Laid up in Lavender Part 3

Lady Betty sprang from her seat with all her old vivacity. "Well!" she cried, "well, I am sure! Then why, I should like to know, did Mr.

Atlay tell me that my letter to the _Times_ had something to do with it!"

"Did not say so," quoth Sir Horace. "Absurd!"

"Yes, he did," cried Lady Betty, so fiercely that the rash speaker, who had returned to his boots, fairly shook in them. "You were not there! How do you know?"

"Don't know," Sir Horace admitted, meekly.

"But stay, stay a moment!" Mr. Stafford said, getting in a word with difficulty. It was strange if his wife could talk so calmly of her misdeeds, and before a third party too. "What letter to the _Times_ did Atlay mean?"

"My letter about the Women's League," she explained earnestly. "You did not see it? No, I thought not. But Mr. Atlay would have it that you did, and that it had something to do with your going out. Horace told me at the time that I ought not to send it without consulting you. But I did, because you said you could not be bothered with it--I mean you said you were busy, Stafford. And so I thought I would ask if it had done any harm, and Mr. Atlay---- What is the matter?" she cried, breaking off sharply at sight of the change in her husband's face. "Did it do harm?"

"No, no," he answered. "Only I never heard of this letter before. What made you write it?"

Lady Betty coloured violently, and became on a sudden very shy--like most young authors. "Well," she said, "I wanted to be in the--in the swim with you, don't you know."

Mr. Stafford murmured, "Oh!"

Thanks to his talk with Atlay he read the secret of that sudden shyness. And confusion poured over him more and more. It caused him to give way to impulse in a manner which a moment's reflection would have led him to avoid.

"Then it was not you," he exclaimed unwarily, "who sent Pilgrimstone's terms to the _Times?_"

"I?" she exclaimed in an indescribable tone, and with eyes like saucers. "I?" she repeated.

"Gad!" cried Sir Horace; and he looked about for a way of escape.

"I?" she continued, struggling between wrath and wonder. "I betray you to the _Times!_ And you thought so, Stafford?"

There was silence in the room for a long moment during which the cool statesman, the hard man of the world, did not know where to turn his eyes. "There were circ.u.mstances--several circ.u.mstances," Mr. Stafford muttered at last, "which made--which forced me to think so."

"And Mr. Atlay thought so?" she asked. He nodded. "Oh, that tame cat!"

she cried, her eyes flashing.

Then she seemed to meditate, while her husband gazed at her, a prey to conflicting emotions, and Sir Horace made himself as small as possible. "I see," she continued in a different tone. "Only--only if you thought that, why did you never say anything? Why did you not scold me, beat me, Stafford? I do not--I do not understand."

"I thought," he explained in despair--he had so mismanaged matters--"that perhaps I had left you--out of the swim, as you call it, Betty. That I had not treated you very well, and after all it might be my own fault."

"And you said nothing! You intended to say nothing?" He nodded.

"Gad!" cried Sir Horace very softly.

But Lady Betty said nothing. She turned after a long look at her husband, and went out of the room, her eyes wet with tears. The two men heard her pause a moment on the landing, and then go upstairs and shut her door. But her foot, even to their gross ears, seemed to touch the stairs as if it loved them, and there was a happy lingering in the slamming of the door.

They looked, when she had left them, anywhere but at one another. Sir Horace sought inspiration in his boots, and presently found it.

"Wonder who did it, then?" he burst out at last.

"Ah! I wonder," replied the ex-minister, descending at a bound from the cloudland to which his thoughts had borne him. "I never pushed the inquiry; you know why now. But they should be able to enlighten us at the _Times_ office. We could learn in whose handwriting the copy was, at any rate. It is not well to have spies about us."

"I can tell you in whose handwriting they say it was," Sir Horace said bluntly.

"In whose?"

"In Atlay's."

Mr. Stafford did not look surprised. Instead of answering he thought.

As a result of which he presently left the room in silence. When he came back he had a copy of the _Times_ in his hand, and his face wore a look of perplexity. "I have read the riddle," he said, "and yet it is a riddle to me still. I never found time to read the report of my speech at the Club. It occurred to me to look at it now. It is full of errors; so full that it is clear the printer had not the corrected proof Atlay prepared. Therefore I conclude that Atlay's copy of the terms went to the _Times_ instead of the speech. But how was the mistake made?"

"That is the question."

It happened that the private secretary came into the room at this juncture. "Atlay," Mr. Stafford said at once, "I want you. Carry your mind back a week--to this day week. Are you sure that you sent the report of my speech at the Club to the _Times?_"

"Am I sure?" the other replied confidently, nothing daunted by being so abruptly challenged. "I am quite sure I did, sir. I remember the circ.u.mstances. I found the report--it was type-written you remember--lying on the blotting-pad when I came down before dinner. I slipped it into an envelope, and put it in the box. I can see myself doing it now."

"But how do you know that it was the report you put in the envelope?"

"You had indorsed it 'Corrected speech.--W. Stafford,'" Atlay replied triumphantly.

"Ah!" Mr. Stafford said, dropping his hands and eyes and sitting down suddenly, "I remember! My wife came in, and--yes, my wife came in."

THE SURGEON'S GUEST

THE SURGEON'S GUEST

CHAPTER I.

"To be content," said the carrier, "that is half the battle. If I have said it to one, I have said it to a hundred. You be content," says I, "and you will be all right."

For the first time, though they had plodded on a mile together, the tall gentleman turned his eyes from the sombre moorland which stretched away on either side of the road, and looked at his companion. There had been something strange in the preoccupation of his thoughts. .h.i.therto; though the carrier, lapped in his own loquacity, had not felt it. And, to tell the truth, there had been something still more strange in the tall gentleman's behaviour before their meeting. Now he had raced along the road and now he had loitered; sometimes he had stood still, letting his eyes stray over the dark groups of heather, which lay islanded in a sea of brown gra.s.s; and again he had sauntered onwards, his hat in his hand and his face turned up to the sky, which hung low over the waste, and had yet the breadth of a fen cloudscape. Whatever the eccentricity of his lonely movements, his tall hat and fluttering frock-coat had exaggerated it.

At length on the summit of one of the ridges over which the road ran he had made a longer halt, and had begun to look about him to right and left, seeking, it seemed, for a track across the moss. Then he had caught sight of the carrier plodding up the next ridge at the tail of his cart, and he had started after him. But having almost overtaken him, he had reduced his pace and loitered as if his desire for human company had faded away. He had even paused as though to return. But a glance at the desolate waste had determined him. He had walked on again, and had overtaken and fallen to talking with the carrier. The latter on his part had been glad to have a companion, and had readily set down what was odd in the stranger's bearing to the cause which accounted for his costume. The tall gentleman was a Londoner.

"'You be content,' says I," quoth the old fellow again, his companion's tardy attention encouraging him to repeat his statement, "'and you will be all right.' I have told that to hundreds in my time."

"And you practise it yourself?" The tall gentleman's voice was husky.

His eyes, now that they had found their way to the other's face, continued to dwell on it with a gleam in their depths which matched the pallor of his features. His forehead was high, his face long and thin, and lengthened by a dark brown beard which hid the working of his lips. A nervous man meeting his gaze might have had strange thoughts. But the carrier's were country nerves, and proof against anything short of electricity.

"Oh yes, I am pretty well content," Nickson answered st.u.r.dily. "I have twenty acres of land from the duke, and I turn a penny with the carrying, going into Sheffield twice a week, rain and shine. Then I have as good a wife as ever kissed her man, and neither chick nor child, and no more than three barren ewes this lambing."

"My G.o.d!" said the stranger.

The words seemed wrung from him by a twinge of mental pain, but whether the feeling was envy of the man's innocent joys, or disgust at his simplicity, did not appear. Whatever the impulse, the tall gentleman showed an immediate consciousness that he had excited his companion's astonishment. He began to talk rapidly, even gesticulating a little. "But is there no drawback?" he said--"no bitter in your life, man? This long journey--ten--eleven miles?--and the same journey home again? Do you never find it cold, hot, dreary, intolerable?"