Then there were disconcerting sounds out in the world beyond the van.
The horse stopped. The double doors were forced open from without, and a
black figure, with white eyes in a black face, filled the doorway. The
van had passed through the mining village of Moorthorne, and this was
one of the marauding colliers on the outskirts thereof. When the
colliers had highroad business in the night they did not trouble to wash
their faces after work. The coal-dust was a positive aid to them, for it
gave them a most useful resemblance to the devil.
Jock-at-a-Venture sprang up as though launched from a catapult.
"Is it thou, Jock?" cried the collier, astounded.
"Ay, lad!" said Jock, briefly.
And caught the collier a blow under the chin that sent him flying into
the obscurity of the night. Other voices sounded in the road. Jock
rushed to the doorway, taking a pistol from his pocket. And Mrs Clowes,
all dithering like a jelly, heard shots. The horse started into a
gallop. The reins escaped from the hands of the mistress, but Jock
secured them, and lashed the horse to greater speed with the loose ends
of them.
"I've saved thee, missis!" he said later. "I give him a regular lifter
under the gob, same as I give Jabez, Sunday. But where's the sense of a
lone woman wandering about dark roads of a night wi' a pack of
childer?... Them childer 'ud ha' slept through th' battle o' Trafalgar,"
he added.
Mrs Clowes wept.
"Well may you say it!" she murmured. "And it's not the first time as
I've been set on!"
"Thou'rt nowt but a girl, for all thy flesh and thy grandchilder!" said
Jock. "Dry thy eyes, or I'll dry 'em for thee!"
She smiled in her weeping. It was an invitation to him to carry out his
threat.
And while he was drying her eyes for her, she asked:
"How far are ye going? Axe?"
"Ay! And beyond! Can I act, I ask ye? Can I fight, I ask ye? Can ye do
without me, I ask ye, you a lone woman? And yer soul, as is mine to
save?"
"But that business o' yours at Bursley?"
"Here's my bundle," he said, "and here's my best hat. And I've money and
a pistol in my pocket. The only thing I've clean forgot is my cornet;
but I'll send for it and I'll play it at my wedding. I'm
Jock-at-a-Venture."
And while the van was rumbling in the dark night across the waste and
savage moorland, and while the children were sleeping hard at the back
of the van, and while the crockery was restlessly clinking in the racks
and the lamp swaying, and while he held the reins, the thin, lithe,
greying man contrived to take into his arms the vast and amiable
creature whom he desired. And the van became a vehicle of high romance.