'Former
pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected;' introducing
gravestone. 'All safe and sound here, sir, and all Durdles's work.
Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up in turf and brambles,
the less said the better. A poor lot, soon forgot.'
'This creature, Deputy, is behind us,' says Jasper, looking back.
'Is he to follow us?'
The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious kind;
for, on Durdles's turning himself about with the slow gravity of
beery suddenness, Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the road
and stands on the defensive.
'You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,' says
Durdles, unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury.
'Yer lie, I did,' says Deputy, in his only form of polite
contradiction.
'Own brother, sir,' observes Durdles, turning himself about again,
and as unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled or
conceived it; 'own brother to Peter the Wild Boy! But I gave him
an object in life.'
'At which he takes aim?' Mr. Jasper suggests.
'That's it, sir,' returns Durdles, quite satisfied; 'at which he
takes aim. I took him in hand and gave him an object. What was he
before? A destroyer. What work did he do? Nothing but
destruction. What did he earn by it? Short terms in Cloisterham
jail. Not a person, not a piece of property, not a winder, not a
horse, nor a dog, nor a cat, nor a bird, nor a fowl, nor a pig, but
what he stoned, for want of an enlightened object.
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