Harsh men are apt
to have consciences, and his was far from easy about the lad who had
been entrusted to his care. He could not help thinking of it when the
day's work was over, and he had to keep filling up his evening
whiskey-glass again and again to drown disagreeable thoughts.
The whiskey answered this purpose, but it made him late in the morning:
it complicated business on market days, not to the benefit of the farm,
and it put him at a disadvantage in dealing with the drunken cowherd.
The cowherd was completely upset by John Broom's mysterious
disappearance, and he comforted himself as the farm-bailiff did, but to
a larger extent. And Thomasina winked at many irregularities in
consideration of the groans of sympathy with which he responded to her
tears as they sat round the hearth where John Broom no longer lay.
At the time that he vanished from Lingborough the gossips of the country
side said, This comes of making pets of tramps' brats, when honest
folk's sons may toil and moil without notice. But when it was proved
that the tramp-boy had stolen nothing, when all search for him was vain,
and when prosperity faded from the place season by season and year by
year, there were old folk who whispered that the gaudily-clothed child
Miss Betty had found under the broom-bush had something more than common
in him, and that whoever and whatever had offended the eerie creature,
he had taken the luck of Lingborough with him when he went away.
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