← catalogue

The New Rector

by Stanley John Weyman · English · Gutenberg #39215 · 479,499 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The New Rector
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The New Rector

Author: Stanley John Weyman


        
Release date: March 20, 2012 [eBook #39215]
                Most recently updated: June 14, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39215

Credits: Charles Bowen


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW RECTOR ***




THE NEW RECTOR

BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN

NEW YORK

AMERICAN PUBLISHERS CORPORATION

310-318 Sixth Avenue

Copyright 1891,
BY
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_


Contents

 CHAPTER I. “LE ROI EST MORT!”
 CHAPTER II. “VIVE LE ROI!”
 CHAPTER III. AN AWKWARD MEETING.
 CHAPTER IV. BIRDS IN THE WILDERNESS.
 CHAPTER V. “REGINALD LINDO, 1850.”
 CHAPTER VI. THE BONAMYS AT HOME.
 CHAPTER VII. THE HAMMONDS’ DINNER PARTY.
 CHAPTER VIII. TWO SURPRISES.
 CHAPTER IX. TOWN TALK.
 CHAPTER X. OUT WITH THE SHEEP.
 CHAPTER XI. THE DOCTOR SPEAKS.
 CHAPTER XII. THE RECTOR IS UNGRATEFUL.
 CHAPTER XIII. LAURA’S PROVISO.
 CHAPTER XIV. THE LETTERS IN THE CUPBOARD.
 CHAPTER XV. THE BAZAAR.
 CHAPTER XVI. “LORD DYNMORE IS HERE.”
 CHAPTER XVII. THE LAWYER AT HOME.
 CHAPTER XVIII. A FRIEND IN NEED.
 CHAPTER XIX. THE DAY AFTER.
 CHAPTER XX. A SUDDEN CALL.
 CHAPTER XXI. IN PROFUNDIS.
 CHAPTER XXII. THE RECTOR’S DECISION.
 CHAPTER XXIII. THE CURATE HEARS THE NEWS.
 CHAPTER XXIV. THE CUP AT THE LIP.
 CHAPTER XXV. HUMBLE PIE.
 CHAPTER XXVI. LOOSE ENDS.





THE NEW RECTOR.




CHAPTER I.
“LE ROI EST MORT!”


The king was dead. But not at once, not until after some short
breathing-space, such as was pleasant enough to those whose only
concern with the succession lay in the shouting, could the cry of “Long
live the king!” be raised. For a few days there was no rector of
Claversham. The living was during this time in abeyance, or in the
clouds, or in the lap of the law, or in any strange and inscrutable
place you choose to name. It may have been in the prescience of the
patron, and, if so, no locality could be more vague, the whereabouts of
Lord Dynmore himself, to say nothing of his prescience, being as
uncertain as possible. Messrs. Gearns & Baker, his solicitors and
agents, should have known as much upon this point as any one; yet it
was their habit to tell one inquirer that his lordship was in the
Cordilleras, and another that he was on the slopes of the Andes, and
another that he was at the forty-ninth parallel—quite
indifferently—these places being all one to Messrs. Gearns & Baker,
whose walk in life had lain for so many years about Lincoln’s Inn
Fields that Clare Market had come to be their ideal of an uncivilized
country.

And more, if the whereabouts of Lord Dynmore could only be told in
words rather far-sounding than definite, there was room for a doubt
whether his prescience existed at all. For, according to his friends,
there never was a man whose memory was so notably eccentric—not weak,
but eccentric. And if his memory was impeccable, his prescience— But we
grow wide of the mark. The question being merely where the living of
Claversham was during the days which immediately followed Mr.
Williams’s death, let it be said at once that we do not know.

Mr. Williams was the late incumbent. He had been rector of the little
Warwickshire town for nearly forty years; and although his people were
ready enough to busy themselves with the question of his successor, he
did not lack honor in his death. His had been a placid life, such as
suited an indolent and easy-going man. “Let me sit upon one chair and
put up my feet on another, and there I am,” he was once heard to say;
and the town repeated the remark and chuckled over it. There were some
who would have had the parish move more quickly, and who talked with a
sneer of the old port-wine kind of parson. But if he had done little
good, he had done less evil. He was kindly and open-handed, and he had
not an enemy in the parish. He was regretted as much as such a man
should be. Besides, people did not die commonly in Claversham. It was
but once a year, or twice at the most, that any one who was any one
passed away. And so, when the event did occur the most was made of it
in an old-fashioned way. When Mr. Williams passed for the last time
into his churchyard, there was no window which did not, by shutter or
blind, mark its respect for him, not a tongue which wagged foul of his
memory. And then the shutters were taken down and the blinds pulled up,
and every one, from Mr. Clode, the curate, to the old people at
Bourne’s Almhouses, who, having no affairs of their own, had the more
time to discuss their neighbors’, asked, “Who is to be the new rector?”

On the day of the funeral two of these old pensioners watched the
curate’s tall form as he came gravely along the opposite side of the
street, to fall in at the door of his lodgings with two ladies, one
elderly, one young, who were passing so opportunely that it really
seemed as if they might have been waiting for him. He and the elder
lady—she was so plump of figure, so healthy of eye and cheek, and was
dressed besides with such a comfortable richness that it did one good
to look at her—began to talk in a subdued, decorous fashion, while the
girl listened. He was telling them of the funeral, how well the
archdeacon had read the service, and what a crowd of Dissenters had
been present, and so on: and at last he came to the important question.

“I hear, Mrs. Hammond,” he said, “that the living will be given to Mr.
Herbert of Easthope, whom you know, I think? To me? Oh, no, I have not,
and never had, any expectation of it. Please do not,” he added, with a
slight smile and a shake of the head, “mention such a thing again.
Leave me in my content.”

“But why should you not have it?” said the young lady, with a pleasant
persistence. “Every one in the parish would be glad if you were
appointed. Could we not do something or say something—get up a petition
or anything? Lord Dynmore ought, of course, to give it to you. I think
some one should tell him what are the wishes of the parish. I do
indeed!”

She was a very pretty young lady, with bright brown eyes and hair and
rather arch features, and the gentleman she was addressing had long
found her face pleasant to look upon; but at this moment it really
seemed to him as the face of an angel. Yet he only answered with a kind
of depressed gratitude. “Thank you, Miss Hammond,” he said. “If good
wishes could procure me the living, I should have an excellent reason
for hoping. But as things are, it is not for me.”

“Pooh! pooh!” said Mrs. Hammond cheerily, “who knows?” And then, after
a few more words, they went on their way, and he turned into his rooms.

The old women were still watching. “I don’t well know who’ll get it,
Peggy,” said one, “but I be pretty sure of this, as he won’t! It isn’t
his sort as gets ’em. It’s the lord’s friends, bless you!”

So it appeared that she and Mr. Clode were of one mind on the matter.
But was that really Mr. Clode’s opinion? It was when the crow opened
its beak that it dropped the piece of cheese; and so to this day the
wise man has no chance or expectation of this or that until he gets it.
And if a patron or a patron’s solicitor has for some days had under his
paperweight a letter written in a hand that bears a strange likeness to
the wise man’s—a letter setting forth the latter’s claims and
wisdom—what of that? That is a private matter, of course.

Be that as it may, there was scarcely a person in Claversham who did
not give some time that evening, and on subsequent evenings too, to the
interesting question who was to be the new rector. The rector was a big
factor in the town-life. Girls wondered whether he would be young, and
hoped he would dance. Their mothers were sanguine that he would be
unmarried, and their fathers that he would play whist. And one
questioned whether he would buy Mr. Williams’s stock of port, and
another whether he would dine late. And some trusted that he would let
things be, and some hoped that he would cleanse the stables. And only
one thing was certain and sure and immutably fixed—that, whoever he
was, he would not be able to please everybody.

Nay, the ripple of excitement spread far beyond Claversham. Not only at
the archdeacon’s at Kingsford Carbonel, five miles away among the
orchards and hopyards, was there much speculation upon the matter, but
even at the Homfrays’, of Holberton, ten miles out beyond the Baer
Hills, there was talk about it, and bets were made across the
billiard-table. And in more distant vicarages and curacies, where the
patron was in some degree known, there were flutterings of heart and
anxious searchings of the “Guardian” and Crockford. Those who seemed to
have some chance of the living grew despondent, and those who had none
talked the thing over with their wives after the children had gone to
bed, until they persuaded themselves that they would die at Claversham
Rectory. Middle-aged men who had been at college with Lord Dynmore
remembered that they had on one occasion rowed in the same boat with
him; and young men who had danced with his niece thought secretly that,
dear little woman as Emily or Annie was, they might have done better.
And a hundred and eleven letters, written by people who knew less than
Messrs. Gearns & Baker of the Andes, seeing that they did not know that
Lord Dynmore was there or thereabouts, were received at Dynmore Park
and forwarded to London, and duly made up into a large parcel with
other correspondence by Messrs. Gearns & Baker, and so were despatched
to the forty-ninth parallel—or thereabouts.




CHAPTER II.
“VIVE LE ROI!”


It was at the beginning of the second week in October that Mr. Williams
died; and, the weather in those parts being peculiarly fine and bright
for the time of year, men stood about in the churchyard with bare
heads, and caught no colds. And it continued so for some days after the
funeral. But not everywhere. Upon a morning, some three perhaps after
the ceremony at Claversham, a young gentleman sat down to his
breakfast, only a hundred and fifty miles away, under such different
conditions—a bitter east wind, a dense fog, and a general murkiness of
atmosphere—that one might have supposed his not over-plentiful meal to
be laid in another planet.

The air in the room—a meagrely furnished, much littered room, was
yellow and choking, and the candles burned dimly in the midst of yellow
halos. The fire seemed to be smouldering, and the owner of the room had
to pay some attention to it before he sat down and found a letter lying
beside his plate. He glanced at it doubtfully. “I do not know the
handwriting,” he muttered, “and it is not a subscription, for they
never come in an east wind. I am afraid it is a bill.”

The letter was addressed to the Rev. Reginald Lindo, St. Barnabas
Mission House, 383 East India Dock Road, London, E. After scrutinizing
it for a moment, he pulled a candle toward him and tore open the
envelope.

He read the letter slowly, his teacup at his lips, and, though he was
alone, his face grew crimson. When he had finished it he turned back
and read it again, and then flung it down and, starting up, began to
walk the room. “What a boy I am!” he muttered. “But it is almost
incredible. Upon my honor it is almost incredible!”

He was still at the height of his excitement, now sitting down to take
a mouthful of breakfast and now leaping up to pace the room, when his
housekeeper entered and said that a woman from Tamplin’s Rents wanted
to see him.

“What does she want, Mrs. Baxter?” he asked.

“Husband is dying, sir,” the old lady replied briefly.

“Do you know her at all?”

“No, sir. She is as poor a piece as I have ever seen. She says that she
could not have come out, for want of clothes, if it had not been for
the fog. And they are not particular here, as I know—the hussies!”

“Say that I shall be ready to go with her in less than five minutes,”
the young clergyman answered. “And here! Give her some tea, Mrs.
Baxter. The pot is half full.”

He bustled about; but nevertheless the message and the business he was
now upon had sobered him, and as he buttoned up the letter in his
breast-pocket, his face was grave. He was a tall young man, fair, with
regular features, and curling hair cut rather short. His eyes were blue
and pleasantly bold; and in his every action and in his whole carriage
there was a great appearance of confidence and self-possession. Taking
a book and a small case from a side-table, he put on his overcoat and
went out. A moment, and the dense fog swallowed him up, and with him
the tattered bundle of rags, which had a husband, and very likely had
nothing else in the world of her own. Tamplin’s Rents not affecting us,
we may skip a few hours, and then go westward with him as far as the
Temple, which in the East India Dock Road is considered very far west
indeed by those who have ever heard of it.

Here he sought a dingy staircase in Fig-tree Court, and, mounting to
the second floor, stopped before a door which was adorned by about a
dozen names, painted in white on a black ground. He knocked loudly,
and, a small boy answering his summons with great alacrity and
importance, our friend asked for Mr. Smith, and was promptly ushered
into a room about nine feet square, in which, at a table covered with
papers and open books, sat a small, dark-complexioned man, very keen
and eager in appearance, who looked up with an air of annoyance.

“Who is it, Fred?” he said impatiently, moving one of the candles,
which the fog still rendered necessary, although it was high noon. “I
am engaged at present.”

“Mr. Lindo to see you, sir,” the boy announced, with a formality very
funny in a groom of the chambers about four feet high.

The little man’s countenance instantly changed, and he jumped up
grinning. “Is it you, old boy?” he said. “Sit down, old fellow! I
thought it might be my own solicitor, and it is well to be prepared,
you know.”

“But you are not really busy?” said the visitor, looking at him
doubtfully.

“Well, I am and I am not,” replied Mr. Smith; and, deftly tipping aside
the books, he disclosed some slips of manuscript. “It is an article for
the ‘Cornhill,’” he continued; “but whether it will ever appear there
is another matter. You have come to lunch, of course? And now, what is
your news?”

He was so quick and eager that he reminded people who saw him for the
first time of a rat. When they came to know him better, they found that
a stauncher friend than Jack Smith was not to be found in the Temple.
With this he had the reputation of being a clever, clear-headed man,
and his sound common-sense was almost a proverb. Observing that Lindo
did not answer him, he repeated, “Is anything amiss, old fellow?”

“Well, not quite amiss,” Lindo answered, his face flushing a little.
“But the fact is”—taking the letter from the breast-pocket—“that I have
had the offer of a living, Jack.”

Smith leaped up and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “By Jove! old
man,” he exclaimed heartily, “I am glad of it! Right glad of it! You
must have had enough of that slumming. But I hope it is a better living
than mine,” he continued, with a comical glance round the tiny room.
“Let us have a look! What is it? Two hundred and a house?”

Lindo handed the letter to him. It was written from Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, and was dated the preceding day. It ran thus:

“Dear Sir:—We are instructed by our client, the Right Honorable the
Earl of Dynmore, to invite your acceptance of the living of Claversham
in the county of Warwick, vacant by the death on the 15th instant of
the Rev. John Williams, the late incumbent. The living, of which his
lordship is the patron, is a town rectory, of the approximate value of
810_l_ per annum and a house. Our client is travelling in the United
States, but we have the requisite authorities to proceed in due form
and without delay, which in this matter is prejudicial. We beg to have
the pleasure of receiving your acceptance at as early a date as
possible,

“And remain, dear Sir,

“Your obedient servants,

“Gearns & Baker.

“To the Rev. Reginald Lindo, M.A.”

The barrister read this letter with even greater surprise than seemed
natural, and, when he had done, looked at his companion with wondering
eyes. “Claversham!” he ejaculated. “Why, I know it well!”

“Do you? I have never heard you mention it.”

“I knew old Williams!” Jack continued, still in amaze. “Knew him well,
and heard of his death, but little thought you were likely to succeed
him. My dear fellow, it is a wonderful piece of good fortune!
Wonderful! I shake you by the hand! I congratulate you heartily! But
how did you come to know the high and mighty earl? Unbosom yourself, my
dear boy!”

“I do not know him—do not know him from Adam!” replied the young
clergyman gravely.

“You don’t mean it?”

“I do. I have never seen him in my life.”

Jack Smith whistled. “Are you sure it is not a hoax?” he said, with a
serious face.

“I think not,” the rector-elect replied. “Perhaps I have given you a
wrong impression. I have had nothing to do with the earl; but my uncle
was his tutor.”

“Oh!” said Smith slowly, “that makes all the difference. What uncle?”

“You have heard me speak of him. He was vicar of St. Gabriel’s,
Aldgate. He died about a year ago—last October, I think. Lord Dynmore
and he were good friends, and my uncle used often to stay at his place
in Scotland. I suppose my name must have come up some time when they
were talking.”

“Likely enough,” assented the lawyer. “But for the earl to remember it,
he must be one in a hundred!”

“It is certainly very good of him,” Lindo replied, his cheek flushing.
“If it had been a small country living, and my uncle had been alive to
jog his elbow, I should not have been so much surprised.”

“And you are just twenty-five!” Jack Smith observed, leaning back in
his chair, and eyeing his friend with undisguised and whimsical
admiration. “You will be the youngest rector in the Clergy List, I
should think! And Claversham! By Jove, what a berth!”

A queer expression of annoyance for a moment showed itself in Lindo’s
face. “I say, Jack, stow that!” he said gently, and with a little
shamefacedness. “I mean,” he continued, smoothing down the nap on his
hat, “that I do not want to look at it altogether in that way, and I do
not want others to regard it so.”

“As a berth, you mean?” Jack said gravely, but with a twinkle in his
eyes.

“Well, from the loaves and fishes point of view,” Lindo commenced,
beginning to walk up and down the room. “I do not think an officer,
when he gets promotion, looks only at the increase in his pay. Of
course I am glad that it is a good living, and that I shall have a
house, and a good position, and all that. But I declare to you, Jack,
believe me or not as you like, that if I did not feel that I could do
the work as I hope, please God, to do it, I would not take it up—I
would not, indeed. As it is, I feel the responsibility. I have been
thinking about it as I walked down here, and upon my honor for a while
I thought I ought to decline it.”

“I would not do that!” said Gallio, dismissing the twinkle from his
eye, and really respecting his old friend, perhaps, a little more than
before. “You are not the man, I think, to shun either work or
responsibility. Did I tell you,” he continued in a different tone,
“that I had an uncle at Claversham?”

“No,” said Lindo, surprised in his turn.

“Yes, and I think he is one of your church wardens. His name is Bonamy,
and he is a solicitor. His London agent is my only client,” Jack said
jerkily.

“And he is one of the church wardens! Well, that is strange—and jolly!”

“Umph! Don’t you be too sure of that!” retorted the barrister sharply.
“He is a—well, he has been very good to me, and he is my uncle, and I
am not going to say anything against him. But I am not quite sure that
I should like him for my church warden. _Your_ church warden! Why, it
is like a fairy tale, old fellow!”

And so it seemed to Lindo when, an hour later, the small boy, with the
same portentous gravity of face, let him out and bade him good-day. As
the young parson started eastward, along Fleet Street first, he looked
at the moving things round him with new eyes, from a new standpoint,
with a new curiosity. The passers-by were the same, but he was changed.
He had lunched, and perhaps the material view of his position was
uppermost, for those in the crowd who specially observed the tall young
clergyman noticed in his bearing an air of calm importance and a strong
sense of personal dignity, which led him to shun collisions, and even
to avoid jostling his fellows, with peculiar care. The truth was that
he had all the while before his eyes, as he walked, an announcement
which was destined to appear in the “Guardian” of the following week:

“The Rev. Reginald Lindo, M.A., St. Barnabas’ Mission, London, to be
Rector of Claversham. Patron, the Earl of Dynmore.”




CHAPTER III.
AN AWKWARD MEETING.


A fortnight after this paragraph in the “Guardian” had filled
Claversham with astonishment and Mr. Clode with a modest thankfulness
that he was spared the burden of office, a little dark man—Jack Smith,
in fact—drove briskly into Paddington Station, and, disregarding the
offers of the porters, who stand waiting on the hither side of the
journey like Charon by the Styx, and see at a glance who has the
obolus, sprang from the hansom without assistance, and bustled on to
the platform.

Here he looked up and down as if he expected to meet some one, and
then, glancing at the clock, found that he had a quarter of an hour to
spare. He made at once for the bookstall, and, with a lavishness which
would have surprised some of his friends, bought “Punch,” a little
volume by Howells, the “Standard,” and finally, though he blushed as he
asked for it, the “Queen.” He had just gathered his purchases together
and was paying for them, when a high-pitched voice at his elbow made
him start. “Why, Jack! what in the world are you buying all those
papers for?” The speaker was a girl about thirteen years old, who in
the hubbub had stolen unnoticed to his side.

“Hullo, Daintry,” he answered. “Why did you not say that you were here
before? I have been looking for you. Where is Kate? Oh, yes, I see
her,” as a young lady turning over books at the farther end of the
stall acknowledged his presence by a laughing nod. “You are here in
good time,” he went on, while the younger girl affectionately slipped
her arm through his.

“Yes,” she said. “Your mother started us early. And so you have come to
see us off, after all, Jack?”

“Just so,” he answered drily. “Let us go to Kate.”

They did so, the young lady meeting them halfway. “How kind of you to
be here, Jack!” she said. “As you have come, will you look us out a
comfortable compartment? That is the train over there. And please to
put this, and this, and Daintry’s parcel in the corners for us.”

This and this were a cloak and a shawl, and a few little matters in
brown paper. In order to possess himself of them, Jack handed Kate the
papers he was carrying.

“Are they for me?” she said, gratefully indeed, but with a placid
gratitude which was not perhaps what the donor wanted. “Oh, thank you.
And this too? What is it?”

“‘Their Wedding Journey,’” said Jack, with a shy twinkle in his eyes.

“Is it pretty?” she answered dubiously. “It sounds silly; but you are
supposed to be a judge. I think I should like ‘A Chance Acquaintance’
better, though.”

Of course the little book was changed, and Jack winced. But he had not
time to think much about it, for he had to bustle away through the
rising babel to secure seats for them in an empty compartment of the
Oxford train, and see their luggage labelled and put in. This done, he
hurried back, and pointed out to them the places he had taken. “Oh,
dear, they are in a through carriage,” Kate said, stopping short and
eyeing the board over the door.

“Yes,” he answered. “I thought that that was what you wanted.”

“No, I would rather go in another carriage, and change. We shall get to
Claversham soon enough without travelling with Claversham people.”

“Indeed we shall,” Daintry chimed in. “Let us go and find seats, and
Jack will bring the things after us.”

He assented meekly—very meekly for sharp Jack Smith—and presently came
along with his arms full of parcels, to find them ensconced in the
nearer seats of a compartment, which contained also one gentleman who
was already deep in the “Times.” Jack, standing at the open door, could
not see his face, for it was hidden by the newspaper, but he could see
that his legs wore a youthful and reckless air; and he raised his
eyebrows interrogatively. “Pooh!” whispered Daintry in answer. “How
stupid you are! It is all right. I can see he is a clergyman by his
boots!”

Jack smiled at this assurance, and, putting in the things he was
holding, shut the door and stood outside, looking first at the platform
about him, on which all was flurry and confusion, and then at the
interior of the carriage, which seemed in comparison peaceful and
homelike. “I think I will come with you to Westbourne Park,” he said
suddenly.

“Nonsense, Jack!” Kate replied, with crushing decision. “We shall be
there in five minutes, and you will have all the trouble of returning
for nothing.”

He acquiesced meekly—poor Jack! “Well,” he said, with a new effort at
cheerfulness, “you will soon be at home, girls. Remember me to the
governor. I am afraid you will be rather dull at first. You will have
one scrap of excitement, however.”

“What is that?” said Kate, very much as if she were prepared to
depreciate it before she knew what it was.

“The new rector!”

“He will make very little difference to us!” the girl answered, with an
accent almost of scorn. “Papa said in his letter that he thought it was
a great pity a local man had not been appointed—some one who knew the
place and the old ways. You say he is clever and nice; but either way
it will not affect us much.”

No one noticed that the “Times” newspaper in the far corner of the
compartment rustled suspiciously, and that the clerical boots became
agitated on a sudden, as though their wearer meditated a move; and, in
ignorance of this, “I expect I shall hate him!” said Daintry calmly.

“Come, you must not do that,” Jack remonstrated “You must remember that
he is not only a very good fellow, but a great friend of mine.”

“Then we ought indeed to spare him!” Kate said frankly, “for you have
been very good to us and made our visit delightful.”

His face flushed with pleasure even at those simple words of praise.
“And you will write and tell me,” he continued eagerly, “that you have
reached your journey’s end safely.”

“One of us will,” was the answer. “Daintry,” Kate went on calmly, “will
you remind me to write to Jack to-morrow evening?”

His face fell sadly. So little would have made him happy. He looked
down and kicked the step of the carriage, and made his tiny moan to
himself before he spoke again. “Good-bye,” he said then. “They are
coming to look at your tickets. You are due out in one minute.
Good-bye, Daintry.”

“Good-bye, Jack. Come and see us soon,” she cried earnestly, as she
released his hand.

“Good-bye, Kate.” Alas! Kate’s cheek did not show the slightest
consciousness that his clasp was more than cousinly. She uttered her
“Good-bye, Jack, and thank you so much,” very kindly, but her color
never varied by the quarter of a tone, and her grasp was as firm and as
devoid of shyness as his own.

He had not much time to be miserable, however, then, for, the
ticket-collector coming to the window, Jack had to fall back, and in
doing so made a discovery. Kate, hunting for her ticket in one of those
mysterious places in which ladies will put tickets, heard him utter an
exclamation, and asked, “What is it, Jack?”

To her surprise, the collector having by this time disappeared, he
stretched out his hand through the window to some one beyond her. “Why,
Lindo!” he cried, “is that you? I had not a notion of your identity. Of
course you are going down to take possession.”

Kate, trembling already with a horrible presentiment, turned her head.
Yes, it was the clergyman in the corner who answered Jack’s greeting
and rose to shake hands with him, the train being already in motion. “I
did not recognize your voice out there,” he said, looking rather hot.

“No? And I did not know you were going down to-day,” Jack answered,
walking beside the train. “Let me introduce you to my cousins, Miss
Bonamy and Daintry. I am sorry that I did not see you before. Good luck
to you! Good-bye, Kate!”

The train was moving faster and faster, and Jack was soon left behind
on the platform gazing pathetically at the black tunnel which had
swallowed it up. In the carriage there was silence, and in the heart of
one at least of the passengers the most horrible vexation. Kate could
have bitten out her tongue. She was conscious that the clergyman had
bowed in acknowledgment of Jack’s introduction and had muttered
something. But then he had sunk back in his corner, his face wearing,
as it seemed to her, a frown of scornful annoyance. Even if nothing
awkward had been said, she would still have shunned, for a certain
reason, such a meeting as this with a new clergyman who did not yet
know Claversham. But now she had aggravated the matter by her
heedlessness. So she sat angry, and yet ashamed, with her lips pressed
together and her eyes fixed upon the opposite cushion.

For the Rev. Reginald, he had been by no means indifferent to the
criticisms he had unfortunately overheard. Always possessed of a fairly
good opinion of himself, he had lately been raising his standard to the
rectorial height; and, being very human, he had come to think himself
something of a personage. If Jack Smith had introduced him under the
same circumstances to his aunt, there is no saying how far the
acquaintance would have progressed or how long the new incumbent might
have fretted and fumed. But presently he stole a look at Kate Bonamy
and melted.

He saw a girl, slightly above the middle height, graceful and rounded
of figure, with a grave stateliness of carriage which oddly became her.
Her complexion was rather pale, but it was clear and healthy, and there
was even a freckle here and a freckle there which I never heard a man
say that he would have had elsewhere. If her face was a trifle long,
with a nose a little aquiline and curving lips too wide, yet it was a
fair and dainty face, such as Englishmen love. The brown hair, which
strayed on to the broad white brow and hung in a heavy loop upon her
neck, had a natural waviness—the sole beauty on which she prided
herself. For she could not see her eyes as others saw them—big gray
eyes that from under long lashes looked out upon you, full of such
purity and truth that men meeting their gaze straightway felt a desire
to be better men and went away and tried—for half an hour. Such was
Kate outwardly. Inwardly she had faults of course, and perhaps pride
and a little temper were two of them.

The rector was still admiring her askance, surprised to find that Jack
Smith, who was not very handsome himself, had such a cousin, when
Daintry roused him abruptly. For some moments she had been gazing at
him, as at some unknown specimen, with no attempt to hide her interest.
Now she said suddenly, “You are the new rector?”

He answered stiffly that he was; being a good deal taken aback at being
challenged in this way. Remonstrance, however, was out of the question,
and Daintry for the moment said no more, though her gaze lost none of
its embarrassing directness.

But presently she began again. “I should think the dogs would like
you,” she said deliberately, and much as if he had not been there to
hear; “you look as if they would.”

Silence again. The rector smiled fatuously. What was a beneficed
clergyman, whose dignity was young and tender, to do, subjected to the
criticism of unknown dogs? He tried to divert his thoughts by
considering the pretty sage-green frock and the gray fur cape and hat
to match which the elder girl was wearing. Doubtless she was taking the
latest fashions down to Claversham, and fur capes and hats,
indefinitely and mysteriously multiplying, would listen to him on
Sundays from all the nearest pews. And Daintry was silent so long that
he thought he had done with her. But no. “Do you think that you will
like Claversham?” she asked, with an air of serious curiosity.

“I trust I shall,” he said, a flush rising to his cheek.

She took a moment to consider the answer conscientiously, and, thinking
badly of it, remarked gravely, “I don’t think you will.”

This was unbearable. The clergyman, full of a nervous dread lest the
next question should be, “Do you think that they will like you at
Claversham?” made a great show of resuming his newspaper. Kate,
possessed by the same fear, shot an imploring glance at Daintry; but,
seeing that the latter had only eyes for the stranger, hoped
desperately for the best.

Which was very bad. “It must be jolly,” remarked the unconscious
tormentor, “to have eight hundred pounds a year, and be a rector!”

“Daintry!” Kate cried in horror.

“Why, what is the matter?” asked Daintry, turning suddenly to her
sister with wide-open eyes. Her look of aggrieved astonishment at once
overcame Lindo’s gravity, and he laughed aloud. He was not without a
charming sense, still novel enough to be pleasing, that Daintry was
right. It was jolly to be a rector and have eight hundred a year!

That laugh came in happily. It seemed to sweep away the cobwebs of
embarrassment which had lain so thickly about two of the party. Lindo
began to talk pleasantly, pointing out this or that reach of the river,
and Kate, meeting his cheery eyes, put aside a faint idea of
apologizing which had been in her head, and replied frankly. He told
them tales of summer voyages between lock and lock, and of long days
idly spent in the Wargrave marshes; and, as the identification of
Mapledurham and Pangbourne and Wittenham and Goring rendered it
necessary that they should all cross and recross the carriage, they
were soon on excellent terms with one another, or would have been if
the rector had not still detected in Kate’s manner a slight stiffness
for which he could not account. It puzzled him also to observe that,
though they were ready, Daintry more particularly, to discuss the
amusements of London and the goodness of cousin Jack, they both grew
reticent when the conversation turned toward Claversham and its
affairs.

At Oxford he got out to go to the bookstall.

“Jack was right,” said Daintry, looking after him. “He _is_ nice.”

“Yes,” her sister allowed, rising and sitting down again in a restless
fashion. “But I wish we had not fallen in with him, all the same.”

“It cannot be helped now,” said Daintry, who was evidently prepared to
accept the event with philosophy.

Not so her sister. “We might go into another carriage,” she suggested.

“That would be rude,” said Daintry calmly.

The question was decided for them by the young clergyman’s return. He
came along the platform, an animated look in his face. “Miss Bonamy,”
he said, stopping at the open door with his hand extended, “there is
some one in the refreshment-room whom I think that you would like to
see. Mr. Gladstone is there, talking to the Duke of Westminster, and
they are both eating buns like common mortals. Will you come and take a
peep at them?”

“I don’t think that we have time,” she objected.

“There is sure to be time,” Daintry cried. “Now, Kate, come!” And she
was down upon the platform in a moment.

“The train is not due out for five minutes yet,” Lindo said, as he
piloted them through the crowd to the doorway. “There, on the left by
the fireplace,” he added.

Kate glanced, and turned away satisfied. Not so Daintry. With rapt
attention in her face, she strayed nearer and nearer to the great men,
her eyes growing larger with each step.

“She will be talking to them next,” said Kate, in a fidget.

“Perhaps asking him if he likes Downing Street,” Lindo suggested slyly.
“There, she is coming now,” he added, as Miss Daintry turned and came
to them at last.

“I wanted to make sure,” she said simply, seeing Kate’s impatience,
“that I should know them again. That was all.”

“Quite so; I hope you have succeeded,” Kate answered drily. “But, if we
are not quick, we shall miss our train.” And she led the way back with
more speed than dignity.

“There is plenty of time—plenty of time,” Lindo answered, following
them. He could not bear to see her pushing her way through the mixed
crowd, and accepting so easily a footing of equality with it. He was
one of those men to whom their womenkind are sacred. He took his time,
therefore, and followed at his ease; only to see, when he emerged from
the press, a long stretch of empty platform, three porters, and the
tail of a departing train. “Good gracious!” he stammered, with dismay
in his face. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” Kate said, in an accent of sharp annoyance—she did not
intend to spare him—“that you have made us miss our train, Mr. Lindo.
And there is not another which reaches Claversham today!”




CHAPTER IV.
BIRDS IN THE WILDERNESS.


“There! That was your fault!” said Daintry, turning from the departing
train.

The young rector could not deny it. He would have given anything for at
least the appearance of being undisturbed; but the blood came into his
cheek, and in his attempt to maintain his dignity he only succeeded in
looking angry as well as confused and taken aback. He had certainly
made a mess of his escort duty. What in the world had led him to go out
of his way to make a fool of himself? he wondered. And with these
Claversham people!

“There may be a special train to-day,” Kate suggested suddenly. She had
got over her first vexation, and perhaps repented that she had betrayed
it so openly. “Or we may be allowed to go on by a luggage-train, Mr.
Lindo. Will you kindly see?”

He snatched at the relief which her proposal held out to him, and went
away to inquire. But almost at once he was back again. “It is most
vexatious!” he said loudly. “It is only three o’clock, and yet there is
no way of getting to Claversham to-night! I am very sorry, but I never
dreamed the company managed things so badly. Never!”

“No,” said Kate drily.

He winced and looked at her sharply, his vanity hurt again. But then he
found that he could not keep it up. No doubt it was a ridiculous
position for a beneficed clergyman, on his way to undertake the work of
his life, to be delayed at a station with two girls; but, after all,
for a young man to be angry with a young woman who is also pretty—well,
the task is difficult. “I am afraid,” he said shyly, and yet with a
kind of frankness, “that I have brought you into trouble, Miss Bonamy.
As your sister says, it was my fault. Is it a matter of great
consequence that you should reach home tonight?”

“I am afraid that my father will be vexed,” she answered.

“You must telegraph to him,” he rejoined. “I am afraid that is all I
can suggest. And that done, you will have only one thing to
consider—whether we shall stay the night here or go on to Birmingham.”

Kate looked at him, her gray eyes very doubtful, and did not at once
answer. He had clearly made up his mind to join his fortunes to theirs,
while she, on her side, had reasons for shrinking from intimacy with
him. But he seemed to consider it so much a matter of course that they
should remain together and travel together, that she scarcely saw how
to put things on a different footing. She knew, too, that she would get
no help from Daintry, who already regarded their detention in the light
of a capital joke.

“What are you going to do yourself, Mr. Lindo?” she said at last, her
manner rather chilling.

He opened his eyes and smiled. “You discard me, then?” he said. “You
have lost all faith in me, Miss Bonamy? Well, I deserve it after the
scrape into which I have led you.”

“I did not mean that,” she answered. “I wished to know if you had made
any plans.”

“Yes,” he replied—“to make amends, if you will let me take command of
the party. We will stay in Oxford, and I will show you round the
colleges.”

“No?” exclaimed Daintry. “Will you? How jolly! And then?”

“We will dine at the Mitre,” he answered, smiling, “if Miss Bonamy will
permit me to manage everything. And then, if you leave here at
nine-thirty to-morrow you will be at Claversham soon after twelve. Will
that suit you?”

Daintry’s face answered sufficiently for her. As for Kate, she was in a
difficulty. She knew little of hotels: yet they must stop somewhere,
and no doubt Mr. Lindo would take a great deal of trouble off her
hands. But would it be proper to do as he proposed? She really did not
know—only that it sounded odd. That it would not be wise she knew. She
could answer that question at once. But how could she explain, and how
tell him to go his way and leave them? And, after all, to see Oxford
would be delightful; and he really was very pleasant, very different
from the men she knew at home.

“You are very good,” she said at length, with a grateful sigh—“if we
have no choice but between Oxford and Birmingham.”

“And no choice of guides at all,” he said, smiling, “you will take me.”

“Yes,” she answered, looking away primly.

Her reserve, however, did not last. Once through the station gates,
that free holiday feeling which we have all experienced on being set
down in an unknown town, with no duty before us save to explore it,
soon possessed her; while he wished nothing better than to play the
showman—a part we love. The day was fine and bright, though cold. She
had eyes for beauty and a soul for the past, and soon forgot herself;
and he, piloting the sisters through Magdalen Walks, now strewn with
leaves, or displaying with pride the staircase of Christ Church, the
quaint library of Merton, or the ancient front of John’s, forgot
himself also, and especially his new-born dignity, in which he had
lived rather too much, perhaps, during the last three weeks. He showed
himself in his true colors—the colors known to his intimate friends—and
was so bright and cheery that Kate found herself talking to him in
utter forgetfulness of his position and theirs. The girl frankly sighed
when darkness fell and they had to go into the house, their curiosity
still unsated.

She thought it was all over. But, lo! there was a cheery fire awaiting
them in the “house” room (he had looked in for a few minutes on their
first arrival and given his orders), and before it a little table laid
for three was sparkling with plate and glass. Nay, there were two cups
of tea ready on a side-table, for it wanted an hour yet of dinnertime.
Altogether, as Daintry naïvely told him, “even Jack could not have made
it nicer for us.”

“Jack is a favorite of yours?” he said, laughing.

“I should think so!” Daintry answered, in wonder. “There is no one like
Jack.”

“After that I shall take myself off,” he replied. “I really want to
call on a friend, Miss Bonamy. But if I may join you at dinner——”

“Oh, do!” she said impulsively. Then, more shyly, she added, “We shall
be very glad if you will, Mr. Lindo.”

He felt singularly pleased with himself as he turned the windy corner
of the Broad. It was pleasant to be in Oxford again, a beneficed
clergyman. Pleasant to have such a future to look forward to, such a
holiday moment to enjoy. Pleasant to anticipate the cheery meal and the
girl’s smile, half shy, half grateful. And Kate?—she remained before
the fire, saying little because Daintry’s tongue gave few openings, but
thinking a good deal. Once she did speak. “It won’t last,” she said
pettishly.

“Why, Kate? Do you think he will be different at Claversham?” Daintry
protested.

“Of course he will!” She spoke with a little scorn in her voice, and
that sort of decision which we use when we wish to crush down our own
unwarranted hopes.

“But he is nice,” Daintry persisted. “You do think so, Kate, don’t
you?”

“Oh, yes, he is very nice,” she said drily. “But he will be in the
Hammond set at home, and we shall see nothing of him.”

But presently he was back, and Kate found it impossible to resist the
charm. He ladled the soup and dispensed the mutton-chops with a gaiety
and boyish glee which were really the stored-up effervescence of weeks,
the ebullition of the long-repressed delight which he took in his
promotion. He learned casually that the girls had been in London for
more than a month staying with Jack’s mother in Bayswater, and that
they were very sorry to be upon their road home.

“And yet,” he said—this was toward the end of dinner—“I have been told
that your town is a very picturesque one. But I fancy that we never
appreciate our home as we do a place strange to us.”

“Very likely that is so,” Kate answered quietly. And then a little
pause ensued, such as he had observed several times before, and come to
connect with any mention of Claversham. The girls’ tongues would run on
frankly and pleasantly enough about their London visit, or Mr.
Gladstone; but let him bring the talk round to his parish and its
people, and forthwith something of reserve seemed to come between him
and them until the conversation strayed afield again.

After the others had finished, he still toyed with his meal, partly in
lazy enjoyment of the time, partly as an excuse for staying with them.
They were sitting in a momentary silence, when a boy passed the window
chanting a ditty at the top of his voice. The doggrel came clearly to
their ears——

 Here we sit like birds in the wilderness,

Birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness;

Here we sit like birds in the wilderness,

Samuel asking for more.


As the sound passed on the young man looked up, a mischievous twinkle
in his eyes, and met their eyes, and all three burst into a merry peal
of laughter. They were the birds in the wilderness, sitting there in
the circle of light, in the strange room in the strange town, almost as
intimate as if they had known one another for years, or had been a week
at sea together.

But Kate, having acknowledged by that pleasant outburst her sense of
the oddity of the position, rose from the table, and the rector had to
say good-night, explaining at the same time that he should not travel
with them next morning, but intended to go on by a later train, as his
friend wished to see more of him. Nevertheless, he said he should be up
to breakfast with them and should see them off. And in this resolution
he persisted, notwithstanding Kate’s protest, which perhaps was not
very violent.

Notwithstanding, he was a little late next morning. When he came down
he found them already seated in the coffee-room. There were others
breakfasting here and there in the room, chiefly upon toast-racks and
newspapers, and he did not at once observe that the gentleman standing
with his back set negligently against the mantelpiece was talking to
Kate. Arrived at the table, however, he saw that it was so; and the
cheery greeting on his lips faded into a commonplace “Good-morning,
Miss Bonamy.” He took no apparent notice of the stranger as he added,
“I am afraid I am rather late.”

The intruder, a short dark-whiskered man between thirty and forty,
seemed to the full as much surprised by the clergyman’s appearance as
Lindo was by his, and as little able to hide the feeling as Kate
herself to control the color which rose in her cheeks. She gave Mr.
Lindo his tea in silence, and then with an obvious effort introduced
the two men. “This is Dr. Gregg of Claversham—Mr. Lindo,” she said.

Lindo rose and shook hands. “Mr. Lindo the younger, I presume?” said
the doctor, with a bow and a swagger intended to show that he was quite
at his ease.

“The only one, I am afraid,” replied the rector, smiling. Though he by
no means liked the look of the man.

“Did I rightly catch your name?” was the answer—“‘Mr. Lindo?’”

“Yes,” said the rector again, opening his eyes.

“But—you are not—you do not mean to say that you are the new rector?”
pronounced the dark man abruptly, and with a kind of aggressiveness
which seemed his most striking quality—“the rector of Claversham, I
mean?”

“I believe so,” said Lindo quietly. “You want some more water, do you
not, Miss Bonamy?” he continued. “Let me ring the bell.” He rose and
crossed the room to do so. The truth was, he hated the newcomer
already. His first sentence had been enough. His manner was not the
manner of the men with whom Lindo had mixed, and the rector felt almost
angry with Kate for introducing Gregg—-albeit his parishioner—to him,
and quite angry with her for suffering the doctor to address her with
the familiarity he seemed to affect.

And Kate, her eyes downcast, knew by instinct how it was with him, and
what he was thinking. “I have been telling Dr. Gregg,” she said
hurriedly, when he returned, “how we missed our train yesterday.”

“Rather how I missed it for you,” Lindo answered gravely, much engaged
apparently with his breakfast.

“Ah, yes, it was very funny!” fired off the doctor, watching each
mouthful they ate. Daintry had finished, and was sitting back in her
chair kicking the leg of the table monotonously; not in the best of
tempers apparently. “Very funny indeed!” the doctor continued. “An
accident, I hope?” with a little sniggling laugh.

“Yes!” said the rector, looking up at him with a black brow and
steadfast eyes—“it was an accident.”

Gregg was a little cowed by the look, and in a moment, with a muttered
word or two, fidgeted himself away, cursing the general
superciliousness of parsons and the quiet airs of this one in
particular. He was a little dog-in-the-mangerish man, ill-bred, and,
like most ill-bred men, resentful of breeding in others. The fact that
he had a sneaking liking for Kate did not tend to lessen his disgustful
wonder how the Bonamy girls and the new rector came to be travelling
together—which, indeed, to any Claversham person would have seemed a
portent. But, then, Lindo did not know that.

The objectionable item removed, and the temptation to remark upon him
overcome, Lindo soon recovered his good temper, and rattled away so
pleasantly that the train time seemed to all of them to come very
quickly. “There,” he said, as he handed the last of Kate’s books into
the railway-carriage, “now I have done something to make amends for my
fault, I trust. One thing more I can do. When you get home you need not
spare me. You can put it all on my shoulders, Miss Bonamy.”

“Thank you,” Kate answered demurely.

“You are going to do so, I see,” he said, laughing. “I fear my
character will reach Claversham before me.”

“I do not think we shall spread it very widely,” she answered in a
peculiar tone, which he naturally misunderstood.

The train was already in motion then, and he shook hands with her as he
walked beside it. “Goodbye,” he said. And then he added in a lower
tone—he was such a very young rector—“I hope to see very much of you in
the future, Miss Bonamy.”

Kate sank back in her seat, her cheek a shade warmer. And in a moment
he was alone upon the platform.




CHAPTER V.
“REGINALD LINDO, 1850.”


Long before the later train by which the rector came on arrived at the
Claversham station, the Rev. Stephen Clode was waiting on the platform.
The curate was a tall, dark man, somewhat over thirty, with a strong
rugged face and a bush of stiff black hair standing up from his
forehead. He had been at Claversham three years, enjoying all the
importance which old Mr. Williams’s long illness naturally gave to his
curate and _locum tenens_; and, though the town was agreed that his
chagrin at having a new rector set over his head was great, it must be
admitted that he concealed it with admirable skill. More than one
letter had passed between him and the new incumbent, and, in securing
for the latter Mr. Williams’s good old-fashioned furniture, and in
other ways, he had made himself very useful to Lindo. But the two had
not met, and consequently the curate viewed the approaching train with
lively, though secret, curiosity.

It came, the bell rang, the porter cried, “Claversham! Claversham!” and
the curate walked down it, past the carriage-windows, looking for the
man he had come to meet. Half-a-dozen people stepped out, and for a
moment there was a mimic tumult on the little platform; but nowhere
amid it all could Clode see any one like the new rector. “He has missed
another train!” he muttered to himself in contemptuous wonder; and he
was already casting a last look round him before turning on his heel,
when a tall, fair young man, in a clerical overcoat, who had been one
of the first to alight, stepped up to him. “Am I speaking to Mr.
Clode?” said the stranger pleasantly. And he lifted his hat.

“Certainly,” the curate answered. “I am Mr. Clode. But I fear I have
not the——”

“No, I know,” replied the other, smiling, and at the same time holding
out his hand. “Though, indeed, I hoped that you might have been here on
purpose to meet me. My name is Lindo.”

The curate uttered an exclamation of surprise; and, hastily returning
the proffered grip, fixed his black eyes curiously on his new friend.
“Mr. Lindo did not mention that you were with him,” he answered in a
tone of some embarrassment. “But, there, let me see to your luggage. Is
it all here?”

“Yes, I think so,” Lindo answered, tapping one article after another
with his umbrella, and giving the stationmaster a pleasant “Good-day!”
“Is there an omnibus or anything?”

“Yes,” Clode said; “it will be all right. They know where to take it.
You will walk up with me, perhaps. It is about a quarter of a mile to
the rectory.”

The new comer assented gladly, and the two passed out of the station
together. Lindo let his eye travel up the wide steep street before him,
until it rested on the noble tower which crowned the little hill and
looked down now, as it had looked down for five centuries, on the red
roofs clustering about it. His tower! His church! Even his companion
did not remark, so slight was the action, that, as he passed out of the
station and looked up, he lifted his hat for a second.

“And where is your father?” Clode asked. “Was he delayed by business?
Or perhaps,” he added, dubiously scanning him, “you are Mr. Lindo’s
brother?”

“I _am_ Mr. Lindo!” said our friend, turning in astonishment and
looking at his companion.

“The rector?”

“Yes.”

It was the curate’s turn to stare now, and he did so—his face flushing
darkly and his eyes wide opened for once. He even seemed for a moment
to be stricken dumb with surprise and emotion. “Indeed!” he said at
last, in a half stifled voice which he vainly strove to control.
“Indeed! I beg your pardon. I had thought—I don’t know why—I mean that
I had expected to see an older man.”

“I am sorry you are disappointed,” the rector replied, smiling
ruefully. “I am beginning to think I am rather young, for you are not
the first to-day who has made that mistake.”

The curate did not answer, and the two walked on in silence, feeling
somewhat awkward. Clode, indeed, was raging inwardly. By one thing and
another he had been led to expect a man past middle life, and the only
Clergy List in the parish, being three years old and containing the
name of Lindo’s uncle only, had confirmed him in the error. He had
never conceived the idea that the man set over his head would be a
fledgling, scarcely a year in priest’s orders, or he would have gone
elsewhere. He would never have stayed to be at the beck and call of
such a puppy as this! He felt now that he had been entrapped, and he
chafed inwardly to such an extent that he did not dare to speak. To
have this young fellow, six or seven years his junior, set over him
would humiliate him in the eyes of all those before whom he had long
played a different part!

In a minor degree Lindo was also vexed—not only because he was
sufficiently sensitive to enter into the other’s feelings, but also
because he foresaw trouble ahead. It was annoying, too, to be received
at each new _rencontre_ as a surprise—as the reverse of all that had
been expected and all that had been, as he feared, hoped.

“You will find the rectory a very comfortable house,” said the curate
at last, his mind fully made up now that he would leave at the earliest
possible date. “Warm and old-fashioned. Rough-cast outside. Many of the
rooms are panelled.”

“It looks out on the churchyard, I believe,” replied the rector, with
the same labored politeness.

“Yes, it stands high. The view from the windows at the back is
pleasant. The front is perhaps a little gloomy—in winter at least.”

Near the top of the street a quaint, narrow flight of steps conducted
them to the churchyard—an airy, elevated place, surrounded on three
sides by the church and houses, but open on the fourth, where a
terraced walk, running along the summit of the old town wall, admitted
the southern sun and afforded a wide view of plain and hill. The two
men crossed the churchyard, the new rector looking about him with
curiosity and a little awe, his companion marching straight onward, his
strongly-marked face set ominously. He would go! He would go at the
earliest possible minute! he was thinking.

It did not affect him nor alter his resolution that in the wooden porch
of the old rectory the new rector turned to him and shyly, yet with
real feeling, besought his help and advice in the work before him. The
young clergyman, commonly so self-confident, was moved, and moved
deeply, by the evening light and his strange and solemn surroundings.
Stephen Clode’s answer was in the affirmative—it could hardly have been
other; and it was spoken becomingly, if a little coldly, in view of the
rector’s advances; but, even while the curate spoke it, he was
considering how he might best escape from Claversham. Still his Yea,
yea, comforted his companion and lightened his momentary apprehensions.

Nor was the curate, when he had recovered from the first shock of
surprise and disgust, so foolish as to betray his feelings by wanton
churlishness. He parted from his companion at the door, leaving him to
the welcome of Mrs. Baker, the rector’s London housekeeper, who had
come down two days before; but at the same time he consented readily to
return at half-past six and share his dinner, and gave him in the
course of the meal all the information in his power. Left to himself,
the rector went over the house under Mrs. Baker’s guidance, and, as he
trod the polished floors, could not but feel some access of
self-importance. The panelled hall, with its wide oak staircase, fed
this, and the spacious sombrely-furnished library, with its books and
busts, its antique clock and one good engraving, and its lofty windows
opening upon the garden. So, in a less degree, did the long
oak-panelled dining-room and a smaller sitting-room which looked to the
front and the churchyard; and the drawing-room, which was situated over
the library, and seemed the larger because Mr. Williams had furnished
it but scantily and lived in it less. Then there were six or seven
bedrooms, and in the garden a stone basin and fountain. Altogether,
when the rector descended after washing his hands, and stood on the
library hearth-rug looking about him, he would have been more than
human if he had not, with a feeling of thankfulness, entertained also
some faint sense of self-congratulation and personal desert. Nor,
probably, would Mr. Clode have been human if, coming in and finding the
younger man standing on that hearth-rug, and betraying in his face and
attitude something of his thoughts, he on his part had not felt a
degree of envy and antagonism. The man was so prosperous, so
self-contented, so conscious of his own merit and success.

But the curate was too wise to betray this feeling; and, laying himself
out to be pleasant, he had, before the little meal was over, so far
ingratiated himself with his entertainer that the rector was greatly
surprised when he presently learned that Clode had not been to a
university. “You astonish me,” he said, “for you have so completely the
manner of a ’varsity-man!”

The observation was a little too gracious, a little wanting in tact,
but it would not have hurt the curate had he not been at the moment in
a state of irritation. As it was, Clode treasured it up, and never got
rid of the feeling that the Oxford man looked down upon him because he
had been only at Wells; whereas Lindo, with some prejudices and
sufficiently prone to judge his fellows, had far too high an opinion of
himself to be bound by such distinctions, but was just as likely to
make a friend of a ploughboy, if he liked him, as of a Christchurch
man. After that speech, however, the curate was more than ever resolved
to go, and go quickly.

But, when dinner was over and he was about to take his leave, he
happened to pick up, as he moved about the room, a small prayer-book
which Lindo had just unpacked, and which was lying on the
writing-table. Clode idly looked into it as he talked, and, seeing on
the flyleaf “Reginald Lindo, 1850,” took occasion, when he had done
with the subject in hand, to discuss it. “Surely,” he said, holding it
up, “you did not possess this in 1850, Mr. Lindo!”

“Hardly,” Lindo answered, laughing. “I was not born until ’54.”

“Then who?”

“It was my uncle’s,” the rector explained. “I was his god-son, and his
name was mine also.”

“Is he alive, may I ask?” the curate pursued, looking at the title-page
as if he saw something curious there—though, indeed, what he saw was
not new to him; only from it he had suddenly deduced a thought.

“No, he died about a year ago—nearly a year ago, I think,” Lindo
answered carelessly, and without the least suspicion. “He was always
particularly kind to me, and I use that book a good deal. I must have
it rebound.”

“Yes,” Clode said mechanically; “it wants rebinding if you value it.”

“I shall have it done. And a lot of these books,” the rector continued,
looking at old Mr. Williams’s shelves, “want their clothes renewing. I
shall have them all looked to, I think.” He had a pleasant sense that
this was in his power. The cost of the furniture and library had made a
hole in his not very large private means; but that mattered little now.
Eight hundred a year, paid quarterly, will bind a book or two.

Had the curate been attending, he would have read Lindo’s thoughts with
ease. But Clode was pursuing a train of reflections of his own, and so
was spared this pang. “Your uncle was an old man, I suppose,” he said.
“I think I observed in the Clergy List that he had been in orders about
forty years.”

“Not quite so long as that,” Lindo replied. “He was sixty-four when he
died. He had been Lord Dynmore’s private tutor you know, though they
were almost of an age.”

“Indeed,” the curate rejoined, still with that thoughtful look on his
face. “You knew Lord Dynmore through him, I suppose, then, Mr. Lindo?”

“Well, I got the living through him, if that what you mean,” Lindo said
frankly. “But I do not think that I ever met Lord Dynmore. Certainly I
should not know him from Adam.”

“Ah!” said the curate, “ah! indeed!” He smiled as he gazed into the
fire, and stroked his chin. In the other’s place, he thought, he would
have been more reticent. He would not have disclaimed, though he might
not have claimed, acquaintance with Lord Dynmore. He would have left
the thing shadowy, to be defined by others as they pleased. Thinking
thus, he got up somewhat abruptly, and wished Lindo good-night. A cool
observer, indeed, might have noticed—but the rector did not—a change in
his manner as he did so—a little accession of familiarity, which did
seem not far removed from a delicate kind of contempt. The change was
subtle, but one thing was certain. Stephen Clode had no longer any
intention of leaving Claversham in a hurry. That resolve was gone.

Once out of the house, he passed quickly from the churchyard by a
narrow lane leading to an irregular open space quaintly called “The Top
of the Town.” Here were his own lodgings, on the first-floor over a
stationer’s; but he did not enter them. Instead, he strode on toward
the farther and darker side of the square, where were no buildings, but
a belt of tall trees stood up, gaunt and rustling in the night wind
above a line of wall. Through the trees the lights of a large house
were visible. He walked up the avenue which led to the door and,
ringing loudly, was at once admitted.

The sound of the bell came to the ears of two ladies who had been for
some time placidly expecting it. They were seated in a small but
charming room filled with soft, shaded light and warmth and color, an
open piano and dainty pictures and china, and a well-littered
writing-table all contributing to the air of accustomed luxury which
pervaded it. The elder lady—that Mrs. Hammond whom we saw talking to
the curate on the day of the old rector’s funeral—looked up expectantly
as Mr. Clode entered, and, extending to him a podgy white hand covered
with rings, began to chide him in a rich full voice for being so late.
“I have been dying,” she said cheerfully, “to hear what is the fate
before us, Mr. Clode. What is he like?”

“Well,” he answered, taking with a word of thanks the cup of tea which
Laura offered him, “I have one surprise in store for you. He is
comparatively young.”

“Sixty?” said Mrs. Hammond interrogatively.

“Forty?” said Laura, raising her eyebrows.

“No,” Clode replied, smiling and stirring his tea, “you must guess
again. He is twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six! You are joking,” exclaimed the elder lady. While Laura
opened her eyes very wide, but said nothing yet.

“No,” said the curate. “He told me himself that he was not born until
1854.”

The two ladies were loud in their surprise then, while for a moment the
curate sipped his tea in silence. The brass kettle hissed and bubbled
on the hob. The tea-set twinkled cheerfully on the wicker table, and
faint scents of flowers and fabrics filled the room with an atmosphere
which he had long come to associate with Laura. It was Laura Hammond,
indeed, who had introduced him to this new world. The son of an
accountant living in a small Lincolnshire town, he owed his clerical
profession to his mother’s ardent wish that he should rise in the
world. His father was not wealthy, and, before he came as curate to
Claversham, Mr. Clode had had no experience of society. Then,
alighting: on a sudden in the midst of much such a small town as his
native place, he found himself astonishingly transmogrified into a
person of social importance. He found every door open to him, and among
them the Hammonds’, who were admitted to be the first people in the
town. He fell in easily enough with the “new learning,” but the central
figure in the novel pleasant world of refinement continued throughout
to be Laura Hammond.

Much petting had somewhat spoiled him, and it annoyed him now, as he
sat sipping his tea, to observe that the ladies were far from
displeased with his tidings. “If he is a young man, he is sure not to
be evangelical,” said Mrs. Hammond decisively. “That is well. That is a
comfort, at any rate.”

“He will play tennis, I dare say,” said Laura.

“And Mr. Bonamy will be kept in some order now,” Mrs. Hammond
continued. “Not that I am blaming you, Mr. Clode,” she added
graciously—indeed, the curate was a great favorite with her, “but in
your position you could do nothing with a man so impracticable.”

“He really will be an acquisition,” cried Laura gleefully, her brown
eyes shining in the firelight. And she made her tiny lace handkerchief
into a ball and flung it up—and did not catch it, for, with all her
talk of lawn-tennis, she was no great player. Her _rôle_ lay rather in
the drawing-room. She was as fond of comfort as a cat, and loved the
fire with the love of a dog, and was, in a word, pre-eminently
feminine, delighting to surround herself with all such things as tended
to set off this side of her nature. “But now,” she continued briskly,
when the curate had recovered her handkerchief for her, “tell me what
you think of him. Is he nice?”

“Certainly; I should say so,” the curate answered, smiling.

But, though he smiled, he became silent again. He was reflecting, with
well-hidden bitterness, that Lindo would not only override him in the
parish, but would be his rival in the particular inner clique which he
affected—perhaps his rival with Laura. The thought awoke the worst
nature of the man. Up to this time, though he had not been true, though
he had kept back at Claversham details of his past history which a
frank man would have avowed, though in the process of assimilating
himself to his new surroundings he had been over-pliant, he had not
been guilty of any baseness which had seemed to him a baseness, which
had outraged his own conscience. But, as he reflected on the wrong
which this young stranger was threatening to do him, he felt himself
capable of much.

“Mrs. Hammond,” he said suddenly, “may I ask if you have destroyed Lord
Dynmore’s letter which you showed me last week?”

“Destroyed Lord Dynmore’s letter!” Laura answered, speaking for her
mother in a tone of comic surprise. “Do you think, sir, that we get
peers’ autographs every day of the week?”

“No,” Mrs. Hammond said, waving aside her daughter’s flippancy and
speaking with some stateliness. “It is not destroyed, though such
things are not so rare with us as Laura pretends. But why do you ask?”

“Because the rector was not sure when Lord Dynmore meant to return to
England,” Clode explained readily. “And I thought he mentioned the date
in his letter to you, Mrs. Hammond.”

“I do not think so,” said Mrs. Hammond.

“Might I look?”

“Of course,” was the answer. “Will you find it, Laura? I think it is
under the malachite weight in the other room.”

It was, sitting there in solitary majesty. Laura opened it, and took
the liberty of glancing through it first. Then she gave it to him.
“There, you unbelieving man,” she said, “you can look. But he does not
say a word about his return.”

The curate read rapidly until he came to one sentence, and on this his
eye dwelt a moment. “I hear with regret,” it ran, “that poor Williams
is not long for this world. When he goes I shall send you an old friend
of mine. I trust he will become an old friend of yours also.” Clode
barely glanced at the rest of the letter, but, as he handed it back, he
informed himself that it was dated in America two days before Mr.
Williams’s death.

“No,” he admitted, “I was wrong. I thought he had said when he would
return.”

“And you are satisfied?” said Laura.

“Perfectly,” he answered. “Perfectly!” with a little unnecessary
emphasis.

He lingered long enough to give them a personal description of the
new-comer—speaking always of him in words of praise—and then he took
his leave. As his hand met Laura’s, his face flushed ever so slightly
and his dark eyes glowed; and the girl, as she turned away, smiled
furtively, knowing well, though he had never spoken, that she was the
cause of this. So she was, but in part only. At that moment the curate
saw something besides Laura—he saw across a narrow strait of trouble
the fairer land of preferment, his footing on which once gained he
might pretend to her and to many other pleasant things at present
beyond his reach.




CHAPTER VI.
THE BONAMYS AT HOME.


Lindo made his first exploration of the neighborhood, not on the day
after his arrival, which was taken up with his induction by the
archdeacon and with other matters, but on the day after that. He chose
to avoid the streets, in which he felt somewhat shy, so polite were the
attentions and so curious the glances of his parishioners; and he
selected instead a lane which, starting from the churchyard, seemed to
plunge at once into the country. It was a pleasant lane. It lay deep
sunk in a cutting through the sandstone rock—a cutting first formed,
perhaps, when the great stones for the building of the church were
dragged up that way. He paused halfway down the slope to look about him
curiously, and was still standing when some one came round the corner
before him. It was Kate Bonamy. He saw the girl’s cheek—she was
alone—flush ever so slightly as their eyes met; and he noticed, too,
that to all appearance she would have passed him with a bow had he not
placed himself in her way. “Come,” he said, laughing frankly as he held
out his hand, “you must not cut me, Miss Bonamy! Let me tell you, you
have quite the aspect of an old friend, for until now I have not seen
one face since I came here that was not absolutely new to me.”

“It must feel strange, no doubt,” she murmured.

“It is. _I_ feel strange!” he replied. “I want you to tell me where
this road goes to, if you please. I am so strange, I do not even know
that.”

“Kingsford Carbonel,” she answered briefly.

“Ah! The archdeacon lives there, does he not?”

“Yes.”

“And the distance, please, is——?”

“Three miles.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Really you are as concise as a mile-stone, Miss
Bonamy. And now let me remind you,” he continued—there was an air of “I
am going on this moment” about her, which provoked him to detain her
the longer—“that you have not yet asked me what I think of Claversham.”

“I would rather ask you in a month’s time,” Kate answered quietly,
holding out her hand to take leave. “Though it is already reported in
the town that you will only stay a year, Mr. Lindo.”

“I shall only stay a year!” the rector repeated in astonishment.

“Certainly,” she answered, smiling, and relapsing for a moment into the
pleasant frankness of that day at Oxford—“only a year; your days are
already numbered.”

“What do you mean?” he said point-blank.

“Have you never heard the old tradition that as many times as a
clergyman sounds the bell at his induction, so many years will he
remain in the living? And the report in Claversham is that you rang it
only once.”

“You did not hear it yourself?” he said, catching her eyes suddenly, a
lurking smile in his own.

Her color rose faintly. “I am not sure,” she said. Then, meeting his
eyes boldly, she added in a different tone, “Yes, I did hear it.”

“Only once?”

She nodded.

“Oh, that is sad,” he answered. “Well, the tradition is new to me. If I
had known it,” he added, laughing, “I should have tolled the bell at
least fifty times. Clode should have instructed me; but I suppose he
thought I knew. I remember now that the archdeacon did say something
afterward, but I did not understand the reference. You know the
archdeacon, Miss Bonamy, I suppose?”

“No,” said Kate, growing stiff again.

“Do you not? Well, at any rate you can tell me where Mrs. Hammond
lives. She has kindly asked me to dine with her on Tuesday. I put my
acceptance in my pocket, and thought I would deliver it myself when I
came back from my walk.”

“Mrs. Hammond lives at the Town House,” Kate answered. “It is the large
house among the trees by the top of the town. You cannot mistake it.”

“Shall I have the pleasure of meeting you there?” he asked, holding out
his hand at last.

“No; I do not know Mrs. Hammond,” Miss Bonamy said with decision.
“Good-day, Mr. Lindo.” And she was gone; rather abruptly at last.

“That is odd—very odd,” Lindo reflected as, continuing his walk, he
turned to admire her graceful figure and the pretty carriage of her
head. “I fancied that in these small towns every one knew every one.
What sort of people are the Hammonds, I wonder? New, rich, and vulgar
perhaps. It may be, and that would account for it. Yet Clode spoke
highly of them.”

Something which he did not understand in the girl’s manner continued to
pique the young man’s curiosity after he had parted from her, and led
him to dwell more intently upon her than upon the scenery, novel as
this was to him. She had shown herself at one moment so frank, and at
another so stiff and constrained, that it was equally impossible to
ascribe the one attitude to shyness or the other to a naturally candid
manner. The rector considered the question so long, and found it so
puzzling—and interesting—that on his return to town he had come to one
conclusion only—that it was his immediate duty to call upon his church
wardens. He had made the acquaintance of Mr. Harper, his own warden, at
his induction. It remained therefore to call upon Mr. Bonamy, the
peoples’ warden. When he had taken his lunch, it seemed to him that
there was no time like the present.

He had no difficulty in finding Mr. Bonamy’s house, which stood in the
middle of the town, about halfway down Bridge Street. It was a
substantial, respectable residence of brick, not detached nor withdrawn
from the roadway. It had nothing aristocratic in its appearance, and
was known by a number. Its eleven windows, of which the three lowest
rejoiced in mohair blinds, were sombre, its doorway was heavy. In a
word, it was a respectable middle-class house in a dull street in a
country town—a house suggestive of early dinners and set teas. The
rector felt chilled by its very appearance; but he knocked, and
presently a maid-servant opened the door about a foot. “Is Mr. Bonamy
at home?” he said.

“No, sir,” the girl drawled, holding the door as if she feared he might
attempt to enter by force, “he is not.”

“Ah, I am sorry I have missed him,” said the clergyman, handling his
card-case. “Do you know at what time he is likely to return?”

“No, sir, I don’t,” replied the girl, who was all eyes for the strange
rector; “but I expect Miss Kate does. Will you walk up-stairs, sir? and
I will tell her.”

“Perhaps I had better,” he answered, pocketing his card-case.
Accordingly he walked in, and followed the servant to the drawing-room,
where she poked the sinking fire and induced a sickly blaze.

Left to himself—for Kate was not there—he looked round curiously, and
as he looked the sense of disappointment which he had felt at sight of
the house grew upon him. It was a cold, uncomfortable room. It had a
set, formal look, which was not quaintness, nor harmony, and which was
strange to the Londoner. It was so neat: every article in it had a
place, and was in its place, and apparently never had been out of its
place. There was a vase of chrysanthemums on the large centre table,
but the rector thought they must be wax, they were so prim. There were
other wax flowers—which he hated. He almost shivered as he looked at
the four walls. He felt obliged to sit upright on his chair, and to
place his hat exactly in the middle of a square of the carpet, and to
ponder over the question of what the maid had done with the poker. For
she had certainly not stirred the fire with the bright and shining
thing which lay in evidence in the fender.

He was in the act of rising cautiously with the intention of solving
this mystery, when the door opened and the elder sister came in,
Daintry following her. “My father is not in, Mr. Lindo,” Kate said,
advancing to meet him, and shaking hands with him.

“No; so I learned down-stairs,” he answered. “But I——”

The girl—she had scarcely turned from him—cut him short with an
exclamation of dismay. “Oh, Daintry, you naughty girl!” she cried. “You
have brought Snorum up.”

“Well,” said Daintry simply—a large white dog, half bull-dog, half
terrier, with red-rimmed eyes and projecting teeth, had crept in at her
heels—“he followed me.”

“You know papa would be so angry if he found him here.”

“But I only want him to see Mr. Lindo. You are unkind, Kate! You know
he never gets a chance of seeing a stranger.”

“You want to know if he likes me?” the rector said, laughing.

“That is it,” she answered, nodding.

But Kate, though she laughed, was inexorable. She bundled the big dog
out. “Do you know, she has two more like that, Mr. Lindo?” she said,
apologetically.

“Snip and Snap,” said Daintry. “But they are not like that. They are
smaller. Jack gave me Snorum, and Snip and Snap are Snorum’s sons.”

“It is quite a genealogy,” the rector said, smiling.

“Yes, and Jack was the Genesis. Genesis means beginning, you know,”
Daintry explained.

“Daintry, you must go down-stairs if you talk nonsense,” Kate said
imperatively. She was looking, the young man thought, prettier than
ever in a gray and blue plaid frock and the neatest of collars and
cuffs. As for Daintry, she shrugged her shoulders under the rebuke, and
lolled in one of the stiff-backed chairs, her attitude much like that
of a vine clinging to a telegraph-post.

Her wilfulness had one happy effect, however. The rector in his
amusement forgot the chill formality of the room and the dull
respectability of the house’s exterior. For half an hour he talked on
without a thought of the gentleman whom he had come to see. Some
inkling of the circumstances of the case which had entered his head
before the sisters’ appearance faded again, and in gazing on the pure
animated faces of the two girls he quickly lost sight of the evidences
of lack of taste which appeared in their surroundings. If Kate, on her
side, forgot for a moment certain chilling realities and surrendered
herself to the pleasure of the moment, it must be remembered that
hitherto—in Claversham, at least—her experience of men had been
confined to Dr. Gregg and his fellows, and also that none of us, even
the wisest and proudest, are always on guard.

Mr. Bonamy not appearing, Reginald left at last, perfectly assured that
the half-hour he had just spent was the pleasantest he had spent in
Claversham. He went out of the house in a gentle glow of enthusiasm.
The picture of Kate Bonamy, trim and neat, with her hair in a bright
knot, and laughter softening her eyes, remained with him, and he walked
half-way down the street lost in a delightful reverie.

He was aroused by the approach of a tall, elderly man who had just
turned the corner before him, and was now advancing along the pavement
with long, rapid strides. The stranger, who seemed about sixty, wore a
wide-skirted black coat, and had a tall silk hat, from under which the
gray hairs straggled thinly, set far back on his head. His figure was
spare, his face sallow, his features prominent. His mouth was peevish,
his eyes sharp and saturnine. As he walked he kept one hand in his
trousers’-pocket, the other swung by his side. The rector looked at him
a moment in doubt, and then stopped him. “Mr. Bonamy, I am sure?” he
said, holding out his hand.

“Yes, I am,” replied the other, fixing him with a penetrating glance.
“And you, sir?”

“May I introduce myself? I have just called at your house, and,
unluckily, failed to find you at home. I am Mr. Lindo.”

“Oh, the new rector!” said Mr. Bonamy, putting out a cold hand, while
the chill glitter of his eye lost none of its steeliness.

“Yes, and I am glad to have intercepted you,” Lindo continued, with a
little color in his cheek, and speaking quickly under the influence of
his late enthusiasm, which as yet was proof against the lawyer’s
reserve. “For I have been extremely anxious to make your acquaintance,
and, indeed, to say something particular to you, Mr. Bonamy.”

The elder man bowed to hide a smile. “As church warden, I presume?” he
said smoothly.

“Yes, and—and generally. I am quite aware, Mr. Bonamy,” continued the
rash young man in a fervor of frankness, “that you were not disposed to
look upon my appointment—the appointment of a complete stranger, I
mean—with favor.”

“May I ask who told you that?” said Bonamy abruptly.

The young clergyman colored. “Well, I—perhaps you will excuse me saying
how I learned it,” he answered, beginning to see that he would have
done better to be more reticent. There is no mistake which youth more
often makes than that of arousing sleeping dogs, and trying to explain
things which a wiser man would pass over in silence. Mr. Bonamy had his
own reasons for regarding the parson with suspicion, and had no mind to
be addressed in the indulgent vein. Nor was he propitiated when Lindo
added, “I learned your feeling, if I may say so, by an accident.”

“Then I think you should have kept knowledge so gained to yourself!”
the lawyer retorted.

The rector started and turned crimson under the reproof. His dignity
was new and tender, and the other’s tone was offensive in the last
degree. Yet the young man tried to control himself, and for the moment
succeeded. “Possibly,” he said, with some stiffness. “My only motive in
mentioning the latter, however, was this, that I hope in a short time,
by appealing to you for your hearty co-operation, to overcome any
prejudices you may have entertained.”

“My prejudices are rather strong,” the lawyer answered grimly. “You are
quite at liberty to try, however, Mr. Lindo. But I may as well warn you
of one thing now, as frankness seems to be in fashion. I have just been
told that you are meditating considerable changes in our church here.
Now, I must tell you this, that I object to anything new—anything new,
and not only to new incumbents!” with a smile which somewhat softened
his last words.

“But who informed you,” cried the rector in angry surprise, “that I
meditated changes, Mr. Bonamy?”

“Ah!” the lawyer answered in his dryest and thinnest voice. “That is
just what I cannot tell you. Let us say that I learned it—by accident,
Mr. Lindo!” And his sharp eyes twinkled.

“It is not true, however!” the rector exclaimed.

“Is it not? Well,” with a slight cough, “I am glad to hear it!”

Mr. Bonamy’s tone as he made this admission, however, was such that it
only irritated Lindo the more. “You mean that you do not believe me!”
he cried, speaking so fiercely that Clowes the bookseller, who had been
watching the interview from his shop-door, was able to repeat the words
to a dozen people afterward. “I can assure you that it is so. I am not
thinking of making any changes whatever—unless you consider the mere
removal of the sheep from the churchyard a change!”

“I do. A great change,” replied the church warden with grimness.

“But surely you do not object to it!” Lindo exclaimed in astonishment.
“Every one must agree that in these days, and in town churchyards at
any rate, the presence of sheep is unseemly.”

“I do not agree to that at all!” Mr. Bonamy answered calmly. “Neither
did Mr. Williams, the late rector, who had had long experience, act as
if he were of that mind.”

The present rector threw up his hands in disgust—in disgust and wonder.
Remember, he was very young. The thing seemed to him so clear that he
was assured the other was arguing for the sake of argument—a thing we
all hate in other people—and he lost patience. “I do not think you mean
what you say, Mr. Bonamy,” he blurted out at last. He was much
discomposed, yet he made an attempt to assume an air of severity which
did not sit well upon him at the moment.

Mr. Bonamy grinned. “That you will see when you turn out the sheep, Mr.
Lindo,” he said. “For the present I think I will bid you good evening.”
and taking off his hat gravely—to the rector the gravity seemed
ironical—he went his way.

Men take these things differently. To the lawyer there was nothing
disturbing in such a passage of arms as this. He was never so
happy—Claversham knew it well—as in and after a quarrel. “Master Lindo
thought to twist me round his finger, did he?” he muttered to himself
as he stopped on his own doorstep and thrust the key into the lock. “He
has found out his mistake now. We will have nothing new here—nothing
new while John Bonamy is warden, at any rate, my lad! It is well,
however,” continued Mr. Bonamy with a backward glance, “that Clode gave
me a hint in time. Set a beggar on horseback and he will ride—we know
whither!” And the lawyer went in and slammed the door behind him.

Meanwhile, what is sauce for the goose is not always sauce for the
gander. The younger man turned away, at the moment, indeed, in a white
heat, full of wrath at the other’s unreasonableness, folly,
churlishness. But the comfortable warmth which this engendered passed
away quickly—alas! much too quickly—and long before Lindo reached the
rectory, though the walk through the gray streets, where the shops were
just being lighted, did not take him two minutes, a chill depression
had taken its place. This was a fine beginning! This was a happy augury
of his future administration of the parish! To have begun by
quarrelling with his church warden—could anything have been worse? And
the check had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and at a time when he
had been on such good terms with himself, that he felt it the more
sorely. He went into the house with his head bent, and was not best
pleased to find Stephen Clode inquiring after him in the hall. He would
rather have been alone.

The curate, as he came forward, did not fail to note that something was
amiss, and a gleam of intelligence flashed for an instant across his
dark face. “Come into the study,” said the rector curtly. Since Clode
was here, and could not be avoided, he felt it would be a relief to
tell him all. And he did so, the curate listening and making no remark
whatever, so that the rector presently looked at him in surprise. “What
do you think of it?” he said, some impatience in his one. “It is
unfortunate, is it not?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the curate answered, leaning forward in his
chair, with his elbows on his knees and his eyes cast down upon the hat
which he was slowly revolving between his hands. “I am not astonished,
you know. What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?”

The rector got up, and, leaning his arm on the mantel-shelf, felt, if
the truth be told, rather uncomfortable. “I do not understand you,” he
said at length.

“It is what I should have expected from Bonamy. That is all.”

“Then you must think him a very ill-conditioned man!” Lindo retorted
warmly, scarcely knowing whether the annoyance he felt was a
reminiscence of his late conflict or caused by his companion’s manner.

“Well, again, what else can you expect?” Clode replied sagely, looking
up and shrugging his shoulders. “You know all about him, I suppose?”

“I know nothing,” said the rector, frowning slightly.

“He is not a gentleman, you know,” the curate answered, still looking
up and speaking with languid indolence as if what he said must be known
to everyone. “You have heard his history?”

“No, I have not.”

“He was an office-boy with Adams & Rooke, the old solicitors here,
swept out the office, and brought the coal, and so forth. He had his
wits about him, and old Adams gave him his articles, and finally took
him into partnership. Then the old men died off and it all came to him.
He is well off, and has power of a sort in the town; but, of course,”
the curate added, getting up lazily and yawning—“well, people like the
Hammonds do not visit with him.”

There was silence in the room for a full minute. The rector had left
the fireplace and, with his back to the speaker, was raising the
lamp-wick. “Why did you not tell me this before?” he said at length,
his voice hard.

“I did not see why I should prejudice you against the man before you
saw him,” replied the curate, with much reason. “Besides, I really was
not sure whether you knew his history or not. I am afraid I did not
give much thought to the matter.”

“Umph!”




CHAPTER VII.
THE HAMMONDS’ DINNER PARTY.


The new top, the new book, the bride—the first joy in the possession of
each one of these fades, not gradually, but at a leap, as day fades in
the tropics. A chip in the wood, the turning of the last page, the
first selfish word, and the thing is done; ecstasy becomes sober
satisfaction. It was so with the rector. The first glamour of his good
fortune, of his new toy, died abruptly with that evening—with the
quarrel with his church warden, and the discovery of the cause of that
constraint which he had remarked in Kate Bonamy’s manner from the
first.

He was a conscientious man, and the failure of his good resolutions,
his aspirations to be the perfect parish priest, fretted him. Moreover,
he had to think of the future. He soon learned that Mr. Bonamy might
not be a gentleman, and was indeed reputed to be a stubborn,
queer-tempered curmudgeon; but he learned also that he had great
influence in the town, though, except in the way of business, he
associated with few, and that he, Reginald Lindo, would have to reckon
with him on that footing. The certainty of this and of the bad
beginning he had made naturally depressed the young man, his customary
good opinion of himself not coming to his aid at once. And, besides, he
carried about with him—sometimes it came between him and his book,
sometimes he saw it framed by the autumn landscape—the picture of
Kate’s pure proud face. At such moments he felt himself humiliated by
the slights cast upon her. The Hammonds did not think her fit company
for them! The Hammonds!

Not that he knew the Hammonds yet, or many others, the days which
intervened between his induction and the dinner at the Town House being
somewhat lonely days, during which he was much thrown back upon
himself, and only felt by slow degrees the soothing influence of the
routine work of his position. Of his curate, and of him only, he
naturally saw much, and found it small comfort to learn from the
Reverend Stephen that the fracas with Mr. Bonamy had not escaped the
attention of the town, but was being made the subject of comment by
many who were delighted to have so novel a subject as the new rector
and his probable conduct.

He was sitting at breakfast a few days later—on the morning of the
Hammonds’ party—when Mrs. Baker announced an early visitor. “No, he is
not a gentleman, sir,” she said, “though he has on a black coat. A
stranger to the town, I think, but he will not say what he wants,
except to see you.”

“I will come to him in the study,” replied her master.

The housekeeper, however, going out, and taking a second glance at the
caller, did not show him into the study, but instead, gave him a seat
in the hall on the farther side from the coatstand. There the rector,
when he came out, found him—a pale fat-faced man, dressed neatly and
decorously, though his clothes were threadbare. He took him into the
study, and asked him his business. “But first sit down,” the rector
added pleasantly, desiring to set the man at his ease.

The stranger sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. For a moment
there was a pause of seeming embarrassment, and then, “I am
body-servant, sir,” he said abruptly, passing his tongue across his
lips, and looking up furtively to learn the effect of his announcement,
“to the Earl of Dynmore.”

“Indeed!” the rector replied, with a slight start. “Has Lord Dynmore
returned to England, then?”

Again the man looked up slyly. “No, sir,” he answered with
deliberation, “I cannot say that he has, sir.”

“You have brought some letter or message from him, perhaps?” the
clergyman hazarded. The stranger seemed to have a difficulty in telling
his own story.

“No, sir, if you will pardon me, I have come about myself, sir,” the
man explained, speaking a little more freely. “I am in a little bit of
trouble, and I think you would help me, sir, if you heard the story.”

“I am quite willing to hear the story,” said the rector gravely.
Looking more closely at the man, he saw that his neatness was only on
the surface. His white cravat was creased, and his wrists displayed no
linen. An air of seediness marked him in the full light of the windows,
and, pale as his face was, it wore here and there a delicate flush.
Perhaps the man’s admission that he was in trouble helped the rector to
see this.

“Well, sir, it was this way,” the servant began. “I was not very well
out there, sir, and his lordship—he is an independent kind of
man—thought he would be better by himself. So he gave me my
passage-money and board wages for three months, and told me to come
home and take a holiday until he returned to England. So far it was all
right, sir.”

“Yes?” said the rector.

“But on board the boat—I am not excusing what I did, sir; but there are
others have done worse,” continued the man, with another of his sudden
upward glances—“I was led to play cards with a set of sharpers, and—and
the end of it was that I landed at Liverpool yesterday without a
halfpenny.”

“That was bad.”

“Yes, it was, sir. I do not know that I ever felt so bad in my life,”
replied the servant earnestly. “And now you know my position, sir.
There are several people in the town—but they have no means to help
me—who can tell you I am his lordship’s valet, and my name Charles
Felton.”

“You want help, I suppose?”

“I have not a halfpenny, sir! I want something to live on until his
lordship comes back.”

His tone changed as he said this, growing hard and almost defiant. The
rector noted the alteration, and did not like it. “But why come to me?”
he said, more coldly than he had yet spoken. “Why do you not go to Lord
Dynmore’s steward, or agent, or his solicitor, my man?”

“They would tell of me,” was the curt answer. “And likely enough I
should lose my place.”

“Still, why come to me?” Lindo persisted—chiefly to learn what was in
the man’s mind, for he had already determined what he would do.

“Because you are rector of Claversham, sir,” the applicant retorted at
last. And he rose suddenly and confronted the parson with an unpleasant
smile on his pale face—“which is in my lord’s gift, as you know, sir,”
he continued, in a tone rude and almost savage—a tone which
considerably puzzled his companion, who was not conscious of having
said anything offensive to the man. “I came here, sir, expecting to
meet an older gentleman, a gentleman of your name, a gentleman known to
me, and I find you—and I see you, do you see, where I expected to find
him.”

“You mean my uncle, I suppose?” said Lindo.

“Well, sir, you know best,” was the odd reply, and the man’s look was
as odd as his words. “But that is how the case stands; and, seeing it
stands so, I hope you will help me, sir. I do hope, on every account,
sir, that you will see your way to help me.”

The rector looked at the speaker with a slight frown, liking neither
the man nor his behavior. But he had already made up his mind to help
him, if only in gratitude to his patron, whose retainer he was; and
this, though the earl would never know of the act, nor possibly approve
of it. The man had at least had the frankness to own the folly which
had brought him to these straits, and Lindo was inclined to set down
the oddity of his present manner to the fear and anxiety of a
respectable servant on the verge of disgrace. “Yes,” he said coldly,
after a moment’s thought, “I am willing to help you. Of course I shall
expect you to repay me if and when you are able, Felton.”

“I will do that,” replied the man rather cavalierly.

“You might have added, ‘and thank you, sir,’” the rector said, with a
keen glance of reproof. He turned, as he spoke, to a small cupboard
constructed between the bookshelves near the fireplace, and, opening
it, took out a cash-box.

The man colored under his reproach, and muttered some apology,
resuming, as by habit, the tone of respect which seemed natural to him.
All the same he watched the clergyman’s movements with great closeness,
and appraised, even before it was placed in his hand, the sum which
Lindo took from a compartment set apart apparently for gold. “I will
allow you ten shillings a week—on loan, of course,” Lindo said after a
moment’s thought. “You can keep yourself on that, I suppose? And,
besides, I will advance you a sovereign to supply yourself with
anything of which you have pressing need. That should be ample. There
are three half sovereigns.”

This time the man did thank him with an appearance of heartiness. But
before he had said much the study door opened, and Stephen Clode came
in, his hat in his hand. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” the curate said,
taking in at a glance the open cash-box and the stranger’s outstretched
hand, and preparing to withdraw. “I thought you were alone.”

“Come in, come in!” said the rector, closing the money-box hastily, and
with some embarrassment, for he was not altogether sure that he had not
done a foolish and quixotic thing. “Our friend here is going. You can
send me your address, Felton. Good-day.”

The man thanked him and, taking up his hat, went. “Some one out of
luck?” said Clode.

“Yes.”

“I did not much like his looks,” the curate remarked. “He is not a
townsman, or I should know him.” The rector felt that his discretion
was assailed, and hastened to defend himself. “He is respectable
enough,” he said carelessly. “As a fact, he is Lord Dynmore’s valet.”

“But has Lord Dynmore come back?” the curate exclaimed, his hand
arrested in the act of taking down a book from a high shelf, and his
head turning quickly. If he expected to learn anything, however, from
his superior’s demeanor he was disappointed. Lindo was busy locking the
cupboard, and had his back to him.

“No, he has not come back,” Reginald explained, “but he has sent the
man home, and the foolish fellow lost his money on the boat coming
over, and wants an advance until his master’s return.”

“But why on earth does he come to you for it?” cried the curate, with
undisguised, astonishment.

The rector shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I do not know,” he said, a
trifle of irritation in his manners. “He did, and there is an end of
it. Is there any news?”

Mr. Clode seemed to find a difficulty in at once changing the direction
of his thoughts. But he did so with an effort, and, after a pause,
answered, “No, I think not. There is a good deal of interest felt in
the question of the sheep out there, I fancy—whether you will take your
course or comply with Mr. Bonamy’s whim.”

“I do not know myself,” said the young rector, turning and facing the
curate, with his feet apart and his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
“I do not, indeed. It is a serious matter.”

“It is. Still you have the responsibility,” said the curate with
diffidence, “and, without expressing any view of my own on the subject,
I confess——”

“Well?”

“I think if I bore the responsibility, I should feel called upon to do
what I myself thought right in the matter.”

The younger man shook his head doubtfully. “There is something in
that,” he said; “but, on the other hand, one cannot look on the point
as an essential, and, that being so, perhaps one should prefer peace.
But, there, enough of that now, Clode. I think you said you were not
going to the Hammonds’ this evening?”

“No, I am not.”

The rector almost wished he were not. However sociable a man may be, a
few days of solitude and a little temporary depression will render him
averse from society if he be sensitive. Lindo as a man was not very
sensitive; he held too good an opinion of himself. But as rector he
was, and as he walked across to the Town House he anticipated anything
but enjoyment.

In a few minutes, however—has it not some time or other happened to all
of us?—everything was changed with him. He felt as if he had entered
another world. The air of culture and refinement which surrounded him
from the hall inward, the hearty kindness of Mrs. Hammond, the pretty
rooms, the music and flowers, Laura’s light laughter and pleasant
badinage, all surprised and delighted him. The party might almost have
been a London party, it was so lively. The archdeacon, a red-faced,
cherry, white-haired man, whose acquaintance Lindo had already made,
and his wife, who was a mild image of himself, were of the number,
which was completed by their daughter and four or five county people,
all prepared to welcome and be pleased with the new rector. Lindo,
sprung from gentlefolk himself, had the ordinary experience of society;
but here he found himself treated as a stranger and a dignitary to a
degree of notice and a delicate flattery of which he had not before
tasted the sweets. Perhaps he was the more struck by the taste
displayed in the house, and the wit and liveliness of his new friends,
because he had so little looked for them—because he had insensibly
judged his parish by his experience of Mr. Bonamy, and had come
expecting this house to be as his.

If, under these circumstances, the young fellow had been unaffected by
the incense offered to him he would have been more than mortal. But he
was not. He began, before he had been in the house an hour, to change,
all unconsciously of course, his standpoint. He began to wonder
especially why he had been so depressed during the last few days, and
why he had troubled himself so much about the opinions of people whose
views no sensible man would regard.

Perhaps the girl beside him—he took in Laura—contributed as much as
anything to this. It was not only that she was bright and sparkling, in
the luxury of her pearls and evening dress even enchanting, nor only
that the femininity which had enslaved Stephen Clode began to have its
effects on her new neighbor. But Laura had a way while she talked to
him, while her lustrous brown eyes dwelt momentarily on his, of
removing herself and himself to a world apart—a world in which
downrightness seemed more downright and rudeness an outrage. And so,
while her manner gently soothed and flattered her companion, it led him
almost insensibly to—well, to put it in the concrete—to think scorn of
Mr. Bonamy.

“You have had a misunderstanding,” she said softly, as they stood
together by the piano after dinner, a feathering plant or two fencing
them off in a tiny solitude of their own, “with Mr. Bonamy, have you
not, Mr. Lindo?”

From anyone else, perhaps from her half an hour before, he would have
resented mention of the matter. Now he did not seem to mind. “Something
of the kind,” he said, laughing.

“About the sheep in the churchyard, was it not?” she continued.

“Yes.”

“Well, will you pardon me saying something?” Resting both her hands on
the raised lid of the piano, she looked up at him, and it must be
confessed that he thought he had never seen eyes so soft and brilliant
before. “It is only this,” she said earnestly. “That I hope you will
not give way to him. He is a wretched, cross-grained, fidgety man and
full of crotchets. You know all about him, of course?” she added, a
slight ring of pride in her voice.

“I know that he is my church warden,” said the rector, half in
seriousness.

“Yes!” she replied. “That is just what he is fit for!”

“You think so?” Lindo retorted, smiling. “Then you really mean that I
should be guided by him? That is it?”

She looked brightly at him for a moment. “I think you will be guided
only by yourself,” she murmured; and, blushing slightly, she nodded and
left him to go to another guest.

They were all in the same tale. “He is a rude overbearing man, Mr.
Lindo,” Mrs. Hammond said roundly, even her good nature giving place to
the _odium theologicum_. “And I cannot imagine why Mr. Williams put up
with him so long.”

“No indeed,” said the archdeacon’s wife, complacently smoothing down
her skirt. “But that is the worst of a town parish. You have this sort
of people.”

Mrs. Hammond looked for the moment as if she would have liked to deny
it. But under the circumstances this was impossible. “I am afraid we
have,” she admitted gloomily. “I hope Mr. Lindo will know how to deal
with him.”

“I think the archdeacon would,” said the other lady, shaking her head
sagely.

But, naturally enough, the archdeacon was more guarded in his
expressions. “It is about removing the sheep from the churchyard, is it
not?” he said, when he and Lindo happened to be left standing together
and the subject came up. “They have been there a long time, you know.”

“That is true, I suppose,” the rector answered. “But,” he continued
rather warmly—“you do not approve of their presence there, archdeacon?”

“No, certainly not.”

“Nor do I. And, thinking the removal right, and the responsibility
resting upon me, ought I not to undertake it?”

“Possibly,” replied the older man. “But pardon me making a suggestion.
Is not the thing of so little importance that you may, with a good
conscience, prefer quiet to the trouble of raising it?”

“If the matter were to end there, I think so,” replied the new rector,
with perhaps too strong an assumption of wisdom in his tone. “But what
if this be only a test case?—if to give way here means to encourage
further trespass on my right of judgment? The affair would bear a
different aspect then, would it not?”

“Oh, no doubt. No doubt it would.”

And that was all the archdeacon, who was a cautious man and knew Mr.
Bonamy, would say. But it will be observed that the rector had both
altered his standpoint and done another thing which most people find
easy enough. He had discovered an answer to his own arguments.




CHAPTER VIII.
TWO SURPRISES.


On the evening of the Hammonds’ party, Mr. Clode sat alone in his room,
trying to compose himself to work. His lamp burned brightly, and his
tea kettle—he had already sent down his frugal dinner an hour or
more—murmured pleasantly on the hob. But for some reason Mr. Clode
could do no work. He was restless, gloomy, ill-satisfied. The
suspicions which had been aroused in his breast on the evening of the
rector’s arrival had received, up to to-day at least, no confirmation;
but they had grown, as suspicions will, feeding on themselves, and with
them had grown the jealousy which had fostered them into being. The
curate saw himself already overshadowed by his superior, socially and
in the parish; and this evening felt this the more keenly that, as he
sat in his little room, he could picture perfectly the gay scene at the
Town House, where, for nearly two years, not a party had taken place
without his presence, no festivity had been arranged without his
co-operation. The omission to invite him to-night, however natural it
might seem to others, had for him a tremendous significance; so that
from a jealousy that was general he leapt at once to a jealousy more
particular, and conjured up a picture of Laura—with whose disposition
he was not unacquainted—smiling on the stranger, and weaving about him
the same charming net which had caught his own feet.

At this thought Clode sprang up with a passionate gesture and began to
walk to and fro, his brow dark. He felt sure that Lindo had no right to
his cure, but he knew also that the cure was a freehold, and that to
oust the rector from it something more than a mere mistake would have
to be shown. If the rector should turn out to be very incompetent, if
he should fall on evil times in the parish, then indeed he might find
his seat untenable when the mistake should be discovered; and with an
eye to this the curate had already dropped a word here and there—as,
for instance, that word which had reached Mr. Bonamy. But Clode was not
satisfied with that now. Was there no shorter, no simpler course
possible? There was one. The rector might be shown to have been aware
of the error when he took advantage of it. In that case his appointment
would be vitiated, and he might be compelled to forego it.

Naturally enough, the curate had scarcely formulated this to himself
before he became convinced—in his present state of envy and
suspicion—of the rector’s guilt. But how was he to prove it? As he
walked up and down the room, chafing and hot-eyed, he thought of a way
in which proof might be secured. The letters which had passed between
Lindo and Lord Dynmore’s agents in regard to the presentation, must
surely contain some word, some expression sufficient to have apprised
the young man of the truth—that the living was intended not for him but
for his uncle. A look at those letters, if they were in existence,
might give Stephen Clode, mere curate though he was, the whip-hand of
his rector!

He had another plan in his mind, of which more presently, and probably
he would have pursued the idea which has just been mentioned no farther
if his eye had not chanced to light at the moment on a small key
hanging upon a nail by the fireplace. Clode looked at the key, and his
face flushed. He stood thinking and apparently hesitating, the lamp
throwing his features into strong relief, while a man might count
twenty. Then he sat down with an angry exclamation and plunged into his
work. But in less than a minute he lifted his head. His glance wandered
again to the key; and, getting up suddenly, he took it down, put on his
hat, and went out.

His lodgings were over the stationer’s shop, but he could go in and out
through a private passage. He saw, as he passed, however; that there
was a light in the shop, and he opened the side door. “I am going to
the rectory to consult a book, Mrs. Wafer,” he said, seeing his
landlady dusting the counter. “You can leave my lamp alight. I shall
want nothing more to-night, thank you.”

She bade him good-night, and he closed the door again and rushed into
the street. Crossing the top of the town, he had to pass the Market
Hall, where he spoke to the one policeman on night duty; and here he
saw that it was five minutes to ten, and hastened his steps, in the
fear that the rector’s household might have retired. “He will not be
home himself until eleven, at the earliest,” the curate muttered as he
turned rapidly into the churchyard, which was very dark, the night
being moonless. “I have a clear hour. It was well that I looked in late
the other night.”

But, whatever his design, it received a sudden check. The rectory was
closed! The front of the house stood up dark and shapeless as the great
church which towered in front of it. The servants had gone to bed, and,
as they slept at the back, he would have found it difficult to arouse
them, had it suited his plans to do so. As it was, he did not dream of
such a thing, and with a slight shiver—for the night was cold, and now
that his project no longer excited him he felt it so, and felt too the
influence of the night wind soughing in sad fashion through the yews—he
was turning away, when something arrested his attention, and he paused.

The something he had seen, or fancied he had seen, was a momentary
glimmer of light shining through the fanlight over the door. It could
not affect him, for, if the servants had really closed the house for
the night, even if they had not all gone to bed, he could scarcely go
in. And yet some impulse led him to step softly into the porch and
grope for the knocker.

His hand lit instead on the iron-studded surface of the old oak door,
and, to his surprise, he felt it move slightly under his touch. He
pushed, and the door slid slowly and silently open, disclosing the
dusky outline of the hall, faintly illuminated by a thin shaft of light
which proceeded apparently from the study, the door of which was a
trifle ajar.

The sight recalled to the curate’s mind the errand on which he had
come, and he stole across the hall on tiptoe, listening with all his
ears. He heard nothing, however, and presently he stood on the mat at
the study door intercepting the light. Then he did hear the dull
footsteps of some one moving in the room, and suddenly it occurred to
him that the rector had stepped home to fetch something—a song, music,
or a book possibly—and was now within searching for it. That would
explain all.

The curate was seized with panic at the thought, and, fearful of being
discovered in his present position—for though he might have done all he
had done in perfect innocence, conscience made a coward of him—he crept
across the hall again and passed out into the churchyard. There he
stood in the darkness, waiting and watching, expecting the rector to
bustle out each minute.

But five minutes passed, and even ten, as it seemed to the curate in
his impatience, and no one came out, nor did the situation alter. Then
he made up his mind that the person moving in the study could not be
the owner of the house, and he went in again and, crossing the hall,
flung the study door wide open and entered.

There was a ringing sound as of coins falling on the floor, and a man
who had been kneeling low over something sprang to his feet and gazed
with wide, horror-stricken eyes at the intruder. A moment only the man
looked, and then he fell again on his knees. “Oh, mercy! mercy!” he
cried, almost grovelling before the curate. “Don’t give me up! I have
never been took! I have never been in jail or in trouble in my life! I
did not know what I was doing, sir! I swear I did not! Don’t give me
up!”

This cry, which was low and yet piercing, ended in hysterical sobbing.
On the table by his side stood a single candle, and by its light Clode
saw that the little cupboard among the books was open. The curate
started at the sight, and the words which he had been about to utter to
the shrinking wretch begging for mercy on the floor before him died
away in his husky throat. His eyes, however, burned with a gloomy rage,
and when he recovered himself his voice was pitiless. “You scoundrel!”
he said, in the low rich tone which had been so much admired in the
church when he first came to Claversham, “what are you doing here? Get
up and speak!” And he made as if he would spurn the creature with his
foot.

“I am a respectable man,” the rogue whined. “I am—that is I was, I
mean, sir—don’t be hard on me—Lord Dynmore’s own valet. I will tell you
all, sir.”

“I know you!” rejoined Clode, looking harshly at him. “You were here
this morning. And Mr. Lindo gave you money.”

“He did, sir. I confess it. I am a——”

“You are an ungrateful scoundrel!” Stephen Clode answered, cutting the
man short. “That is what you are! And in a few days you will be a
convicted felon, with the broad-arrow on your clothes, my man!”

To hear his worst anticipations thus put into words was too much for
the poor wretch. He fell on his knees, feebly crying for mercy, mercy!
“You are a minister of the gospel. Give me this one more chance, sir!”
he prayed.

“Stop that noise!” growled the curate fiercely, his dark face rendered
more rugged by the light and shadow cast by the single candle. “Be
silent! do you hear? and get up and speak like a man, if you can. Tell
me all—how you came here, and what you came for, and perhaps I may let
you escape. But the truth, mind, the truth!” he added truculently.

The knave was too thoroughly terrified to think of anything else. “Lord
Dynmore dismissed me,” he muttered, his breath coming quickly. “He
missed some money in Chicago, and he gave me enough to carry me home,
and bade me go to the devil! I landed in Liverpool without a
shilling—sir, it is God’s truth—and I remembered the gentleman Lord
Dynmore had just put in the living here. I had known him, and he had
given me half a sovereign more than once. And I thought I would come to
him. So I pawned my clothes, and came on.”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed the curate, leaning forward, with fierce
impatience in his tone. “And then?”

“Sir?”

“Well? When you came here? What happened? Go on, fool!” He could
scarcely control himself.

“I found a stranger,” whimpered the man—“another Mr. Lindo. He had got
in here somehow.”

“Well? But there,” added the curate with a sudden change of manner,
“how do you know that Lord Dynmore meant to put the clergyman you used
to know in here?”

“Because I heard him read a letter from his agents about it,” the
fellow replied at once. “And from what his lordship said I knew it was
his old pal—his old friend, sir, I mean, begging your pardon humbly,
sir.”

“And when did you learn,” said the curate more quickly, “that the
gentleman here was not your Mr. Lindo?”

“I heard in the town that he was a young man. And, putting one thing
and another together, and keeping a still tongue myself, I thought he
would serve me as well as the other, and I called——”

“What did you say?”

“Not much, sir,” answered the valet, a twinkle of cunning in his eye.
“The less said the sooner mended. But he understood, and he promised to
give me ten shillings a week.”

“To hold your tongue?”

“Well, so I took it, sir.”

The curate drew a long breath. This was what he had expected. It was to
information which might be drawn from this man that his second scheme
had referred. And here was the man at his service, bound by a craven
fear to do his bidding—bound to tell all he knew. “But why,” Clode
asked suspiciously, a thought striking him, “if what you say be true,
are you here now—doing this, my man?”

“I was tempted, sir,” the servant answered, his tone abject again. “I
confess it truly, sir. I saw the money in the box here this morning,
sir, and I thought that my ten shillings a week would not last long,
and a little capital would set me up comfortably. And then the devil
put it into my head that the young gentleman would not persecute me,
even if he caught me.”

“You did not think of me catching you?” said the curate grimly.

The man uttered a cry of anguish. “That I did not, sir,” he sobbed.
“Oh, Lord! I have never had a policeman’s hand on me. I have been
honest always.”

“Until you took his lordship’s money,” replied the curate quietly. “But
I understand. You have never been found out before, you mean.”

No doubt when people of a certain class, for which respectability has
long spelled livelihood, do fall into the law’s clutch they suffer very
sharply. Master Felton continued to pour forth heartrending prayers;
but he might have saved his breath. The curate’s thoughts were
elsewhere. He was thinking that a witness so valuable must be kept
within reach at any cost and it did flash across his brain that the
best course would be to hand him over now to the police, and trust to
the effect which his statements respecting the rector should produce
upon the inquiry. But the reflection that the allegations of a man on
his trial for burglary would not obtain much credence led Clode to
reject this simple course and adopt another. “Look here!” he said
curtly. “I am going to deal mercifully with you, my man. But—but,” he
continued, frowning impatiently, as he saw the other about to speak—“on
certain conditions. You are not to leave Claversham. That is the first.
If you leave the town before I give you the word, I shall put the
police on your track without an instant’s delay. Do you hear that?”

“I will stop as long as you like, sir,” said the servant submissively,
but with wonder apparent both in his voice and face.

“Very well. I wish it for the present, no matter why. Perhaps because I
would see that you lead an honest life for awhile.”

“And—how shall I live, sir?” said the culprit timidly.

“For the present you may continue to draw your half-sovereign a week,”
the curate answered hastily, his face reddening, he best knew why.
“Possibly I may tell Mr. Lindo at once. Possibly I may give you another
chance, and tell him later, if I find you deserving. What is your
address?”

“I am at the Bull and Staff,” muttered Felton. It was a small public
house of no very good repute.

“Well, stay there,” Stephen Clode answered after a moment’s thought.
“But see you get into no harm. And since you are living on the rector’s
bounty, you may say so.”

The man looked puzzled as well as relieved, but, stealing a doubtful
glance at the curate’s dark fate, he found his eyes still upon him, and
cowered afresh. “Yes, take care,” said Clode, smiling unpleasantly as
he saw the effect his look produced. “Do not try to evade me or it will
be the worse for you, Felton. And now go! But see you take nothing from
here.”

The detected one cast a sly glance at the half-rifled box which still
lay on the carpet at his feet, a few gold coins scattered round it;
then he looked up again. “It is all there, sir,” he said, cringing. “I
had but just begun.”

“Then go!” said the curate, pointing with emphasis to the door. “Go, I
tell you!”

The man’s presence annoyed and humiliated him so that he felt a
positive relief when the valet’s back was turned. Left alone he stood
listening, a cloud on his brow, until the faint sound of the outer door
being pulled to reached his ear, and then, stooping hastily, he
gathered up the sovereigns and half-sovereigns, which lay where they
had fallen, and put them into the box. This done, he rose and laid the
box itself upon the table by his side. And again he stood still,
listening, a dark shade on his face.

Long ago, almost at the moment of his entrance, he had seen the pale
shimmer of papers at the back of the little cupboard. Now, still
listening stealthily, he thrust in his hand and drew out one of the
bundles and opened it. The papers were parish accounts in his own
handwriting! With a gesture of fierce impatience he thrust them back
and drew out others, and, disappointed again in these, exchanged them
hastily for a third set. In vain! The last were as worthless to him as
the first.

He was turning away baffled and defeated, when he saw lying at the back
of the lower compartment of the cupboard, whence the cash-box had come,
two or three smaller packets, consisting apparently of letters. The
curate reached hastily for one of these, and the discovery that it
contained some of Lindo’s private accounts, dated before his
appointment, made his face flush and his fingers tremble with
eagerness. He glanced nervously round the room and stopped to listen;
then, moving the candle a little nearer, he ran his eye over the
papers. But here, too, though the scent was hot, he took nothing, and
he exchanged the packet for one of the others. Looking at this, he saw
that it was indorsed in Lindo’s handwriting, “Letters relating to the
Claversham Living.”

“At last,” Clode muttered, his eyes burning, “I have it now.” The
string which bound the packet was knotted tightly, and his fingers
seemed all thumbs as he labored to unfasten it. But he succeeded at
last, and opening the uppermost letter (they were all folded across),
saw that it was written from Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “My dear sir,” he
read; and then—with a mighty crash sounding awfully in his ears—the
door behind him was flung open just as he had flung it open himself an
hour before, and, dropping the letter, he sprang round, to find the
rector confronting him with a face of stupid astonishment.




CHAPTER IX.
TOWN TALK.


He was a man, as the reader will perhaps have gathered, of many shifts,
and cool-headed; but for a moment he felt something of the anguish of
discovery which had so tortured the surprised servant. The table shook
beneath his hand, and it was with difficulty he repressed a wild
impulse to overturn the candle, and escape in the darkness. He did
repress it, however; nay, he forced his eyes to meet the rector’s, and
twisted his lips into the likeness of a smile. But when he thought of
the scene afterward he found his chief comfort in the reflection that
the light had been too faint to betray his full embarrassment.

Naturally the rector was the first to speak. “Clode!” he ejaculated
softly, his surprise above words. “Is it you? Why, man,” he continued,
still standing with his hand on the door and his eyes devouring the
scene, “what is up?”

The money-box stood open at the curate’s side, and the letters lay
about his feet where they had fallen. The little cupboard yawned among
the books. No wonder Lindo’s amazement, as he gradually took it all in,
rather increased than diminished, or that the curate’s tongue was dry
and his throat husky when he at last found his voice. “It is all right.
I will explain it,” he stammered, almost upsetting the table in his
agitation. “I expected you before,” he added fussily, moving the light.

“The dickens you did!” slipped from the rector. It was difficult for
him not to believe that his arrival had been the last thing expected.

“Yes,” returned the curate, with a little snap of defiance. He was
recovering himself, and could look the other in the face now. “But I am
glad you did not come before, all the same.”

“Why?”

“I will explain.”

The light which the one candle gave was not so meagre that Clode’s
embarrassment had altogether escaped Lindo; and had the latter been a
suspicious man he might have had queer thoughts, and possibly expressed
them. As it was, he was only puzzled, and when the curate said he would
explain, answered simply, “Do.”

“The truth is,” said Stephen Clode, beginning with an effort, “I have
taken a good deal on myself, and I am afraid you will blame me, Mr.
Lindo. If so, I cannot help it.” His face flushed, and he beat a tattoo
on the table with his fingers. “I came across,” he continued, “to
borrow a book a little before ten. The lights here were out; but, to my
surprise, your house-door was open.”

“As I found it myself!” the rector exclaimed.

“Precisely. Naturally I had misgivings, and I looked into the hall. I
saw a streak of light proceeding from the doorway of this room, and I
came in softly to see what it meant. I heard a man moving about in
here, and I threw open the door much as you did.”

“Did you?” said Lindo eagerly. “And who was it—the man, I mean?”

“That is just what I cannot tell you,” replied the curate. His face was
pale, but there was a smile upon it, and he met the other’s gaze
without flinching. He had settled his plan now.

“He got away, then?” said the rector, disappointed.

“No. He did not try either to escape or to resist,” was the answer.

“But was he really a burglar?”

“Yes.”

“Then where is he?” The rector looked round as if he expected to see
the man lying bound on the floor. “What did you do with him?”

“I let him go.”

Lindo whistled; and when he had done whistling still stood with his
mouth open and a face of the most complete mystification. “You let him
go?” he repeated mechanically, but not until after a pause of half a
minute or so. “Why, may I ask?”

“You have every right to ask,” the curate answered with firmness, and
yet despondently. “I will tell you why—why I let him go, and why I
cannot tell you his name. He is a parishioner of yours. It was his
first offence, and I believe him to be sincerely penitent. I believe,
too, that he will never repeat the attempt, and that the accident of my
entrance saved him from a life of crime. I may have been wrong—I dare
say I was wrong,” continued the curate, growing excited—excitement came
very easily to him at the moment—“but I cannot go back from my word.
The man’s misery moved me. I thought what I should have felt in his
place, and I promised him, in return for his pledge that he would live
honestly in the future, that he should go free, and that I would not
betray his name to any one—to any one!”

“Well!” exclaimed the rector, his tone one of unbounded admiration in
every sense of the word. “When you do a thing nobly, my dear fellow,
you do do it nobly, and no mistake! I wonder who it was! But I must not
ask you.”

“No.” said Clode. “And now,” he continued, still beating the tattoo on
the table, “you do not blame me greatly?”

“I do not, indeed. No. Only I think perhaps that you should have
retained the right to tell me.”

“I should have done so,” said the curate regretfully.

“He has taken nothing, I suppose?” the rector continued, turning to the
cupboard, and, not only satisfied with the explanation, but liking
Clode better than he had liked him before.

“No,” the other answered. “I was putting things straight when you
entered and startled me. He had dropped the money about the floor, but
you will find it right, I think. He has made a mess among the papers, I
fear, and damaged the cupboard door in forcing it, but that is the
extent of the mischief. By the way,” the curate added, “I have a key to
this cupboard at my lodgings. Williams gave it to me. He only kept
parish matters here. I must let you have it.”

“Right,” said the rector carelessly; and, a few more words having
passed between them as to the attempted robbery, and the manner in
which the outer door had been opened, the curate took his hat and
prepared to go. “You had a pleasant party, I suppose?” he said, pausing
and turning when halfway across the hall.

“A _very_ pleasant one,” Lindo answered with enthusiasm.

“They are nice people,” said Clode smoothly.

“They are—very nice. You told me I should find them so, and you were
right. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Such harmless words! And yet they roused the curate’s jealousy anew. As
he walked home, the church clock tolling midnight above his head, he
drank in no peaceful influence from the dark stillness or the solemn
sound. He was gnawed by fresh hatred of the man who had surprised and
confounded him, and forced him to lie and quibble in order to escape
from a dishonorable position. If you would make a man your enemy come
upon him when he is doing something of which he is ashamed. He will
fear you afterward, but he will hate you more. In the curate’s case it
was only he who knew himself discovered, so that he had no ground for
fear. But he hated none the less vigorously.

And, somehow, in a few days an ugly rumor of which the new rector was
the subject began to gain currency in the town. It was an ill-defined
rumor, coming to one thing in one person’s mouth and to a different
thing in another’s—a kind of cloud on the rector’s fair fame, shifting
from moment to moment, and taking ever a fresh shape, yet always a
cloud.

One whispered that he had obtained the presentation as the reward of
questionable services rendered to the patron. Another that he had
forged his own deed of presentation, if such a thing existed. A third
that he had been presented by mistake; and a fourth that he had
deceived the authorities as to his age. It was noticeable that these
rumors began low down in the social scale of the town and worked their
way upward, which was odd; and that, whatever form the rumor took,
there was not one who heard it who did not within a fortnight or three
weeks come to associate it with the presence of a seedy, down-looking,
unwholesome man, who was much about the rector’s doorway, and, when he
was not there, was generally to be found at the Bull and Staff. Whether
he was the disseminator of the reports, or, alike with the rector, was
the unconscious subject of them, was not known; but at sight of
him—particularly if he were seen, as frequently happened, in the
rector’s neighborhood—people shrugged their shoulders and lifted their
eyebrows, and expressed a great many severe things without using their
tongues.

To the circle of the rector’s personal friends the rumors did not
reach. That was natural enough. To tell a person that his or her
intimate friend is a forger or a swindler is a piquant but somewhat
perilous task. And no one mentioned the matter to the Hammonds, or to
the archdeacon, or to the Homfrays of Holberton, or the other county
people living round, with whom it must be confessed that, after that
dinner-party at the Town House, he consorted perhaps too exclusively.
It might have been thought that even the townsfolk, seeing the young
fellow’s frank face passing daily about their streets, and catching the
glint of his fair curly hair when, the wintry sunlight pierced the
lanthorn windows and fell in gules and azure on the reading-desk, would
have been slow to believe such tales of him.

They might have been; but circumstances and Mr. Bonamy were against
him. The lawyer did not circulate the stories; he had not even
mentioned them out-of-doors, nor, for aught the greater part of
Claversham knew, had heard of them at all. But all his weight—and with
the Low-Church middle-class in the town it was great—was thrown into
the scale against the rector. It was known that he did not trust the
rector. It was known that day by day his frown on meeting the rector
grew darker and darker. And the why and the wherefore not being
understood—for no one thought of questioning the lawyer, or observed
how frequently of late the curate happened upon him in the street or
the reading-room—many concluded that he knew more of the clergyman’s
antecedents than appeared.

There was one person, and perhaps only one, who openly circulated and
rejoiced in these rumors. That was a man whom Lindo met daily in the
street and passed with a careless nod and a word, not dreaming for an
instant that the spiteful little busybody was concerning himself with
him. The man was Dr. Gregg, the snappish, ill-bred man who had chanced
upon Lindo and the Bonamy girls breakfasting together at Oxford. The
sight, it will be remembered, had not pleased him, for he had long had
a sneaking liking for Miss Kate himself, and had only refrained from
trying to win her because he still more desired to be of the “best set”
in Claversham. He had been ashamed, indeed, up to this time of his
passion; but, reading on that occasion unmistakable admiration of the
girl in the young clergyman’s face, and being himself rather cavalierly
treated by Lindo, he had somewhat changed his views. The girl had
acquired increased value in his eyes. Another’s appreciation had
increased his own, and, merely as an incident, the man who had effected
this has earned his hearty jealousy and ill-will. And this, while Lindo
thought him a vulgar but harmless little man.

But if the rector, immersed in new social engagements, did not see
whither he was tending, others, though they knew nothing of the
unpleasant tales we have mentioned, saw more clearly. The archdeacon,
coming into town one Saturday five or six weeks after Lindo’s arrival,
did his business early and turned his steps toward the rectory. He felt
pretty sure of finding the young fellow at home, because he knew it was
his sermon day. A few yards from the door he fell in, as it chanced,
with Stephen Clode. The two stood together talking, while the
archdeacon waited to be admitted, and presently the curate said, “If
you wish to see the rector, archdeacon, I am afraid you will be
disappointed. He is not at home.”

“But I thought that he was always at home on Saturdays?”

“Generally he is,” Clode replied, looking down and tracing a pattern
with the point of his umbrella. “But he is away to-day.”

“Where?” said the archdeacon rather abruptly.

“He has gone to the Homfrays’ at Holberton. They have some sort of
party to-day, and the Hammonds drove him over.” Despite himself, the
curate’s tone was sullen, his manner constrained.

“Oh!” said the archdeacon thoughtfully. The Homfrays were his very good
friends, but of the county families round Claversham they were reckoned
the fastest and most frivolous. And he sagely suspected that a man in
Lindo’s delicate position might be wiser if he chose other companions.
“Lindo seems to see a good deal of the Hammonds,” he remarked after a
pause.

“Yes,” said Clode. “It is very natural.”

“Oh, very natural,” the archdeacon hastened to say; but his tone
clearly expressed the opinion that “toujours Hammonds” was not a good
bill of fare for the rector of Claversham. “Very natural, of course.
Only,” he continued, taking courage, for he really liked the rector,
“you have had some experience here, and I think it would be well if you
were to give him a hint not to be too exclusive. A town rector must not
be too exclusive. It does not do.”

“No,” said Clode.

“It is different in the country, of course. And then there is Mr.
Bonamy. He is unpleasant, I know, and yet he is honest after a fashion.
Lindo must beware of getting across with him. He has done nothing about
the sheep yet, has he?”

“No.”

“Well, do not let him, if you can help it. You are not urging him on in
that, are you?”

“On the contrary,” the curate answered rather warmly, “I have all
through told him that I would not express an opinion on it. If
anything, I have discouraged him in the matter.”

“Well, I hope he will let it drop now. I hope he will let it drop.”

They parted then, and the archdeacon, sagely revolving in his mind the
evils of exclusiveness, strolled back to the hotel where he put up his
horses. On his way, casting his eye down the wide, quiet street, with
its old-fashioned houses on this side and that, he espied Mr. Bonamy’s
tall spare figure approaching, and he purposely passed the inn and went
to meet him. As a county magnate the archdeacon could afford to know
Mr. Bonamy, and even to be friendly with him. I am not sure, indeed,
that he had not a sneaking liking and respect for the rugged, snappish,
self-made man.

“How do you do, Mr. Bonamy?” he began. And then, after saying a few
words about closing a road in which he was interested, he slid into a
mention of Lindo, with a view to seeing how the land lay. “I have just
been to call on your rector,” he said.

“You did not find him at home,” replied Bonamy, with a queer grin, and
a little jerk of his head which sent his hat still farther back.

“No, I was unlucky.”

“Not more than most people,” said the churchwarden, with much
enjoyment. “I will tell you what it is, Mr. Archdeacon. Mr. Lindo is
better suited for your place. He would make a very good archdeacon.
With a pair of horses and a park phaeton and a small parish, and a
little general superintendence of the district—with that and the life
of a country gentleman he would get on capitally.”

There was just so much of a jest in the words that the clergyman had no
choice but to laugh. “Come, Bonamy,” he said good-humoredly, “he is
young yet.”

“Oh, yes, he is quite out of place here in that respect, too!” replied
the lawyer naïvely.

“But he will improve,” pleaded the archdeacon.

“I am not sure that he will have the chance,” Mr. Bonamy answered in
his gentlest tone.

The archdeacon was so far from understanding him that he did not answer
save by raising his eyebrows. Could Bonamy really be so foolish, he
wondered, as to think he could get rid of a beneficed clergyman. The
archdeacon was surprised, and yet that was all he could make of it.

“He is away at Mr. Homfray’s of Holberton now,” the lawyer continued,
condemnation in his thin voice.

“Well, there is no harm in that, Mr. Bonamy,” replied the archdeacon,
somewhat offended, “as long as he is back to do the duty to-morrow.”

Mr. Bonamy grunted. “A one-day-a-week duty is a very fine thing,” he
said. “You clergymen are to be envied, Mr. Archdeacon!”

“You would be a great deal more to be envied yourself, Mr. Bonamy,” the
magnate returned with heat, “if you did not carp at everything and look
at other people through distorted glasses. Fie! here is a young
clergyman new to the parish, and, instead of helping him, you find
fault with everything he does. For shame! For shame, Mr. Bonamy!”

“Ah!” said the lawyer, quite unabashed, “you did not mean to say that
when you came across the street to me. But—well, least said soonest
mended, and I will wish you good evening. You will have a wet drive
home, I am afraid, Mr. Archdeacon.”

And he put up his umbrella and went his way sturdily, while the
archdeacon, crossing to his carriage, which was in front of the inn,
entertained an uncomfortable suspicion that he had done more harm than
good by his intercession. “I am afraid,” he said to himself, as he
handled the reins and sent his horses down the street in a fashion of
which he was not a little proud—“I am afraid that there is trouble in
front of that young man. I am afraid there is.”

If he had known all, he might have shaken his head still more gravely,




CHAPTER X.
OUT WITH THE SHEEP.


Stephen Clode, while listening with a certain pleasure to the
archdeacon’s hints, did not dream of the good turn which fortune was
about to do him. If he had foreseen it, he would probably have taken a
bolder part in the conversation, and parted from the elder clergyman
with a more jubilant step. As it was, he heard no rumor that evening,
nor was it until ten o’clock on the Sunday morning that he learned
anything was amiss. Calling at the house in the churchyard at that
hour, he was received by Mrs. Baker herself; and he remarked at once
that the housekeeper’s face fell in a manner far from flattering when
she recognized him.

“Oh, it is you, is it, Mr. Clode?” she said, her tone one of
disappointment. “You have not seen him, sir, have you?”

“Seen whom?” the curate replied in surprise.

“Mr. Lindo, sir?”

“Why? Is he not here?”

“He is not, indeed, sir,” the housekeeper said, putting her head out to
look up and down. “He never came back last night, and we have not heard
of him. I sent across to the Town House to inquire, and the only thing
Mrs. Hammond could say was that Mr. Lindo was to follow them, and they
supposed he had come.”

“Well, but—who is to do the duty at the church?” Clode ejaculated. His
dismay at the moment was genuine, for he did not at once see how much
this was to his advantage.

“There is only you, sir, unless he comes in time,” the housekeeper
added despondently.

“But I am going to the Hamlet church,” said Clode, rapidly turning
things over in his mind. If there was no one at the parish church to
conduct the chief service of the week, what a talk there would be! Why
it would almost be matter for the bishop’s interference! “You see I
cannot possibly neglect that,” he continued, in answer as much to the
remonstrance of his own conscience as to the housekeeper. “It was the
rector’s own arrangement, Mrs. Baker. You may be sure he will be here
in time for the eleven o’clock service. Mr. Homfray has kept him over
night. That is all.”

“You do not think he has met with an accident, sir? They say the
coal-pits on Baer Hill——”

“Pooh, pooh! He will be here in a few minutes, you will see,” the
curate answered. And he affected to be so cheerfully certain of this
that he would not wait even for a little while, but started at once for
the Hamlet church—a small chapel-of-ease in the outskirts of the town.
There he put on his surplice early, and was ready in excellent time.
Punctuality is a virtue.

At half-past ten the bells of the great church began to ring, and
presently door after door in the quiet streets about it opened
silently, and little parties issued forth in their Sunday clothes and
walked stiffly and slowly toward the building. At the moment when the
High Street was dotted most thickly with these groups, and the small
bell was tinkling its impatient summons, the rattle of an old
taxed-cart was heard as the vehicle flashed quickly over the bridge at
the foot of the street. One and another of the church-goers turned in
curiosity to gaze, for such a sound was rare on a Sunday morning. Judge
of their astonishment, then, when they recognized, perched up beside
the boy who urged on the pony, no less a person than the rector
himself! As he jogged up the street in his sorry conveyance and with
his sorry companion, he had to pass under the fire of a battery of eyes
which did not fail to notice all the peculiarities of his appearance.
His tie was awry and his chin unshaven. He had a haggard, dissipated
air, as of one who had been up all night, and there was a great smudge
on his cheek. He looked dissipated—-nothing less than disreputable,
some said; and he seemed aware of it, for he sat erect, gazing straight
before him, and declining to see any one. At the top of the street he
descended hastily, and, as the bell jerked out its final note, hurried
toward the vestry with a depressed and gloomy face.

“Well!” said Mr. Bonamy to Kate, who was walking up by his side, and
whose face for some mysterious reason was flushed and troubled, “I
think that is the coolest young man I have ever met!”

“Eh?” said a voice behind them as they entered the porch—the speaker
was Gregg. “What do you think of that, Bonamy? A gay young spark, is he
not?”

There was time for no more then. But as the congregation waited in
their seats through a long voluntary, many were the nods and winks, and
incessant the low mutterings, as one communicated to another the
details of the scene outside, and his or her view of them. When the
rector appeared—nine minutes late by Mr. Bonamy’s watch—he looked pale
and fagged, and the sermon he preached was of the shortest. Nine-tenths
of the congregation noted only the brevity of the discourse and drew
their conclusions. But Kate Bonamy, who sat by her father with downcast
eyes and a tinge of color still in her cheeks, and who scarcely once
looked up at the weary face and tumbled hair, fancied, heaven knows
why, that she detected a new pathos and a deeper tone of appeal in the
few simple sentences; and though she had scarcely spoken to the rector
for a month, and was nursing a tiny contempt for him, the girl felt on
a sudden more kindly disposed toward the young man.

Not so Mr. Bonamy, He came out of church chuckling; full of a grim
delight in the fulfilment of his predictions. It was not his custom to
linger in the porch, for he was not a sociable man; but he did so
to-day, and, letting Kate and Daintry go on, formed one of a coterie of
men, who had no difficulty in coming to a conclusion about the rector.

“He has been studying hard, poor fellow!” said Gregg, with a wink—there
is no dislike so mean and cruel as that which the ill-bred man feels
for the gentleman—“reading the devil’s books all night!”

“Nine minutes late!” said the lawyer. “That is what comes of having a
young fellow who is always gadding about the country!”

“He could not gad to a more congenial place than Holberton, I should
think,” sneered a third.

And then all the sins which the Homfrays had ever committed, and all
those which had ever been laid to their charge, were cited to render
the rector’s case more black. To do him justice, Mr. Bonamy took but a
listener’s part in this. He was a shrewd man, and he did not believe
that the rector could have had anything to do with an elopement from
Holberton which had taken place before his name was heard in the
county; but he was honestly assured that the young fellow had been
sitting over the cards half the night. And as for the other crimes,
perhaps he would commit them if he were left to follow his own foolish
devices.

“What is ill-gotten soon goes,” said one charitable person with a
sneer. “You may depend upon it that what we hear is true.”

“It is all of a piece,” said another. “A man does not have a follower
of that kind for nothing?”

“It comes over the devil’s back, and goes—you know how?” said a third.
“But perhaps he is wise to make the most of it while it lasts. He is
consequential enough now, but the Homfrays will not have much to say to
him presently, you will see. A few weeks, and he will go.”

“Well, let him go for the d—d dissipated gambling parson he is!” said
Gregg coarsely, carried away by the unusual agreement with him. “And
the sooner the better, say I!”

The man beside him, a little startled by the doctor’s violence, turned
round to make sure that they were not overheard, and found himself face
to face with the rector, who, seeking to go out—as was not his custom,
for he generally used the vestry door—by the porch, had walked into the
midst of the group, even as Gregg opened his mouth. A glance at the
young man’s reddening cheek and compressed lips apprised the startled
group that he had overheard something at least.

In one way it was the crisis of Lindo’s fate at Claversham. But he did
not know it. If he had been wise—if he had been such a man as his
curate, for instance; or if, without being wise, he had learned a
little of the prudence which comes of necessity with years—he would
have passed through them in silence, satisfied with such revenge as
mute contempt could give him. But he was not old, nor very wise; and
perhaps certain things had lately jarred on his nerves, so that he was
not quite himself. He did not pass by in silence, but, instead, stood
for a moment. Then, singling Gregg out with a withering glance, “I am
much obliged to you for your good opinion,” he said to him; “but I
should be still more obliged if you would swear elsewhere, sir, and not
in the porch of my church. Leave the building! Go at once!” And he
pointed toward the churchyard with the air of an angry schoolmaster.

But Gregg did not move. He was astounded by this direct attack, but he
had the courage of numbers on his side, and, though he did not dare to
answer, he did not budge. Neither did the others, though they felt
ashamed of themselves, and looked all ways at once. Only one of them
all met the rector’s glance fairly, and that was Mr. Bonamy. “I think
the least said the soonest mended, Mr. Lindo,” he replied, with an
acrid smile.

“I am sorry that you did not think of that before,” retorted the young
man, standing before them with his fair head thrown back, his clerical
coat hanging loose, and his brow dark with indignation—for he had heard
enough to be able to guess the cause of Gregg’s remark. “Do you come to
church only to cavil and backbite?—to put the worst construction on
what you cannot understand?”

“Speaking for myself,” replied the church warden coolly, “the sole
thing with which I can charge myself is the remark that you were
somewhat late for service this morning, Mr. Lindo.”

“And if I was?” said the clergyman in his haughtiest tone.

“Well, of course there may have been a good cause for it,” the lawyer
replied drily. “But it is a thing I have not known happen here for
twenty years.”

An altercation with these men, none of whom were well disposed toward
him, and half of whom were tradespeople, was the last thing which the
young rector should have allowed himself to enter upon, and the last
thing indeed to which he would have condescended in his normal frame of
mind. But on this unlucky morning he was nervous and irritable; and,
finding himself thus bearded and defied, he spoke foolishly. “You
trouble yourself too much, Mr. Bonamy,” he said impulsively, “with
things which do not concern you! The parish, among other things. You
have set yourself, as I know, to thwart and embarrass me; but I warn
you that you are not strong enough! I shall find means to——”

“To put me down, in fact?” said Mr. Bonamy.

The young man hesitated, his face crimson. His opponent’s sallow
features, seamed with a hundred astute wrinkles, warned him, if the
covert smiles of the others did not, that, in his present mood at any
rate, he was not a match for the lawyer. He had gone too far already,
as he was now aware. “No,” he replied, swallowing his rage, “but to
keep you to your proper province, as I hope to keep to mine. I wish you
good morning.”

He passed through them, and hurried away, more angry with them, and
with himself for allowing them to provoke him, than he had ever felt in
his life. He knew well that he had been foolish. He knew that he had
lowered himself in their eyes by his display of temper. But, though he
was bitterly annoyed with himself, the consciousness that the fault had
originally lain with them, and that they had grievously misjudged him,
kept his anger hot; for there is no wrath so fierce as the indignation
of the man falsely accused. He called them under his breath an
uncharitable, spiteful, tattling crew; and was so far unnerved in
thought of them that he had entered his dining-room before he
remembered that he was engaged to take the mid-day meal at the Town
House, as he had done once or twice before, and then walked up with
Laura to the schools.

He washed and changed hurriedly, keeping his anger hot the while, and
then went across, with the tale on the tip of his tongue. Again, if he
had been wise, he would have kept what had happened to himself. But the
soothing luxury of unfolding his wrong to some one who would sympathize
was one he could not in his soreness forego.

It was a particularly mild day for the fourth Sunday in Advent, and he
found Miss Hammond still lingering before the door, She was looking for
violets under the north wall, and he joined her, and naturally broke
out at once with the story of what had happened. She was wearing a
little close bonnet, which set off her piquant features and bright
coloring to peculiar advantage, and, as far as looks went, no young man
in trouble ever had a better listener. Only to stand beside her on the
lawn, where the old trees shut out all view of the town and the
troubles he connected with it, was a relief. Of course the search for
violets was soon abandoned. “It is abominable!” she said. But her voice
was like the cooing of a dove. She did everything softly. Even her
indignation was gentle.

“But you have not heard yet,” he protested, “why I really was late.”

“I know what is being said,” she murmured, looking up at him, a gleam
of humor in her brown eyes—“that you stayed at the Homfrays’ all night,
playing cards. My maid told me as we came in—after church.”

“Ha! I knew that they were saying something of the kind,” he replied
savagely. He was so stern that she felt her little attempt at badinage
reproved. “The true reason was of a very different description. What
spiteful busybodies they are! I started to return last evening about
half-past nine, but as I passed Baer Hill Colliery I learned that there
had been an accident. A man going down the shaft with the night shift
had been crushed—hurt beyond help,” the rector continued in a lower
voice. “He wanted to see a clergyman, and the other pitmen, some of
whom had seen me pass earlier in the day, stopped me and took me to
him.”

“How sad! How very sad!” she ejaculated. Somehow she felt ill at ease
with him in this mood. With his last words a kind of veil had fallen
between them.

“I stayed with him the night,” the rector continued. “He died at
half-past nine this morning. I came straight from that to this. And
they say these things of me!”

His voice, though low, was hard, and yet there was a suspicious break
in it as he uttered his last words. Injustice touches a man, young and
not yet hardened, very sorely; and he was overwrought. Laura, fingering
her little bunch of violets, heard the catch in his voice, and knew
that he was not very far from tears.

She was almost terrified. She longed to respond, to say the proper
thing, but here her powers deserted her. She was not capable of much
emotion, unless the call especially concerned herself; and she could
not rise to this occasion. She could only murmur again that it was
abominable and too bad, or, taking her cue from the young man’s face,
that it was very sad. She said enough, it is true, to satisfy him,
though not herself; for he only wanted a listener. And when he went in
to lunch Mrs. Hammond more than bore him out in all his denunciations;
so that when he left to go to the schools he had fully made up his mind
to carry things through.

This unfortunate quarrel indeed did him great injury by throwing him
into the arms of the party which his own pleasure and taste led him to
prefer. He did not demur when Mrs. Hammond—meaning little evil, but
expressing prejudices which at one time she had sedulously cultivated
(for when one lives near the town one must take especial care not to be
confounded with it)—talked of a set of butchers and bakers, and said,
much more strongly than he had, that Mr. Bonamy must be kept in his
place. A little quarrel with the lawyer, a little social relaxation in
which the young fellow had lost sight of the excellent intentions with
which he had set out, then this final quarrel—such had been the course
of events; sufficient, taken with his own fastidiousness and
inexperience, to bring him to this.

Mrs. Hammond, standing at the drawing-room window, watched him as he
walked down the short drive. “I like that young man,” she said
decisively. “He is thrown away upon those people.”

Laura, who had not gone to the schools, yawned. “He has not one-half
the brains of some one else we know, mother,” she answered.

“Who is that?”

Laura did not reply; and probably her mother understood, for she did
not press the question. “Well,” Mrs. Hammond said, after a moment’s
silence, “perhaps he has not. I do not know. But at any rate he is a
gentleman from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes.”

“I dare say he is,” said Laura languidly.

Mrs. Hammond, depositing her own portly form in a suitable chair,
watched her daughter curiously. She would have given a good deal to be
able to read the girl’s mind and learn her intentions; but she was too
wise to ask questions, and had always given Laura the fullest liberty.
She had watched the growth of the intimacy between her and Mr. Clode
without demur, feeling a strong liking for the man herself, though she
scarcely thought him a suitable match for her daughter. On the old
rector’s death there had seemed for a few days a chance of Mr. Clode
being appointed his successor; and at that time Mrs. Hammond had
fancied she detected a shade of anxiety and excitement in her
daughter’s manner. But Mr. Clode had not been appointed, and the new
rector had come; and Laura had apparently transferred her favor from
the curate to him.

At this Mrs. Hammond had felt somewhat troubled—at first; but in a
short time she had naturally reconciled herself to the change, the
rector’s superiority as a _parti_ being indisputable. Yet still Mrs.
Hammond felt no certainty as to Laura’s real feelings, and, gazing at
her this afternoon, was as much in the dark as ever. That the girl was
fond of her she knew; indeed, it was quite a pretty sight to see the
daughter purring about the mother. But Mrs. Hammond was more than half
inclined to doubt now whether Laura was fond, or capable of being fond,
of any other human being except herself.

She sighed gently as she thought of this, and rang the bell for tea. “I
think we will have it early this afternoon,” she said, “I feel I want a
cup.”




CHAPTER XI.
THE DOCTOR SPEAKS.


The feelings with which the curate hastened on the conclusion of his
own service, to learn what had happened at the great church may be
imagined. His excitement and curiosity were not the less because he had
to hide them. If there really had been no service—if the rector had not
appeared—what a scandal, what a subject for talk was here! Even if the
rector had appeared a little late there would still be whispering; for
new brooms are expected to sweep clean. The curate composed his dark
face, and purposely made one or two sick calls at houses which lay in
his road, lest he might seem to ask the question he had to put too
pointedly. By the time he reached the rectory he had made up his mind,
judging from the absence of stir in the streets, that nothing very
unusual had happened.

“Is the rector in?” he asked the servant.

“No, sir; he has gone to the Town House to dinner,” the girl answered.

Involuntarily Mr. Clode frowned. “He was in time for service, I
suppose?” he asked, more abruptly than he had intended.

“Oh, yes, sir,” said the unconscious maid, who had not been to church.

“Thank you; that is all,” he answered, turning away. So nothing had
come of it after all! His heart was sick with disappointed hope as he
turned into his own dull lodgings; and he felt that the rector in being
in time had wronged him afresh, and by dining at the Town House had
added insult to injury.

But in the course of the day he learned how late the rector had been;
and early next morning some rumor of the triangular altercation in the
church porch also reached him—of course in an exaggerated form. As a
fact, all Claversham was by this time talking of it, Mr. Bonamy’s
companions, with one exception, having taken good care to make the most
of his success, and to paint the rebuff he had administered to the
clergyman in the deepest colors. The curate heard the news with a face
of grave concern, but with secret delight; and, turning over in his
mind what use he might make of it, came opportunely upon Gregg as the
latter was going his rounds. “Hallo!” he said, calling so loudly that
the doctor, who had turned away and would fain have retreated, could
not decently escape, “you are the very man I wanted to see! What is
this absurd story about the rector and you? There is not a word of
truth in it, I suppose?”

“I am sure I cannot say until you tell me what it is,” replied the
doctor snappishly. He was a little afraid of the curate, who had a
knack of being unpleasant without giving an opening in return.

“Why, you seem rather sore about it,” Clode remarked, with apparent
surprise.

“I do not know why I should!” sneered the doctor, his face a dark red
with anger.

“Certainly not, if there is no truth in the story,” the curate replied,
looking down with his eyes half shut at the chafing little man. “But I
suppose it is all an invention, Gregg?”

“It is not an invention that the rector was abominably rude to me,”
blurted out the doctor, who scarcely knew with whom to be most
angry—his present tormentor or the first cause of his trouble.

“Pooh!” said Clode, “it is only his way.”

“Then it is a d——, it is a most unpleasant way!” retorted the doctor
savagely.

“He means no harm,” said the curate gaily. “Why did you not answer him
back?”

Dr. Gregg’s face turned a shade redder. That was where the shoe
pinched. Why had he not answered him back as Bonamy had, and not stood
mute, acknowledging himself the smaller man? That was what was
troubling him now, and making him fancy himself the laughing-stock of
the town. “I will answer him back in a way he will not like!” he cried
viciously, striving to hide his embarrassment under a show of bluster.

“Tut-t-tut!” said the curate provokingly, “do not go and make a fool of
yourself by saying things like that, when you know you don’t mean them,
man. What can you say to the rector?”

“I will ask him——”

But what he would ask the rector was lost to the world, for at this
moment Mr. Bonamy, coming down the pavement behind him, touched his
sleeve. “I have just been to your house, doctor,” he said. “My youngest
girl is a little out of sorts. Would you mind stepping in and seeing
her?”

Gregg swallowed his wrath, and was perhaps thankful for the
interruption. He said he would; and the lawyer turned to Mr. Clode.
“Well,” he said, “so you have made up your minds to fight?”

“I am not quite sure,” said the curate, with caution—for he knew better
than to treat Mr. Bonamy as he treated Gregg—“that I take you.”

“You have not seen your principal this morning?” replied the lawyer,
with a smile which for him was almost benevolent. The prospect of a
fight was as the Mountains of Beulah to him.

“Do you mean Mr. Lindo?” said the curate, with some curtness.

The lawyer nodded. “I see you have not,” he continued. “Perhaps you do
not know that he turned the sheep out of the churchyard after breakfast
this morning, and half of them were found nearly a mile down the Red
Lane!”

“I did not know it,” said the curate gravely. But it was as much as he
could do to restrain his exultation and show no sign save of concern.

“Well, it is the fact,” the lawyer replied, rubbing his hands. “It is
quite true he gave the church wardens notice to remove them a fortnight
ago; but we did not comply, because we say it is our affair and not
his. Now you may tell him from me that the only question in my mind is
the form of action.”

“I will tell him,’ said the curate with dignity.

“Just so! What do you say, Gregg?”

But the doctor, grinning from ear to ear with satisfaction, was gone;
and the curate, not a whit less pleased in his heart, hastened to
follow his example. “Bonamy one, and Gregg two,” he said softly to
himself, “and last, but not least, one who shall be nameless, three! He
has made three enemies already, and, if those be not enough, with right
on their side, to oust him from his seat when the time comes, why, I
know nothing of odds!”

“With right on their side,” said the curate, even to himself. He had
made no second attempt to pry into the rector’s secrets or to bring
home to him a knowledge of the wrongfulness of his possession. But he
did still believe, or persuaded himself he believed, that Lindo was a
guilty man; or why should the young rector pension the old earl’s
servant? And on this ground Clode justified to himself the secret
ill-turns he was doing him. A month’s intimacy with the rector would
probably have convinced an impartial mind of his good faith. But the
curate had not, it must be remembered, an impartial mind; and we are
all very apt to believe what suits us.

To return to the little doctor, whom we left going on his way in a mood
almost hilarious. He hoped that this fresh escapade of the rector’s
would wipe out the memory of the fray in which he had himself borne so
inglorious a part. And the more he thought of it, the greater was his
admiration of the lawyer, whom he had long patronized in a timid
fashion, much as a snub-nosed King Charlie treats the butcher’s
mongrel. Now he felt a positive reverence for him. He began to think it
possible that, with all his drawbacks of birth, Mr. Bonamy might become
a personage in the town, and pretty Kate not so bad a match. The result
of these musings was that, by the time he reached the lawyer’s door, an
idea which he had first entertained on seeing the young clergyman’s
admiration for Kate Bonamy, and which he had since turned over more
than once in his mind, had become on a sudden a settled purpose. So
much so that, as the doctor rang the bell, he looked at his hands,
which were not so clean as they might have been, pished and pshawed,
settled his light-blue scarf—which the next minute rose again to the
level of his collar—and at length went in with a briskly juvenile air
and an engaging smile.

He found Daintry lying on the sofa in the dining-room down-stairs, her
head on a white bed-pillow. Kate was leaning over her. The room was in
some disorder—littered with this and that, a bottle of eau de Cologne,
Mr. Bonamy’s papers, books, and sewing; but it looked comfortable, for
it was very evidently inhabited. A fastidious eye might have thought it
was too much inhabited; and yet proofs of refinement were not wanting,
though the sofa was covered with horsehair, and the mirror was heavy
and ugly, and the grate, knee-high, was as old as the Georges. There
were flowers on the table and on the little cottage piano; and by the
side of the last was a violin-case. Not many people in Claversham knew
that Mr. Bonamy played the violin. Still fewer had heard him play, for
he never did so out of his own house.

Possibly a very particular suitor might have preferred to find Kate
attending on her sister in a boudoir, free from a lawyer’s papers,
furnished in a less solid and durable style, and with some livelier
look-out than through wire blinds upon a dull street. But another might
have thought that the office in which she was engaged, and the
gentleness of her touch and eye as she went about it, made up for all
deficiencies.

Dr. Gregg was not of a nature to appreciate either the deficiencies or
the set-off; but he had eyes for the girl’s grace and beauty, for the
neatness of the well-fitting blue gown and the white collar and cuffs;
and he shook hands with her and devoted himself to Daintry—who disliked
him extremely and was very fractious—with the most anxious solicitude.
“It is only a sick headache!” he said finally, with bluntness which was
meant for encouragement. “It is nothing, you know.”

“I wish you had it, then!” Daintry wailed, burying her face in the
pillow.

“It will be gone in the morning!” he retorted, rising and keeping his
temper by an unnatural effort. “She will be the better for it
afterward, Miss Bonamy.”

To this Daintry vouchsafed no answer, unless a muttered “Rubbish!” was
intended for one. He affected not to hear it, at any rate. He was all
good-temper this morning; the unfortunate point about this being that
his good nature was a shade more unpleasant than his usual snappish
manner.

At any rate Kate thought it so. She felt the instinctive repulsion
which the wrong man’s wooing awakens in an unspoiled girl. She was
conscious of an added dislike for the man as she held out her hand to
him at the dining-room door. But she did not divine the cause of this;
no, nor conjecture his purpose when he said in a low voice that he
wished to speak to her outside.

“May we go in here a moment?” he muttered, when the door was closed
behind them. He pointed to the room on the other side of the hall,
which Mr. Bonamy used in summer as a kind of office.

“There is no fire there,” Kate answered. “I think it has been lighted
up-stairs, however, if you will not mind coming up, Dr. Gregg. Is there
anything”—this was when he had silently followed her into the stiff
drawing-room, where the newly lit fire was rather smoking than
burning—“serious the matter with her, then?”

Her voice was steady, but her eyes betrayed the sudden anxiety his
manner had aroused in her.

“With your sister?” he answered slowly. He was really pondering how he
should say what he had come to say. But, naturally, she set down his
thoughtfulness to a professional cause.

“Yes,” she said anxiously.

“Oh, no—nothing, nothing. The truth is,” continued the doctor,
following up a happy thought and smiling approval of it, “the matter is
with me, Miss Bonamy.”

“With you!” Kate exclaimed, opening her eyes in astonishment. Her
momentary anxiety had put all else out of her head. She thought the
doctor had gone mad.

“Yes,” he said jerkily, but with a grin of tender meaning. “With me.
And you are the cause of it. Now do not be frightened, Miss Kate,” he
continued hastily, seeing her start of apprehension. “You must have
known for a long time what I was thinking of.”

“Indeed I have not,” Kate murmured in a low voice. She did not affect
to misunderstand him.

“Well, you easily might have known it then,” he retorted, forgetting
his _rôle_ for an instant. “But the long and the short of it is that I
want you to marry me. I do!” he repeated, overcoming something in his
throat, and going on from this point swimmingly. “And you will please
to hear me out, and not answer in a hurry, Miss Kate. If you like—but I
should not think that you would want it—you can have until to-morrow to
think it over.”

“No,” she replied impulsively, her face crimson. And then she shut her
mouth so suddenly, it seemed she was afraid to let anything escape it
except that unmistakable monosyllable.

“Very well,” he replied, comfortably settling his elbow upon the
mantel-shelf, “that is as you like. I hope it does not want much
thinking over myself. I will not boast that I am a rich man, but I am
decently off. I flatter myself that I can keep my head above water—and
yours, too, for the matter of that.”

“Oh, it is not that,” she began hurriedly.

He interrupted her. “No, no,” he said jocularly—-his last remarks had
put him into a state of considerable self-satisfaction, and he no more
thought it possible that she could or would refuse him than that the
sky could fall—“do not buy a pig in a poke! Hear me out first, Miss
Kate, and we shall start fair. You have been in my house, and, if it is
not quite so large a house as this, I will answer for it you will find
it a great deal more lively. You will see people you have never seen
here, nor will see while your name is Bonamy. You will have—well,
altogether a better time. Not that I mind myself,” the doctor added
rather vaguely, forgetting the French proverb about those who excuse
themselves, “what your name is, not I! So don’t you think you could say
Yes at once, my dear?”

He took a step nearer, thinking he had put it rather neatly and without
any nonsense. Possibly, from his point of view of things, he had. But
Kate fell back, nevertheless, as he advanced.

“Oh, no,” she said, flushing painfully. “I could not! I could not
indeed, Dr. Gregg! I am very sorry.”

“Come, come,” he said, holding out his hand, his tone one of pleasant
raillery. He had looked for some hanging back, some show of coyness and
bashfulness, and was prepared to laugh in his sleeve at it—“I think you
can, Kate. I think it is possible.” That it was in woman’s nature to
say No to his comfortable home and the little lift in society he had to
offer—it is only little lifts we appreciate, just up the next floor
above us—he did not believe.

But Kate soon undeceived him. “I am afraid it is not possible,” she
said firmly. “Indeed, I may say at once, Dr. Gregg, that it is out of
the question what you ask; though I thank you, I am sure.”

His face fell ludicrously, and his thick black brows drew together in a
very ominous fashion. But he still could not believe that she meant it.
“I do not think you understand,” he said, “that the house is ready, and
the furniture and servants, and there is nothing to prevent you
stepping into it all whenever you please. I will take you away from
this,” he continued, darting a scornful glance round the stiff chilly
room—“I do not suppose that ten people enter this room in the
twelvemonth—and I will show you something like life. It is an offer not
many would make you. Come, Kate, do not be a little fool! You are not
going to say No, so say Yes at once. And don’t let us shilly-shally!”

He had put out his hand as he spoke and captured hers. But she snatched
it from him again almost roughly, and stepped back. The right man might
have used the words the doctor used, and might have scolded her with
impunity, but not the wrong one. Her face, perplexed and troubled a
moment before, grew decided enough now. “I am going to say No,
nevertheless, Dr. Gregg,” she replied firmly. “I thought I had already
said it. I will be as plain as you have been. I do not like you as a
wife should like her husband, nor otherwise than as a friend.”

“A friend!” he exclaimed. He gasped as a man does who has been plunged
suddenly into cold water. His face was red with anger, and his little
black eyes glared at her banefully. “Oh, bother your friendship!” he
added violently. “I did not ask you for that!”

“I have nothing else to give you,” she replied coldly.

He gasped again. Refused by the Bonamy girl! He had never thought of
this. He was beside himself with astonishment and anger, with
disappointment and wounded pride. “You would not have said this a month
ago!” he cried at last. “It was a pity I did not ask you then!”

“I should have given you the same answer.”

“Oh, no,” he replied ironically, swinging his hat to and fro. “Oh, no,
you would not—not at all, Miss Bonamy. You would have sung to a very
different tune if I had whistled to you before this niminy-piminy
parson showed his face here! Do not think that I am such a fool as not
to see which way the wind is blowing.”

She stood looking at him in silence. But her face was scarlet, and her
hand shook with rage.

He saw it. “Pooh! do not think to frighten me!” he said coarsely. “When
a man has offered to marry you he has a right to speak his mind! It
will be a long time, I warrant you, before your parson will have the
same right to speak. He was very great with you once, but he has quite
another set of friends now, and I have not heard of him offering to
introduce you to them.”

“Will you go, Dr. Gregg?” she cried passionately, pointing to the door.
His taunts were torture to her. “Will you go, or do you wish to stay
and insult me further?”

“I wish to say one thing, and I am going to say it,” he replied,
nodding triumphantly. “You are pretty proud of your capture, but you
need not be. He will not be much of a match when we have stripped him
of the living he has no right to, and shown him the detected swindler
he is! Wait! Wait a little, Miss Bonamy, and when your parson is
ruined, as he will be before three months are out, high as he holds his
head now, perhaps you will be sorry that you did not take my offer.
Why,” he added scornfully, “I should say you are the only person in the
parish who does not know he has no more right where he is than I have.”

“Go!” she said, pointing to the door. Her face was white now.

“So I will when I have said one more word——”

“You won’t say it!” cried a sharp voice behind him. “You will go now!”
He shot round, and there was Daintry with her hand on the door. Her
hair was in disorder, her cheeks were flushed, her greenish-gray eyes
were aglow with anger. He saw that she had overheard something of what
had passed, and he began to tremble. He had said more than he intended.
“You will go now, as Kate tells you,” she cried, “I will not have——”

“Leave the room, child!” he snarled, stamping his foot.

“I shan’t!” she retorted fiercely. “And if you do not go before I count
three I will fetch the dogs.”

Dr. Gregg made a movement as if he would have put her out of the room.
But her presence had a little sobered him, and he stopped. “Look here,”
he said.

“One!” cried Daintry, who knew well that the doctor had a particular
dislike for Snorum, and that the dog’s presence was at any time enough
to drive him from the house.

He turned and looked at Kate. She had gone to the window and was gazing
out, her back to him, her figure proud and scornful. “Miss Bonamy,” he
said.

“Two!” cried Daintry. “Are you going, or shall I fetch Snorum?”

With a muttered oath he took up his hat and went down the stairs and
out into the street. There at the door he stood a moment, grinding his
teeth, as the full sense of the calamity which had befallen him came
home to him. He had stooped and been rejected—had been rejected by
Bonamy’s daughter. He walked away, and still his anger did not
decrease, but all the same he began to be a little thankful that the
child had interrupted him. Had he gone on he might have said too much.
As it was, he had an idea that perhaps he had said more than was quite
prudent. And this had presently a wonderful effect in the way of
sobering him.




CHAPTER XII.
THE RECTOR IS UNGRATEFUL.


It was tea-time at Mr. Bonamy’s; five-thirty, that is, for the lawyer
knew nothing of four o’clock tea. He would have stared had he been
invited into the drawing-room to take it, or had his daughters produced
one of those dainty afternoon tea-tables which were in use at the Town
House, and asked him to support his cup and saucer on his knee.
Compromises found no favor with him. Tea was a meal—he had always so
considered it; and he liked to have the dining-room table laid for it.
Possibly Kate, had she enjoyed more of her own way, would have altered
this, as she would certainly have reformed the drawing-room. But Mr.
Bonamy, who was in many things an indulgent father, was conservative in
some. Four o’clock tea, and a daily use of the drawing-room, were
refinements which he had always regarded as peculiar to a certain set;
and in his pride he would not appear to ape its ways or affect to
belong to it.

Almost to the moment he came into the room, which was as bright and
cheerful as gaslight and firelight could make it. Laying some letters
under a weight on the mantel-shelf, he turned round and stood with his
back to the fire-place. “How is the child?” he asked. “Has she gone to
bed?”

“Yes,” Kate answered, lifting the lid of the teapot and looking in; “I
think she will be all right after a night’s rest.”

“You do not look very bright yourself, Kate,” he remarked, as he sat
down.

Her cheek flushing, she made the old old woman’s excuse. “I have a
little headache,” she said. “It will be better when I have had my tea.”

He took a piece of toast and buttered it deliberately. “Gregg came and
saw her?” he asked.

“Yes. He said it was only a sick headache, and would pass off.”

The lawyer made no comment at the moment, but went on eating his toast.
But presently he looked up. “What is the matter, Kitty?” he said, not
unkindly.

Her face burning, she peered again quite unnecessarily into the teapot.
Then she said hurriedly, “I have something I think I ought to tell you,
father. Dr. Gregg has asked me to marry him!”

“The deuce he has!” Mr. Bonamy answered in unmistakable surprise. For a
moment he did not know what to say, or how to feel about it. If any one
had informed the Claversham people that the lawyer’s moroseness was not
natural to the man, but the product of many slights, the informant
would have lost his pains. Yet in a great measure this was so; and
first among the things which of late years had exercised Mr. Bonamy a
keen anxiety for his daughters’ happiness had place. He had never made
any move toward procuring them the society of their equals; nay, he had
done many things in his pride calculated rather to prolong their
exclusion. Yet all the time he had bitterly resented it, and had spent
many a wakeful night in pondering gloomily over the dull lives to which
they were condemned. Now—strange that he had never thought of it
before—as far as Kate was concerned, he saw a way of escape opening.
Gregg had a fair practice, some private means, a good house, a
tolerable position in the town. In a word, he was perfectly eligible.
Yet Mr. Bonamy was not altogether pleased. He had no fastidious
objection to the doctor. It did not occur to him that the doctor was
not a gentleman. But he did know that he did not like him.

So the lawyer, after one exclamation of surprise, was for a moment
silent. Then he asked, “Well Kate, and what did you say?”

“I said No,” Kate answered in a low voice.

“He is a well-to-do man,” Mr. Bonamy said, slowly stirring his tea.
“Not that you need think of that only. But you are not likely to know
many people who could make you more comfortable. I believe he is
skilful in his profession. It is a chance, girl, not to be lightly
thrown away.”

“I could not—I could not marry him,” Kate stammered, her agitation now
very apparent. “I do not like him. You would not have me——”

“I would not have you marry any one you do not like!” Mr. Bonamy
replied, almost sternly. “But are you sure that you know your own
mind?”

“Quite,” Kate said, with a shudder.

“Hum! Well, well; there is no more to be said, then,” he answered.
“Don’t cry, girl.”

Kate managed to obey him. And in a moment, bravely steadying her voice,
she asked, “What is this about Mr. Lindo, father? I heard that he had
turned the sheep out of the churchyard.”

The lawyer thought she asked the question in order to change the
subject; and he answered briskly, with less reserve perhaps than he
might have exercised at another time. “It is quite true,” he said. “He
is making a fool of himself, as I expected. You cannot put old heads on
young shoulders. However, what has happened has convinced me of one
thing.”

“What is that?” she asked in a low voice.

“That he does not know himself that he has no right here.”

“But has he none?” she murmured, in the same tone. He noticed that her
manner was conscious and embarrassed; but naturally he set this down to
the former topic. He thought she was trying to avoid a scene, and he
admired her for it.

“Well, I doubt if he has,” he answered, “though I am not quite sure
that people have not lit upon a mare’s nest. It is the talk of the town
that there was some mistake in his presentation, and there is a
disreputable fellow hanging on his heels, and apparently living on him,
who is said to be in the secret, and to be making the most of it. I do
not believe that now, however,” the lawyer continued, falling into a
brown study and speaking as much to himself as to her. “If he knew he
were insecure he would live more quietly than he does. All the same, he
is likely to learn a lesson he will not forget.”

“How?” she asked, her spoon tinkling tremulously against the side of
the cup, and her head bent low over it, as though she saw something
interesting in the lees.

Mr. Bonamy laughed in his out-of-door manner. “How?” he said grimly.
“Well, if there be any mistake he is going the right way to suffer by
it. If he kept quiet, and went softly, and made no enemies, very little
might be said and nothing done when the mistake came out. But as it
is—well, he has made a good many enemies, and the chances are that he
will lose the best berth he will ever get into. It will be bad for him,
but the better for the parish.”

“Don’t you think,” said Kate very gently, “that he means well?”

Mr. Bonamy grunted. “Perhaps so; but he does not go the right way to do
it,” he rejoined. “His good fortune has turned his head, and he has put
himself in the hands of the Hammond set, and that does not do at
Claversham.” The lawyer ended with a harsh laugh, which said more
plainly than any words, that it never would do while John Bonamy was
church warden at Claversham.

“It seems a pity,” Kate said, almost under her breath. She had never
raised her eyes from the tea-tray since the subject was introduced, and
if her father had looked closely he would have seen that her very ears
were scarlet. “Could you not give him a word of warning?”

“I!” said the lawyer, with asperity. “Certainly not; why should I?”

Kate did not say, and her father, with another impatient word or two,
rose from the table, and presently went out. She rang the bell
mechanically and had the table cleared, and in the same mood turned to
the fire and, putting her feet on the fender, began to brood over the
coals, which were burning red and low in the grate.

Five times—five times only, counting the Oxford escapade as one, she
had spoken to him; and they—“they” meant Claversham, for it was her
chief misery to believe that the whole town was talking of her—had made
this of it! They had noticed his attentions, and had seen them
scornfully withdrawn when he learned who she was. Oh, it was cowardly
of him—cowardly! And yet—and yet—so her thoughts ran, taking a fresh
turn—had he ever said a word or cast a glance at her which meant
anything—which all the world might not have heard and seen? No, never.
And, with that, her anger changed its course and ran against Gregg. Him
she would never forgive. It was his evil imagination, his base
suspicions, which had built it all up; and Mr. Lindo was no more to
blame—though she a little despised him for his weakness and
conventionality—than she was herself.

It seemed most sad that he should be ruined because no one would say a
word to warn him. Brooding over the fire, she felt a girl’s pity for
the young man’s ill-fortune. She forgot the last month, during which
she had spoken to him but once—and then he had seemed embarrassed and
anxious to be gone—and remembered only how frank and gay he had been in
the first blush of his hopes at Oxford, how pleasantly he had smiled,
how well and yet how quaintly his new dignity had sat upon him, and how
naïvely he had shaken it off at times and shown himself a boy, with a
boy’s love of fun and mischief. Or, again, she remembered how
thoughtful he had been for them, how considerate, how much at home in
scenes new to them, with how lordly an air he had provided for their
comfort. Oh, it was a pity—a grievous pity, that his hopes should end
in such a disaster as Mr. Bonamy foretold! And all because no one would
say a friendly word to him!

The next day (Tuesday) was a wet day—a sleety, blusterous winter day,
and she did not go out. But on the Wednesday, as the rector crossed the
churchyard after reading the Litany, he saw Miss Bonamy passing his
door. He fancied, with a little astonishment—for she had constantly
evinced the same avoidance of intimacy with him which had at first
piqued him—that she slightly checked her pace so as to meet him. And,
to tell the truth, the rector was half pleased and half annoyed. He had
hardened his heart and set his face to crush Mr. Bonamy.

He had in his pocket a letter from the lawyer, warning him that, unless
he altered his course, a writ would be served upon him. And a dozen
times to-day he had in his mind called the church warden hard names.
But yet he was not absolutely ill-pleased to see Miss Bonamy. He felt a
certain excitement in the _rencontre_ under the circumstances. He would
meet her magnanimously, and of course she would ignore the quarrel. He
hated Mr. Bonamy for a puritanical old pettifogger; but that was no
reason why he should be rude to his daughter.

Lindo saw, when he was a few paces from her and had raised his hat,
that her face expressed much more emotion, if not embarrassment, than
seemed to be called for by the occasion. And naturally this
communicated itself to him. “I have not seen you for a long time,” he
said, as he shook hands. Perhaps the worst thing he could have said
under the circumstances.

She assented, however. “No,” she said, sloping her umbrella behind her
so as to keep off the wind and a half-frozen drizzle with which it was
laden. And, as she did this, her eyes met his gallantly. “But I am
glad, Mr. Lindo,” she continued, “that I have met you to-day, because I
have something I want to say to you.”

On the instant he vowed within himself that it would be in bad taste,
in the worst taste, if she referred to the quarrel or to parish
matters. And he answered very frigidly. “What is that, Miss Bonamy?” he
said. “Pray speak on.”

She detected the change of tone, and for a second her gray eyes
flashed. But she had come to say something. She had counted the cost,
and nothing he could do should prevent her saying it. She had been
awake all night, torturing herself with imagining the things he would
think of her. But she was not to be deterred by the reality. “Do you
know, Mr. Lindo,” she said steadily, “what is being said of you in the
town?”

“A good many hard things.” he answered half lightly and half bitterly.
“So I have reason to believe. But I do not think that they will affect
me one way or the other, Miss Bonamy.”

“And so,” she answered, with spirit, “you will not thank any one for
telling you of them? That is what you mean, is it not?”

He was very sore, and her interference annoyed him excessively—possibly
because he valued her good opinion. He would not deny the feeling she
imputed to him. “Possibly I do mean something of that kind,” he said.
“Where ignorance is bliss—you know.”

“Yet there is one thing,” she replied, “being said of you in the town,
which I think you should be told, Mr. Lindo. Your friends probably will
not hear it, or, if they do, they will not venture to tell you of it.”

“Indeed,” he answered. “You pique my curiosity.”

“It is being commonly said,” she rejoined, looking down for the first
time, “that you have no right to the living, and were appointed by some
mistake, or—or fraud.”

He did not answer her at once. He was so completely taken by surprise
that he stood looking at her with his mouth open. His first and better
impulse was to laugh heartily. But what he did was to say in a very
quiet way, “Indeed. That is being said, is it? It is quite true I had
not heard it. May I ask, Miss Bonamy, if you had it from your father?”

If his tone had been cold before, it was freezing now. But she was not
to be daunted, and she answered with considerable presence of mind, “I
heard from my father that that was the report in the town, but I also
heard him express his disbelief in the greater part of it.”

“I am much obliged to him,” said the rector through his closed teeth.
“He did not think I had been guilty of fraud, then?”

“No, he did not,” Kate muttered, her voice faltering for the first
time.

“Indeed. I am much obliged to him.”

He had received it even worse than she had expected. It was terrible to
go on in the face of such scorn and incredulity. But to stop there was
to have done only evil, as Kate knew, and she persevered. “I have one
more thing I wish to say, if you will permit me,” she continued
steadying her voice and striving to speak in as indifferent a manner as
possible.

He bowed, his face hard and contemptuous.

The wind had shifted slightly, and, to protect herself from the small
rain which was falling, she changed her position, so as to face the
churchyard. He saw only her profile. If he looked proud, involuntarily
he remarked how proud she looked also—how pure and cold was the line of
her features, softened only by the roundness of her chin. “I am told,”
she said in a low voice, “that the fewer enemies you make, and the more
quietly you proceed, the greater will be the chance of your remaining
when the mistake is found out. Pray,” she said more sharply, for he had
raised his hand, as if to interrupt, “have patience for a moment, Mr.
Lindo. I shall not trouble you again. I only wish you to know that
those who have cause to dislike you—I do not mean my father, there are
others—are congratulating themselves that you are playing into their
hands, and consider that every disagreement between you and any part of
the parish is a weapon given them, to be used when the crisis comes.”

“When the mistake is found out?” he said, grimly repeating her words.
“Or the fraud? But I forgot—Mr. Bonamy does not believe in that!”

“You understand me, I think,” she said, ignoring the latter part of his
speech.

“And may I ask,” he continued, his eyes on her face, “who my
ill-wishers are?”

“I do not think that matters,” she replied.

“Then, at least, why am I indebted to you for this warning?”

His tone as he asked the question was as contemptuous as before. And
yet Kate felt that this she must answer. To refuse to answer it, or to
evade it, would be to lay herself open to surmises of all kinds.

“I thought it a pity that you should fall into a trap unwarned,” she
answered, looking away at the yew-trees. “And it seemed to me that, for
several reasons, your friends were not likely to warn you.”

“There, I quite agree with you,” he retorted quickly. “My friends would
not have believed in the trap.”

“Perhaps not,” she said, outwardly unmoved.

“I am astonished that you did; I am astonished that you should have
believed anything so absurd, Miss Bonamy!” he said severely. At that
moment, as it happened, two people came round the flank of the church.
The one was the curate; the other was Dr. Gregg. Kate looked at them,
and her face flamed. The rector looked, and felt only relief. They
would afford him an excuse to be gone. “Ah, there is Mr. Clode,” he
said indifferently. “I was just looking for him. I think, if you will
excuse me, Miss Bonamy, I will seize the opportunity of speaking to him
now.” And raising his hat, with a formality which one of the men took
to be a pretence and a sham, he left her and walked across to them.




CHAPTER XIII.
LAURA’S PROVISO.


When a mine has been laid, and the fuse lit, and the tiny thread of
smoke has begun to curl upward, it is apt to seem a long time—so I am
told by those who have stood and watched such things—before the earth
flies into the air. So it seemed to Stephen Clode. The curate looked to
see an explosion follow immediately upon the rector taking the decisive
step of turning out the sheep. But week after week elapsed, until
Christmas was some time gone, and nothing happened. Mr. Bonamy, with a
lawyer’s prudence, wrote another letter, and for a time, perhaps out of
regard to the season, held his hand. There was talk of Lord Dynmore’s
return, but no sign of it as yet. And Dr. Gregg snapped and snarled
among his intimates, but in public was pretty quiet.

It was noticeable, however, that the rector was invited to none of the
whist-parties which were a feature of the town life at this season; and
to those who looked closely into things and listened to the gossip of
the place it was plain that the breach between him and the bulk of his
parishioners was growing wider. The rector was much with the Hammonds,
and carried his head high—higher than ever, one of his parishioners
thought since a talk she had had with him in the churchyard. The habit
of looking down upon a certain section of the town, because they were
not quite so refined as himself, because they were narrow in their
opinions, or because the Hammonds looked down upon them, was growing
upon him. And he yielded to it none the less because he was all the
time dissatisfied with himself. He was conscious that he was not acting
up to the standard he had set himself on coming to the town. He was not
living the life he had hoped to live. He visited his poor and gave
almost too largely in the hard weather, and was diligent at services
and sermon-writing. But there was a flaw in his life, and he knew it;
and yet he had not the strength to set it right.

All this Mr. Clode might have observed—he was sagacious enough; but for
the time his judgment was clouded by his jealousy, and in his
impatience he fancied that the rector’s troubles were passing away.
Each visit Lindo paid to the Town House, each time his name was coupled
with Laura Hammond’s, as people were be

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39215