"For you or anybody that pays me well, ma'am," replied the young married man.
"True -- the man must live!" said a woman in the back quarter, who had just entered with clicking pattens.
"What woman is that?" Bathsheba asked.
"I be his lawful wife!" continued the voice with greater prominence of manner and tone. This lady called herself five-and-twenty, looked thirty, passed as thirty-five, and was forty. She was a woman who never, like some newly married, showed conjugal tenderness in public, perhaps because she had none to show.
"Oh, you are." said Bathsheba. "Well, Laban, will you stay on?"
"Yes, he'll stay, ma'am!" said again the shrill tongue of Laban's lawful wife.
"Well, he can speak for himself, I suppose."
"O Lord, not he, ma'am! A simple tool. Well enough, but a poor gawkhammer mortal." the wife replied "Heh-heh-heh!" laughed the married man with a hideous effort of appreciation, for he was as irrepressibly good-humoured under ghastly snubs as a parliamentary candidate on the hustings.
The names remaining were called in the same manner.
"Now I think I have done with you." said Bathsheba, closing the book and shaking back a stray twine of hair.
"Has William Smallbury returned?"
"No, ma'am."
"The new shepherd will want a man under him," suggested Henery Fray, trying to make himself official again by a sideway approach towards her chair.
"Oh -- he will. Who can he have?"
"Young Cain Ball is a very good lad." Henery said, "and Shepherd Oak don't mind his youth?" he added, turning with an apologetic smile to the shepherd, who had just appeared on the scene, and was now leaning against the doorpost with his arms folded.
"No, I don't mind that." said Gabriel.
"How did Cain come by such a name?" asked Bathsheba.
"Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman made a mistake at his christening, thinking 'twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, but 'twas too late, for the name could never be got rid of in the parish. 'Tis very unfortunate for the boy."
"It is rather unfortunate."
"Yes. However, we soften it down as much as we can, and call him Cainey. Ah, pore widow-woman!
she cried her heart out about it almost. She was brought up by a very heathen father and mother, who never sent her to church or school, and it shows how the sins of the parents are visited upon the children, mem."