and shook the reins.
"I've had my share of trouble," she remarked mysteriously.
"Tell me about it, missis!"
And lo! in a moment, lured on by his smile, she was telling him quite
familiarly about the ailments of her younger children, the escapades of
her unmarried daughter aged fifteen, the surliness of one of her
sons-in-law, the budding dishonesty of the other, the perils of infant
life, and the need of repainting the big van and getting new pictures
for the front of the booth. Indeed, all the worries of a queen of the
road!
"And I'm so fat!" she said, "and yet I'm not forty, and shan't be for
two year--and me a grandmother!"
"I knowed it!" Jock exclaimed.
"If I wasn't such a heap o' flesh--"
"Ye're the grandest heap o' flesh as I ever set eyes on, and I'm telling
ye!" Jock interrupted her.