Laid up in Lavender Part 29

The young clergyman turned his face to his companion, and Jim Foley, albeit of the coolest, was taken aback by the change which anger or some other emotion had wrought in it. Even the clergyman's voice was altered. "And what if I have?" he said, stopping so suddenly that the two confronted one another. "What if I have, Mr. Foley?"

Jim deliberately shut his eyes and opened them, to make sure that the tragic spirit, so suddenly infused into the pleasant landscape, with its long shadows and its distant forge-note, was no delusion.

Satisfied, he rose to the occasion. "This," he said, outwardly unmoved. "You must get rid of it. That is all, Jones."

"And if I cannot?"

"Will not, you mean."

"No, cannot!" the clergyman replied with vehemence.

"Then," Jim drawled--"I am not a moral man, don't mistake me, but I belong to the family--your majesty must go elsewhere for a wife! And a little late to do so!" he continued, harshness in his tone. "What! you are not coming to the house?"

"No!" the other cried violently. And, without a word of farewell, he turned his back on his companion, and strode away through the lush gra.s.s to a point a little higher up the stream, where a plank-bridge gave access to the Chase outbuildings, and through them to the village.

Foley stood awhile, looking after him. "Well," he said, speaking gently, as if rallying himself on some weakness, "I am afraid--I really am afraid that I am a little astonished. I should know men by now, yet I did think that if any one could show a clean bill of health it was the vicar. He is smug, he is next door to a prig. The old women swear by him, the young ones dote on him. They say he is on foot from morning till night, and not one blank day in a fortnight!

And now--pheugh! I wonder whether I ought to have knocked him down.

Poor little Patty! There is not a better girl in the country--except the Partridge!"

He looked pathetically at the gardens below him; then, seeing that the chimneys of the house were smoking briskly, he bethought him of dinner, and strode down to the gate with his usual air of _insouciance_.

Meanwhile the young clergyman gained the side avenue, and walked rapidly towards the village, his eyes dazzled by the low beams of the sun which shone in his face, and his mind confounded by the tumult of his thoughts. A crisis which he had long foreseen, often dreaded, and as often postponed, was now imminent, the power to control it gone from his hands. He looked on the past with regret, and forward with shame. That which had once been feasible--nay, as it seemed to him now, easy--time and his cowardice had rendered impossible. He stood aghast at his own feebleness; not considering that the routine of parish work and the satisfaction derived from small duties done, had weakened his moral fibre; even as the peace of the life about him, and the transparent truthfulness of those, with whom his lot was cast, had made the task of disclosure more formidable. He had fallen--no, he had not fallen; but he had put off the act which honour demanded so long that, though the day of grace was still his, there could be no grace in the doing.

The rooks, streaming homeward in some order of their own, were cawing overhead as he opened the gate and entered the vicarage garden, where the great hollyhocks stood in rows, and the peaches, catching the last rays of the sun aslant, were glowing against the southern gable. To the stranger--to the American, in particular--who looked in as he pa.s.sed, it seemed a paradise, that garden. But--for peaches are not peace, nor hollyhocks either--its owner pa.s.sed through it with compressed lips and tingling cheeks. He entered the porch, where one or two packing-cases told of coming changes; then he stood irresolute in the cool hall, remembering that he had intended to dine at the Chase, and that there was nothing prepared for him here. Not that he had an appet.i.te, but dinner was a decent observance, and it seemed to him that not to dine would be to lose his hold on life and fall into abysses before his time.

It is well, when we are unfortunate, to consider how much worse a minute, a few seconds, may see us. A faint sound at his elbow caused him to turn. The door of the dining-room was ajar, and through the opening a face peered at him. The young vicar did not start, but he drew a deep breath, and stiffened as he gazed. A minute, and his lips--while the other face, with a shifty smile, half mockery, half shame, returned his look--formed the word "Father!"

It was not audible two paces away. But as it fell the clergyman glanced round with a gesture of alarm, and at a single stride he was in the dining-room, and had shut the door behind him. The other man--a shambling creature, grey-haired and blear-eyed and unwashed, with a beard of a week's growth--fell back to the table and leaned against it. His rusty black clothes and his broken boots seemed to share, rather than to impart, the look of decay which marked his person. The vicar, with his back against the door, looked at him and shuddered, and then looked again, his face hard and his eyes gloomy.

"Well," he said, in a low stern voice, "what is the meaning of this?

You know our agreement. Why have you broken it, sir?"

The old man pursed up his lips, and, with his head on one side, contemplated his questioner in silence. Then he said suddenly, "Blow the agreement!"

The vicar winced as if he had been struck. But he found words again.

"If you can do without the money," he said, "so much the better.

But----"

"Blow the money!" cried the old man, with the same violence.

Notwithstanding his words, he stood in awe of his son, and was trying to gain courage by working himself into a pa.s.sion. "What is money?" he continued. "I want no money! I am coming to live with you. You are going to be married. I heard of it, though you kept it close, my boy!

I heard of it, and I said to myself, 'Good! I will go and live with my boy. And his wife shall take care of my little comforts.'"

The younger man shivered. He thought of Patty, and he looked at the old man before him, sly, vicious, gin-sodden--and his father! "You do not want to live with me," he answered coldly. "You could not bear to live with me for one week, and you know it. Will you tell me what you do want, and why you have left Glasgow?"

"To congratulate you!" his father answered, with a drunken chuckle.

"Walter Jones and Patty Stanton--third time of asking! Oh, I heard of it! But not through you. Why," he continued, with a quick change to ferocity, "would you not ask your own father to your wedding, you ungrateful boy?"

"No," the vicar replied sternly, "he being such as he is, I would not."

"Oh, you are ashamed of him, are you? You have kept him dark, I fancy?" the old man replied, grinning with wicked enjoyment as he saw how his son winced at each sentence, how his colour went and came.

"Well, now you will have the pleasure of introducing me to the squire, and to daughter Patty, and to all your friends. It will be a pleasant surprise for them. I'll be bound you said I was dead."

"I have not said you were dead."

"Don't you wish I was?"

"G.o.d keep me from it!" the vicar groaned.

On that, the two men stood looking at each other, the one neat, clean-shaven, conventional, the other vile with the degradation of drink. Though the windows stood open, the room was full of the smell of spirits, and seemed itself soiled and degraded. Suddenly the younger man sat down at the table, and, burying his face between his hands, fell into a storm of weeping.

His father shifted his feet, and licking his lips nervously, looked at him in maudlin shame; then from him to the sideboard, in search of his supporter under all trials. But the sideboard was bare, the doors closed, the key invisible. Mr. Jones grew indignant. "There, stop that foolery!" he said brutally. "You make me sick."

The rough adjuration restored the young man's nerve, and he looked up, his cheeks wet with tears. Tears in a man are shameful; but this tragedy was one not to be evaded by manliness, or, indeed, by any help of men. "Tell me what it is you want," he said wearily.

"More money," his father snarled. The liquor with which he had primed himself was losing its effect. "I cannot live on what you give me.

Glasgow is a dear place. The money ought to be mine; all of it!"

"You have had two hundred a year--one-half of my mother's money."

"I know. I want three."

"Well, you cannot have it," the son answered languidly. "If you must know, I have agreed to settle one-half of my income on my wife now, and the other half at your death. Therefore it will not be in my power to allow you more. You have spent your own fortune, and you have no claim on my mother's money."

"Very well," Mr. Jones answered, his head trembling with rage and weakness. "Then I stay with you. I stay here. Your father-in-law that is to be will be glad to meet his old friend again--I have no doubt.

We were at college together. I dare say he will acknowledge me, if my own son is too proud to do so. I shall stay here until I am tired of the country."

The young man looked at him in despair. Supplication he knew would avail him nothing, and the only threat he could use--that he would stop his father's allowance--would have no terrors, for he could not execute it. To let his father go to the workhouse would increase the scandal a hundred times. He rose at last and went out. His housekeeper had come in, and he told her, keeping his burning face averted, to prepare a bed and get supper for two. He shrank--he whose life in Acton had been so full of propriety--from saying who his guest was.

Let his father proclaim himself if he would; that would be less painful. The truth must out. Once before, at his first curacy, the young man, younger then and more hopeful, had tried the work of reformation. He had made a home for his father, and done what he could. And the end had been hot, flaming shame, and an exposure which had driven him to the other end of England.

When he left the house next morning, though his mind was made up to go to the squire and tell him all, he lingered on the white dusty road.

The sunlight fell about him in dazzling chequers, and, save for the humming of the bees overhead and the whirr of a reaping-machine in a neighbouring field, the stillness of the August noon hung with the haze over the landscape. His heart, despite his resolution, grew hot within him, as he looked around, and contrasted the peacefulness of nature with the tumult of shame and agitation in his own breast. There was the school which he opened with prayers four times a week. Between the trees he caught a grey glimpse of the church--his church. As he looked his secret grew more sordid, more formidable.

He turned at last with an effort to enter the gates, and saw Patty and her sister, Mrs. Foley, coming down the avenue. They were still a long way off, their light frocks and parasols flitting from sunlight to shadow, and shadow to sunlight, as they advanced. The young man halted. Had Patty been alone, he would have gone to her and told her all; and surely, surely, though he doubted it at this moment, he would have won comfort--for love laughs at vicarious shame. But the Partridge's presence frightened him. Mrs. Foley, round and small and plump, in all things the ant.i.thesis of her husband, had yet imbibed something of Jim's dryness. The vicar feared her under the present circ.u.mstances, and he turned and fled down the road. He would let them pa.s.s--probably they were going to the vicarage--and he would then step up and see the squire.

He was right in supposing that the ladies were going to the vicarage.

As they went in that direction, they came upon a strange dissolute old man whom they eyed with wondering dislike, and to whom they gave a wide berth as they pa.s.sed. They had not gone by long before a third person came through the lodge gates and sauntered after them. This was Jim Foley, come out, with his hands in his pockets and a one-eyed terrier at his heels, to smoke his morning pipe. He, too, espied the old toper, and at sight of him took his pipe from his mouth and stood in the middle of the road, an expression of surprise on his features; while Mr. Jones, becoming aware of him too late--for his faculties were not of the sharpest in the morning--also stood by some instinct and looked, with a growing sense of unpleasant recognition, at his lanky figure.

"Hallo!" said Jim. Mr. Jones did not answer, but stood blinking in the sunshine. He looked more blear-eyed and shabby, more hopelessly gone to seed, than he had looked in the vicarage dining-room.

"Hallo!" said Foley again. "My old friend Wilkins, I think!"

"My name is Jones," the man muttered.

"Ah, Jones is it? Jones _vice_ Wilkins resigned," Jim replied, with ironical politeness. "Come down to Acton upon a little matter of business, I suppose. Now look here, Jones _vice_ Wilkins," he continued, pointing each sentence with a wave of his pipe, "I see your game. You have come down here to screw out a ten-pound note, by threatening to tell the squire some old story of my turf days. That is it, isn't it?"

Mr. Jones opened his mouth to deny the charge but thought better of it; either because of the settled scepticism which Foley's face expressed, or because he saw a ten-pound note in the immediate future.

He remained silent.

"Just so," Foley went on with a nod, replacing his pipe in his mouth and his hand in his pocket. "Well, it won't do. It won't do, do you understand? Because, do you see, you have not accounted for the last pony I sent you to put on Paradox for the Two Thousand. And I will just trouble you for it and three to the back of it. Three to one was the starting price, I think, Mr. Jones."