Laid up in Lavender Part 30

Mr. Jones's face fell abruptly, and he glared at Foley. "It never reached me," he muttered huskily.

"You mean that you are not going to refund it," Jim retorted. "Well, you don't look as if you had it. But I'll tell you what you'll do. You will go back whence you came within three hours--there is a train at two-forty, and you will go by it. You have caught a Tartar, do you see?" Jim continued sternly, "and though you may, if you stay, give me an unpleasant hour with the squire, I shall give you a much more unpleasant hour with the policeman."

"But the squire----" the old man began; "the squire----"

"No, the policeman!" Foley retorted sharply. "Never mind the squire.

Keep your mind steadily on the policeman, and you will be the more certain to catch the train. Now mind," Jim added, pausing to say another word after he had turned away, "I am serious, my man. If I find you here after the two-forty train has left, I give you in charge, and we will both take the consequences."

Jim strolled on towards the vicarage, congratulating himself on his presence of mind and chuckling over the skill with which he had foiled this attempt on his pocket; while Mr. Jones, though his appet.i.te for a country walk was spoiled by the meeting, tottered onwards too, in the opposite direction, rather than seem, by turning, to be d.o.g.g.i.ng Foley, who had inspired him with a very genuine terror. The consequence was that the next turn in the road brought the old man face to face with his son.

"Walter, I am going back," he said, quavering piteously. The interview had shaken him. He seemed less offensive, less of a blot on the landscape; on the other hand, more broken and older. It is not without a sharp pang that the man who has once been a gentleman finds himself threatened with the handcuffs, and forced to avoid the policeman.

The vicar had been for pa.s.sing him in silence, but the statement brought him to a standstill. What if his father should indeed go? To explain him in his absence seemed an easy, almost a normal, task. Yet he feared a trap, and he only answered, "I am glad to hear it."

"I am going by the two-forty train," the old man whined. "But I must have a sovereign to pay my fare, Walter."

"You shall have it," the vicar said, his heart bounding.

"Give it me now! Give it me now!" his father repeated eagerly. "I tell you I am going by the two-forty. Do you think I am a liar?"

Reluctantly--not because he grudged the money, but because he feared that, the coins once obtained, his father would prove a liar, the clergyman took out two pounds and handed them to him. The old man gripped them with avidity, and, thrusting them and his hands into his pocket, turned his back on the donor, and hobbled away, mumbling to himself.

The vicar remained where he was, standing irresolute at the turn of the road, which brought the lodge gates into view. He found it was a quarter past twelve. He wondered what Patty was thinking of him, and his strange avoidance of her. And what his housekeeper was thinking of his guest, and whether many people had observed him. He began to feel himself at a loose end in the familiar scene. He should have been moving to and fro about his business; instead, he was here, hovering stealthily upon the outskirts of the village, dreading men's eyes, and prepared to fly from the first comer. By going straight to the squire he might put an end to this intolerable position. But the temptation to postpone his explanation until his father had left overcame him, and he turned and walked from the village.

He long remembered that tramp in the heat and dust. Throughout it he was weighed down by the feeling that he was an outcast, that people who met him looked strangely at him, that while he roamed aimlessly his duty called him home. Presently a new fear rose to vex his soul--that his father would not keep his word; the consequence of which was that half an hour before the train started he was lurking about the fir-plantation at the back of the station-house, peeping at the platform, which lay grilling in the sunshine, and tormenting himself with the suspicion that his watch was wrong.

Presently the station woke up. One or two people arrived, and took seats on a barrow in a shady place. The station-master labelled a hamper and gave out a ticket. Then some one who was by no means welcome to the vicar appeared--Jim Foley. He did not enter the station, but the vicar caught sight of him standing on the bridge which carried the road over the railway. What was more, Jim Foley at the same moment discovered the vicar.

Jim looked elsewhere, but he had his suspicions. "Hallo!" he muttered.

"Friend Jones grows more of a riddle than ever. I suppose he has had dealings with Master Wilkins, and has an equal interest with me in seeing him off. I hope he has got rid of him as cheaply! But it is odd! I shall tell the Partridge, and hear what she says. She likes him."

He forgot his wife a few minutes later, when the train had steamed slowly in, and stood, and steamed out again, and the two people who had come by it had pa.s.sed him, and even the vicar, slowly and perforce, had crawled up to him on the bridge. Foley by that time had found something else to consider. "I say," he exclaimed on the impulse of the moment, meeting the clergyman open-mouthed, "this won't do, you know."

Jones was dazed, struck down and prostrated by his disappointment.

"What," he said feebly--"what won't do?"

"He has not gone!"

"No!"

"The old buffer! I guessed what was up when I saw you hanging about.

Did he get anything out of you?"

The question sounded brutal, but the clergyman answered it. "Yes," he said, his cheek dark--and he looked down at the end of his stick and wondered how the other had found it out. "Two sovereigns."

"By Jove! Well, what is to be done now--that is the question?"

"I shall go to the squire," Jones said.

"What? And tell him this?"

"Yes."

Jim shrugged his shoulders. "Well," he said, after a pause in which he tried to see if this would hurt him, "I dare say it is the best thing you can do. While you are telling other things, perhaps you may as well throw this in."

Jim strolled towards the Acton Arms, after making this handsome concession, much puzzled in his mind by the new light which events were shedding on the character of Jones. The discovery that his future brother-in-law had done a little betting did not surprise him. But, in conjunction with the entanglement to which the vicar had owned the day before, it seemed to indicate a character so different from the model of propriety he had hitherto known, that he was staggered. "And he never kills a thing," Jim thought, turning it over. "You would not think that he knew what sport meant!"

The village policeman was loitering outside the inn, and Foley, who had a word for every one, invited him to come in and have a gla.s.s of ale. The road in front of the Acton Arms is separated from the Chase only by a sunk fence; and Jim, casting a glance behind him as he entered, could see the windows of the great house flashing in the sunlight, and the vicar pounding along the avenue towards them. He went in, the constable at his heels, and turned into the cool fireless taproom, which he took to be empty. His stick had scarcely rung on the oak table, however, before a man who had been sitting on the settle, his head on his hands and his senses lost in a drunken stupor, leapt up and, supporting himself by the table, glared at the two intruders.

"Ah!" the squire's son-in-law said drily, "so you are here, Master Jones _vice_ Wilkins, are you? I might have known where to find you!"

It is probable that the wretched man, recognising him, and seeing the policeman with him, thought that they had come to arrest him. Roused thus abruptly from his slumbers, bemused and drink-sodden, he saw in a flash the hand of the law stretched out to grasp him, and an old and ungovernable terror seized upon his shattered nerves. "Keep off! keep off!" he gasped, clawing at the two with his trembling hands. "You shall not take me! I will not be taken! Don't you see I am a gentleman?"--this last in a feeble scream.

"Easy, easy, old fellow," Jim said, surprised by his violence, "or you will be doing yourself a mischief."

But the words only confirmed the poor man in his mistake. "I won't be taken!" he cried, waving them off. "My son will pay you, I tell you,"

he cried, his voice rising in a shriek which rang in the road outside, and startled the house-dog sleeping in the sunshine--"I tell you my son will pay you!" One of his hands as he spoke overturned the empty gla.s.s, and it rolled off the table--on such trifles life rests. For the policeman instinctively started forward to catch it, and the old man misunderstood the movement. He fell in a fit on the floor.

Of course there was a great commotion. The inn was roused from its afternoon slumber, and the policeman was sent for the doctor; with one thing and another half an hour elapsed before Foley left the house and slowly made his way to the Chase. He was thinking a great deal more seriously than was his wont. As hard as nails, some of his friends called him; but there is a soft spot in these men who are as hard as nails, if one can find it. Approaching the house, he caught sight of his sister-in-law, and shrugged his shoulders and shook himself to get rid of unpleasant thoughts. Patty was a favourite with him, and, seeing her loitering round the sweep before the house, he guessed that she was waiting to intercept her betrothed and learn the cause of his conduct. Jim said a naughty word under his breath and went to her, as if he had something to say. But, reaching her, he listened instead--as a man must when a woman has a mind to speak.

"What is it, Jim?" she broke out. Her eyes were full of trouble and her pale complexion was a shade paler than usual. "What is the matter with Walter? He did not dine here last night, though he meant to do so. And when we went to learn the reason this morning he was out. He was away at luncheon-time, and the school had never been visited. And now, when he appeared at last, he told Robert not to call me, and said he would wait in papa's study until he came in."

She stopped. "He is here now?" Jim asked.

"Yes; papa has come in, and they are in the bowling-green."

"I will go to them," he said.

"But, Jim, what is it?" she repeated, speaking with a little quaver in her voice; and laying her hand on his arm, she detained him. "Tell me, is there anything the matter?"

Jim looked down at her. She was one of those soft plump feminine women who seem made to be protected--whom to hurt seems as wicked as to harm a child. "The matter?" he said. "Nothing that I know of. What should be the matter? I will go and see them."

He escaped from her and, entering the hall, of which both the front and back doors were open, he found that she was right. The young vicar, the dust on his shoes and an unwonted shade of depression darkening his face, was walking up and down the sward with the squire--a little man as choleric as he was kind-hearted, who pa.s.sed two-thirds of his waking hours in breeches and gaiters. Jim Foley strode towards them, a purpose in his mind. The vicar, just embarked on his confession, found it interrupted and made a thousand times more difficult. "Jones has come to explain matters, I hope, sir," Jim said.

The clergyman winced. "He has come to turn my brain, I think," the squire cried, angry and suspicious. "I cannot make out what he would be at."

"I was telling you, sir," the vicar answered with some impatience--"that my father----"

"You had better leave your father alone, I think!" Foley struck in with a manner like the snapping of a trap. "And explain to Mr. Stanton the matter you mentioned to me yesterday."

"I was explaining it!" the clergyman rejoined. "I was saying that my father--he was at school with you, sir, you remember?"

"To be sure," the squire said, his grey whiskers curling with impatience as he looked from one to the other. "And at college."

"He lost money after my mother's death," the young man continued, "and went to live in Glasgow." In his shrinking from the disclosure he had to make his voice took a rambling tone as he added, "I think I told you that, sir."

"To be sure! Twice!