Part 15 (1/2)

The Archdeacon shuddered. He dropped his napkin and picked it up again, to hide his dismay. Then he plunged into a fresh subject. When his son upon some excuse left him early, he was glad to be alone. He had now a course laid down for him, and acting upon it, he next day saw the landlady in Sidmouth Street and requested her to take charge of the young lady in the event of the mother's death and to guard her from intrusion until other arrangements could be made. ”You will look to me for all expenses,” the Archdeacon added, seizing with eagerness the only ground on which he felt himself at home. To which the landlady gladly said she would, and accepted Mr. Yale's address at the Athenaeum Club as a personal favour to herself.

So the Archdeacon, free for the moment, went down to Studbury, and as he walked about his shrubberies with the scent of his wife's old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers in the air, or sat drinking his gla.s.s of Leoville '74 after dinner while Vinnells the butler, anxious to get to his supper, rattled the spoons on the sideboard, he tried to believe it a dream. What, he wondered, would Vinnells say if he knew that master had a ward, and that ward a play-actress? Or, as Studbury would prefer to style her, a painted Jezebel? And what would Mrs. Yale say, who loved lavender, and had seen a ballet--once? Was Archdeacon ever, he asked himself, in a position so--so anomalous before?

”My dear,” his wife remarked when he had read his letters one morning, a week or two later, ”I am sure you are not well. I have noticed that you have not been yourself since you were in London.”

”Nonsense,” he replied tartly.

”It is not nonsense. There is something preying on your mind. I believe,” she persisted, ”it is that visitation, Cyprian, that is troubling you.”

”Visitation? What visitation?” he asked incautiously. For indeed he had forgotten all about that very important business, and could think only of a visitation more personal to himself. Before his wife could hold up her hands in astonishment, ”What visitation! indeed!” he had escaped into the open air. Mrs. Kent was dead.

Yes, the blow had fallen; but the first shock over, things were made easy for him. He wrote to his ward as soon after the funeral as seemed decent, and her answer pleased him greatly. Ready as he was to scent misbehaviour in the air, he thought it a proper letter, a good girl's letter. She did not deny his right to give advice. She had not, she said, seen the gentleman he mentioned since her mother's death, although Mr. Charles Williams--that was his name--had called several times. But she had given him an appointment for the following Tuesday, and was willing that Mr. Yale should see him on that occasion.

All this in a formal and precise way; but there was something in the tone of her reference to Mr. Williams which led the Archdeacon to smile. ”She is over head and ears in love,” he thought. And in his reply, after saying that he would be in Sidmouth Street on Tuesday at the hour named, he added that if there appeared to be nothing against Mr. Charles Williams he, the Archdeacon, would have pleasure in forwarding his ward's happiness.

”I am going to London to-morrow, my dear, for two nights,” he said to his wife on the Sunday evening. ”I have some business there.”

Mrs. Yale sat silent for a moment, as if she had not heard. Then she laid down her book and folded her hands. ”Cyprian,” she said, ”what is it?”

The Archdeacon was fussing with his pile of sermons and did not turn.

”What is what, my dear?” he asked.

”Why are you going to London?”

”On business, my dear; business,” he said lightly.

”Yes, but what business?” replied Mrs. Yale with decision. ”Cyprian, you are keeping something from me; you were not used to have secrets from me. Tell me what it is.”

But he remained obstinately silent. He would not tell a lie, and he could not tell the truth.

”Is it about Jack?” with sudden conviction. ”I know what it is; he has entangled himself with some girl!”

The Archdeacon laughed oddly. ”You ought to know your son better by this time, my dear. He is about as likely to entangle himself with a girl as--as I am.”

But Mrs. Yale shook her head unconvinced. The Archdeacon was a landowner, though a poor one. It was his ambition, and his wife's, that Jack should some day be rich enough to live at the Hall, instead of letting it, as his father found it necessary to do. But while the Archdeacon considered that Jack's way to the Hall lay over the woolsack, his wife had in view a short cut through the marriage market; being a woman, and so thinking it a small sin in a man to marry for money. Consequently she lived in fear lest Jack should be entrapped by some penniless fair one, and was not wholly rea.s.sured now. ”Well, I shall be sure to find out, Cyprian,” she said warningly, ”if you are deceiving me.”

And these words recurred disagreeably to the Archdeacon's mind on his way to town and afterwards. They rendered him as sensitive as a mole in the suns.h.i.+ne. He found London almost intolerable. He could not walk the streets without seeing those horrid placards, nor take up a newspaper without being stared out of countenance by the name ”Kittie Latouche.” While his conscience so multiplied each bill and poster and programme that in twenty-four hours London seemed to him a great h.o.a.rding of which his ward was the sole lessee.

Naturally he shrank into himself as he pa.s.sed down Sidmouth Street next day. He pondered, standing on the steps of No. 14, what the neighbours thought of the house; whether they knew that ”Kittie Latouche” lived there. He was spared the giggling and dirty plates on the stairs, but looking round the room at the ten photographs, and thinking what Mrs. Yale would say could she see him, he shuddered.

Nervously he picked up the first pamphlet he saw on the table. It was a trifle in one act: ”The Tench,” Lacy's edition, by Charles Williams.

He set it down with a grimace, and a word about birds of a feather.

And then the door by which he had entered opened behind him, and he turned.

One look was enough. The kindly expression faded from his handsome features. His face turned to flame. The veins of his forehead swelled with pa.s.sion, and he strode forward as though he would lay hands on the intruder. ”How dare you,” he cried when he could find his voice--”how dare you follow me? How dare you play the spy upon me, sir? Speak!”

But Jack--for Jack it was--had no answer ready. He seemed to have lost for once (astonished at being taken in this way, perhaps) his presence of mind. ”I do not--understand,” he said helplessly.

”Understand? You understand,” the Archdeacon cried, his son's very confusion condemning him unheard, ”that you have meanly followed me to--to detect me in--in----” And then he came to a deadlock, and, redder than before, thundered, ”Are you not ashamed of yourself, sir?”

”I thought I saw a back I knew,” Jack muttered, looking everywhere but at his father, which was terribly irritating. ”I was coming through the street.”