Miss Flippance, sweeping out again, and finding him still hanging about, immovable, had a new thought. “Pardon me—has my father engaged you?”
He coloured up in anger. “I brought his bills in passing—that’s all.”
“Oh, I thought you might be looking for a job. There’s this drum, you know.”
He could have knocked her down. But she was evidently quite in earnest, this outrageous, humourless female, only second in self-sufficiency to Jinny the Carrier. The world seemed suddenly emasculated.
“But you look a strong young man and it’s muscle we want, not music. You’d only have to stand here about half an hour a day. This afternoon, of course, you might join the Bellman round the town—I’ve ordered him for five.”
“Miss Flippance,” said Will, mastering himself and speaking with crushing dignity, “have you observed my clothes?”
“They don’t matter,” she assured him. “We provide the uniform.”
“Do I look,” he snorted, “like a drummer at a dime show?”
“If you’ve come as a walking gentleman,” replied Miss Flippance simply, “you’ve come to the wrong shop. We’re only wires.”
“Oh, I know all about that.” And he slashed savagely with his stick at the insulting tambour, which uttered a bass roar of agony.
“Splendid! But you might have smashed it!” cried Miss Flippance. “Where’s the drumstick?”
“Am I the drumstick’s keeper?” he answered, with an odd Biblical reminiscence.
“Nincompoops! Thickheads! Zanies! Where’s the drumstick?”
But nobody had seen the drumstick. Jinny hadn’t brought it, the slaves assured her. She assured them, still more emphatically, that they had dropped it off the drum in taking it out. And no inch of it being visible where the cart had stood, she drew the deduction that it was now speeding towards Long Bradmarsh.
She turned to Will. “Do run after her—the men are so busy—she can’t be far, and she has to stop every now and again.”
He glared at her. Then something inside him whispered that that was the obvious thing to do—impishly to pretend to obey her, and then to keep her waiting for the drumstick—eternally. Yes, he would be revenged on behalf of his sex.
“Yoicks! Tally-ho!” he cried with an advent of glee that he felt justifiably malicious. And, waving his own stick wildly, he bounded with mock frenzy towards the field gate by which the cart had gone off.