Part 9 (1/2)

”No, no,” he said, ”I am putting you out. If you were going to the post, pray go. You can leave me here and come back to me, if that be all.”

The rector hesitated, his letters in his hand. He might send Sarah. But it wanted a few minutes only of nine o'clock, and, besides, he did not approve of the maids going out so late. ”Well, I think I will do as you say,” he answered, feeling that compliance was perhaps the truest politeness; ”if you are sure that you do not mind.”

”I beg you will,” the curate said warmly.

The cup and saucer being at that moment brought in, the rector nodded a.s.sent. ”Very well; I shall not be two minutes,” he said. ”Take care of yourself while I am away.”

The curate, left alone, muttered, ”No, you will be at least four minutes, my friend!” and waited, with his cup poised, until he heard the outer door closed. Then he set it down. a.s.suring himself by a steady look that the windows were shuttered, he rose and, quietly crossing the room, as a man might who wished to examine a book, he stood before the little cupboard among the shelves. Perhaps, because he had done the thing before, he did not hesitate. His hand was as steady as it had ever been. If it shook at all it was with eagerness. His task was so easy and so devoid of danger, under the circ.u.mstances, that he even smiled darkly, as he set the key in the lock, at the thought of the more clumsy burglar whom he had detected there. He turned the key and opened the door. Nothing could be more simple. The packet he wanted lay just where he had looked to find it. He took it out and dropped it into his breast-pocket, and, long before the time which he had given himself was up, was back in his chair by the fire, with his coffee-cup on his knee.

He might have been expected to feel some surprise at his own coolness. But, as a fact, his thoughts were otherwise employed. He was longing, with intense eagerness, for the moment when he might take the next step--when he might open the packet and secure the weapon he needed. He fingered the letters as they lay in their hiding place, and could scarcely refrain from taking them out and examining them there and then. When Lindo returned, and broke into the room with a hearty word about the haste he had made, the curate's answer betrayed no self-consciousness. On the contrary, he rather underplayed his part, his eye and voice being for, a moment so absent as to surprise his host. The next instant he was aware of this, and conducted himself so warily during the half-hour he remained that he entirely erased from the rector's mind the unlucky impression of the afternoon.

By half-past nine he was back in his own room, at his table, his hat thrown this way, his umbrella that. It took him but a feverish moment to turn up the lamp and settle himself in his chair. Then he took out the packet of letters, and, untying the string which bound them together, he opened the first--there were only six of them in all. This was the one which he had partially read on the former occasion--Messrs. Gearns & Baker's first letter. He read it through now at his leisure, without interruption, once, twice, thrice, and with a long breath laid it down again, and sat gazing, with knitted brows, into the shadow beyond the lamp's influence. There was not a word in it, not an expression, which helped him; nothing to show the recipient that he was not the Reginald Lindo for whom the living was intended.

The curate sat awhile before he opened the second, and that one he read more quickly. He dealt in the same way with the next, and the next. When, in a short minute or two, he had read them all and they lay in a disordered pile before him--some folded and some unfolded, just as they had dropped from his hands--he leaned back in his chair, and, folding his arms, sat frowning darkly into vacancy. There was not a word to help him in any one of them, not a sentence which even tended to convict the rector. He had been at all his pains for nothing. He had---- The sound of a raised voice asking for him below, and the hasty tread of a foot mounting the stairs two at a time, roused him with a start from the dream of disappointment. In a second he was erect, motionless, and listening, his hand upon and half covering the letters. A hasty knock on the outside of his door, and the touch of fingers on the handle, seemed at the last moment to nerve him to action. It was all but too late. As the rector came hurriedly into the room, the curate, his face pallid, and the drops of perspiration standing on his brow, swept the letters aside and drew a newspaper partly over them. ”What--what is it?” he muttered, stooping forward, his hands on the table.

The rector was too full of the news he had brought to observe the other's agitation, the more as the lamp was between them, and his eyes were dazzled by the light. ”Why, what do you think Bonamy has done?” he answered excitedly, as he closed the door behind him. He was breathing quickly with the haste he had made, and, uninvited, he dropped into a chair.

”What?” said the curate hoa.r.s.ely. He dared not look down at the table lest he should direct the other's eyes to what lay there, but he was racked as he stood there with the fear that some d.a.m.ning corner of the paper, some sc.r.a.p of the writing, should still be visible. The shame of possible discovery poured like a flood over his soul. ”What is it?” he repeated mechanically. He had not yet recovered enough presence of mind to wonder why the rector should have paid this untimely call.

”He has served me with a writ!” Lindo replied, his face hot with haste and indignation, his lips curling. ”At this hour of the night, too! A writ for trespa.s.s in driving out the sheep from the churchyard.”

”A writ!” the curate echoed. ”It is very late for serving writs.”

”Yes. His clerk, who handed it to me--he came five minutes after you left--apologized, and took the blame for that on himself, saying he had forgotten to deliver it on leaving the office.”

”For trespa.s.s!” said the curate stupidly. What a fool he had been to meddle with those letters! Why had he not had a little patience? Here, after all, was the catastrophe for which he had been longing.

”Yes, in the Queen's Bench Division, and all the rest of it!” replied the rector; and then he waited to hear what the curate had to say.

But Clode had nothing to say, except ”What shall you do?”

”Fight!” replied Lindo briskly, getting up and approaching the table. ”That of course. And it was about that I came to you. I do not think there is any lawyer here I should like to employ. Did not you tell me the other day who the archdeacon's were? Some people in Birmingham, I think?”

”I think I did,” the curate answered. He had overcome his first fear, and, as he spoke, looked down at the table, on which he was still leaning. His hasty movement had disordered his own papers, but none of the tell-tale letters were visible so far as he could see. But what if the rector took up the newspaper? Or casually put it aside? The curate grew hot again, despite his great self-control. He felt himself on the edge of a precipice down which he dared not cast his eye.

”Well, can you give me their address?” the rector continued.

”Certainly!” the curate answered. Indeed he leapt at the suggestion, for it seemed to offer some chance of escape--at least a way by which he might rid himself of his visitor.

”Just write it down, that is a good fellow, then,” said the rector, unconscious of what was pa.s.sing in his mind.

The curate said he would, and tore off at random---the rector was leaning his hand on the newspaper, and might at any moment be taken with a fancy to raise it--the back sheet of the first stray note that came to his fingers, and wrote the address upon it. ”There, that is it,” he said; and as he gave it to Lindo--he had written it standing up and stooping--he almost pushed him away from the table. ”That will serve you, I think. They may be trusted, I am told. The best you can do, I am sure, will be to place the matter in their hands at once.”

”I will write before I sleep!” the younger clergyman answered heartily. ”You cannot think how the narrowness of these people provokes me! But I will not keep you now. I see you are busy. Come round early in the morning, will you, and talk it over?”

”I will come the moment I have had breakfast,” the curate answered, making no attempt to detain his visitor.

The rector thereupon going, he stood eyeing the newspaper askance until the other's footsteps died away on the pavement outside. Then he swept it off and stood contemplating the half-dozen letters with abhorrence. He loathed and detested them. They had suddenly become to him such an incubus as his victim's body becomes to the murderer. The desire which had tempted him to the crime was gone, and he felt them only as a burden. They were the visible proof of his shame. To keep them was to become a thief, and yet he shrank with a nervous terror quite new and strange to him from the task of returning them--of going to the study at the rectory and putting them back in the cupboard. It had been easy to get possession of them; but to return them seemed a task so thankless, and withal so perilous, that he quailed before it. With shaking hands he bundled them together and locked them in the lowest drawer of his writing table. He would return them to-morrow.

CHAPTER XV.

THE BAZAAR.

Long before noon on the next day the service of the writ at the rectory was pretty well known in the town, and the course which the churchwardens had taken was freely canva.s.sed in more houses than one. But they had on their side all the advantages of prescription, while of the rector people said that there was no smoke without fire, and that he would not have become the subject of so many comments and strictures, and the centre of more than one dispute, without being in fault. There had been none of these squabbles in old Mr. Williams's time, they said. Tongues had not wagged about him. But then, they added, he had not aspired to drive tandem with the Homfrays! The town had been good enough for him. He had not wanted to have everything his own way, or thought himself a little Jupiter in the place. His head had not been turned by a little authority conferred too early, and conferred, if all the town heard was true, in some very odd and unsatisfactory manner.

To know that all round you people are saying that your conceit has led you into trouble is not pleasant. And in one way and another this impression was brought home to the young rector more than once during these days, so that his cheek flamed as he pa.s.sed the window of the reading-room, or caught the half-restrained sniggle in which Gregg ventured to indulge when in company. Nor were these annoyances all Lindo had to bear. The archdeacon scolded him roundly for placing the matter in the hands of the lawyers without consulting him. Mrs. Hammond looked grave. Laura seemed less friendly than a while back. Clode's conduct was odd, too, and unsatisfactory. He was sometimes enthusiastic and loyal enough, ready to back up his superior as warmly as could be wished, and anon he would show himself the reverse of all this--sullen, repellent, and absolutely unsympathetic.

So that the rector was not having a very sunny time, albeit the heat of conflict kept him warm; and he threw back his head and set his fair pleasant face very hard as he strode about the town, his long-tailed black coat flapping behind him. He hugged himself more than ever on the one thing which his opponents could not take from him. When all was said and done, he must still be rector of Claversham. If his promotion had not brought him as much happiness as he had expected, if he had not been able to do in his new position all he had hoped, the promotion and the position were yet undeniable. Knowing so well all the circ.u.mstances of his appointment, he never gave two thoughts to the curious story Kate Bonamy had told him. He was sorry that he had treated her so cavalierly, and more than once he had thought with a regret almost tender of the girl and the interview. But, for the rest, he treated it as the ignorant invention of the enemy. Possibly on the strength of certain 'Varsity prejudices he was a little too p.r.o.ne to exaggerate the ignorance of Claversham.

On the day before the bazaar a visitor arrived in Claversham, in the shape of a small, dark, sharp-featured man, with a peculiarly alert manner, whom the reader will remember to have met in the Temple. Jack Smith, for he it was--we parted from him last at Euston Station--may have come over on his own motion, or acting upon a hint from Mr. Bonamy, who, since the refusal of Gregg's offer, had thought more and more of the future which lay before his girls. The house had seemed more and more dull, not to him as himself, but to him considering it in the night-watches through their eyes. Hitherto the lawyer had not encouraged the young Londoner's visits, perhaps because he dreaded the change in his way of life he might be forced to make. But now, whether he had given him a hint to come or not, he received him with undoubted cordiality.

Almost the first question Jack asked, Daintry hanging over the back of his chair and Kate smiling in more subdued radiance opposite him, was about his friend, the rector. Fortunately, Mr. Bonamy was not in the room. ”And how about Lindo?” he asked. ”Have you seen much of him, Kate?”

”No, we have not seen much of him,” she answered, getting up to put something straight which was not much awry before.

”Father has served him with a writ, though,” Daintry explained, nodding her head seriously.

Jack whistled. ”A writ!” he exclaimed. ”What about?”

”About the sheep in the churchyard. Mr. Lindo turned them out,” Kate explained hurriedly, as if she wished to hear no more upon the subject.

But Jack was curious; and gradually he drew from them the story of the rector's iniquities, and acquired, in the course of it, a pretty correct notion of the state of things in the parish. He whistled still more seriously then. ”It seems to me that the old man has been putting his foot in it here,” he said.

”He has,” Daintry answered solemnly, nodding any number of times. ”No end!”

”And yet he is the very best of fellows,” Jack replied, rubbing his short black hair in honest vexation. ”Don't you like him?”

”I did,” said Daintry, speaking for both of them.

”And you do not now?”

The child reddened, and rubbed herself shyly against Kate's chair. ”Well, not so much!” she murmured, Jack's eyes upon her. ”He is too big a swell for us.”

”Oh, that is it, is it?” Jack said contemptuously.

He pressed it no farther, and appeared to have forgotten the subject; but presently, when he was alone with Kate, he recurred to it. ”So, Lindo has been putting on airs, has he?” he observed. ”Yet, I thought when Daintry wrote to me, after you left us, that she seemed to like him.”

”He was very kind and pleasant to us on our journey,” Kate answered, compelling herself to speak with indifference. ”But--well, you know, my father and he have not got on well; so, of course, we have seen little of him lately.”

”Oh, that is all, is it?” Jack answered, moving restlessly in his chair.

”That is all,” said Kate quietly.

This seemed to satisfy Jack, for at tea he surprised her--and, for Daintry, she fairly leapt in her seat--by calmly announcing that he proposed to call on the rector in the course of the evening. ”You have no objection, sir, I hope,” he said, coolly looking across at his host. ”He has been a friend of mine for years, and though I hear you and he are at odds at present, it seems to me that that need not make mischief between us.”

”N--no,” said Mr. Bonamy slowly. ”I do not see why it should.” Nevertheless, he was greatly astonished. He had heard that Jack and Mr. Lindo were acquainted, but had thought nothing of it. It is possible that the discovery of this friends.h.i.+p existing between the two led him to take new views of the rector. He continued, ”I dare say in private he is not an objectionable man.”