Zacchary had always felt scorn of Tickuss, but now he almost disdained himself for springing of one wedlock with him. He stood in the place where he must be seen if Tickuss wished to see him, until he was quite sure that no such longing existed on his brother's part. Then the family seemed to be lowered so by this behaviour of a leading member, that when the Carrier moved his legs, he had not the spirit to crack his whip.
"What shall us do? Whatever shall us do?" he said to himself more reasonably, with the anger dying out of his kind blue eyes. "A hath insulted of me, but a hath a big family of little uns to kape up. I harn't had no knowledge how that zort o' thing may drive a man out of his proper ways. Like enough it maketh them careful to tell lies, and shun the thrashing."
Taking this view of the case, Master Cripps turned away from the path towards his brother's house, to which, in the flush of first anger, he meant to go, and there to wait for him; and being rather slow of resolution, he naturally set forth again on the track of the one last interrupted. He would go to this cottage in the wood of which he had heard through one of his washerwomen--though none of them had any washing thence--and then he would satisfy his own mind concerning an ugly rumour, which had unsettled that mind since Tuesday. For in his own hearing it had been said--by a woman, it is true, but still a woman who came of a truthful family, and was married now into the like--that Master Leviticus Cripps was harbouring pirates and conspirators, believed to have come from America, in a little place out of the way of all honest people, where the deaf old woman was. Nobody ever had leave to the house; never a butcher, nor baker, nor tea-grocer, nor a milkman, nor even a respectable washerwoman--there was nothing except a great dog to rush out and bite without even barking.
Zacchary had no easy task to find the little cottage of which he had heard, for it lay well back from all thoroughfares, and so embedded among ivied trees, that he passed and re-passed several times before he descried it; and even then he would not have done so if it had not chanced that Miss Patch, who loved good things when she could get them, was about to dine on a juicy roaster, supplied by the wary Leviticus. Grace herself had prepared the currant sauce, before she went forth for her daily walk, and deaf old Margery Daw was stooping over the fierce wood fire on the ground, and basting with a short iron spoon. The double result was a wreath of blue smoke rising from the crooked chimney, and a very rich odour streaming forth from door and window on the vernal air. The eyes and the nose of the Carrier at once presented him with clear impressions.