The Honour of the Clintons Part 37

He came in as the Squire was sitting with Lord Sedbergh's letter in his hand.

"Well, my dear Edward," he said, "it is such a lovely morning that I was tempted out of my study. It is my sermon morning, and I shall have a good one to preach to you on Sunday. I was in the vein. I shall go back to it with renewed interest."

"I've had a letter that may interest you," said the Squire. "In a way it seems to shed a gleam of light. But I don't know. Things are black enough. It's this waiting for the blow to fall that is so wretched. I had rather, almost, that everyone knew."

The Rector read through the letter carefully and handed it back.

"If nothing but the truth is to be told...!" he said.

"You mean that won't be so bad for us. It does look as if there might be a chance of her not telling more than the truth, for her own sake.

If she is going to marry that creature! Colne! Bah! What mud we're mixed up with! To think it rests with a man like that to keep her quiet!"

"Is he so bad?" enquired the Rector.

"Bad! The sort of man that makes his order a by-word, for all the world to spit upon. I should think even you must have some knowledge of him. His first wife divorced him; his second died because he ill-treated her."

"Is that known?"

"Yes. In the way these things _are_ known."

"He was Hubert Legrange, wasn't he? He was in my tutor's house at Eton--after your time. He wasn't bad then--high-spirited, troublesome, perhaps--that was all. But warm-hearted--merry. I liked him."

"Ah, my dear Tom! That's the sad thing, when you get to our age. To see the men you've known as boys--how some of them turn out! I've sometimes thought lately that I ought to have been more grateful to G.o.d Almighty for keeping me free from a good many temptations I might have had. I married young; I settled down here; it was what suited me. But I see now that those tastes were given to me for my good. If it hadn't been for that I might have gone wrong just as well as another. I had money from the moment I came of age. I could have done what I liked.

Money's a great temptation to a young fellow."

The Rector hardly knew whether to be pleased or sorry at this vein of moralising that had lately come over his brother. It showed his mind working as he might have wished to see it work, towards humility and a more lively faith; but it also showed him deeply affected by the waves that were pa.s.sing over his head; and the waves were black and heavy.

"What you say is very true," he said. "G.o.d keep us all faithful, as He kept you, Edward. You were tempted, and you were upheld. You see that now, I think."

"I thought," said the poor Squire after a pause, "that G.o.d was working to avert this disgrace from me. Everything seemed to have been ordered, in a way that was almost miraculous, to that end. It was just when I was shaking off the last uncomfortable thoughts about it, when everything seemed most bright for the future, that the blow fell.

Well, I suppose it was to be, and it will come right for us all in the end; though I don't think I shall know a happy moment again as long as I live. I was living in a fool's paradise. I don't quite understand it, Tom."

The Rector thought he did. A fool's paradise is a paradise that the fool makes for himself, and when he is driven out of it blames a higher power. He was not inclined to think his brother the worse off, in all that really mattered, for having been driven out of his paradise. But it was a little difficult to tell him so.

The necessity was spared him for the moment. d.i.c.k came in, and was shown the letter.

"I think that is the way things will work," he said. "She will be repulsed by decent people, and she will come to see that whatever mud she stirs up, more than half of it will stick to her. If she marries Colne--or even if she only clings on to him as her champion--he'll come to see, if he has any sense, that the less she talks the better."

"He would want to see her cleared," said the Rector.

"Yes, and that's our difficulty. Sedbergh is very good; but I don't like it, all the same."

"Don't like what?" asked the Squire.

"I wish to G.o.d we could come out into the open." He spoke with strong impatience. "She's in the wrong. Yes. Scandalously in the wrong--a blackmailer, everything you like to say of her. But she's also in the right, and that's just where she can hurt us--where she _is_ hurting us."

"Has anything happened?" asked the Squire anxiously.

"Yes. It's reached us at last. It's creeping like a blight all over the country--above ground, underground. It will crop up where you never could have expected. And what satisfactory answer can we give, without telling the truth, and the whole truth?"

"Tell us what has happened," said the Squire.

"I went into Bathgate, to Brooks, the saddler. I always have a talk with the _old_ man, if he's in the shop; and he was there alone. He hummed and ha'd a lot, and said there was a story going about that he thought I ought to know of. And what do you think the story was?

Humphrey stole the necklace and gave it to Mrs. Amberley. Susan found it out and it killed her. You gave Humphrey money on condition he never showed his face in England again. That's the sort of thing we are up against."

The Squire's face was a sight to see. The Rector relieved the tension by laughing, but not very merrily.

"That story won't hurt us," he said.

"That's all very well, Tom," said d.i.c.k. "It wouldn't hurt us if there was nothing behind. But what can you say? It's a lie. Yes. And you say so. What do you look like, when you say it? Brooks didn't believe it, of course. But he knew well enough there was _something_, or he wouldn't have told me. How did it come? Who knows? He heard it in the 'George.' They were talking of us. They'll be talking of us all over Bathgate; then all over the country. Trace that story back, and you'll get something nearer the truth. That will spread into another story. There will be many different stories."

"They will contradict one another," said the Rector.

"Yes. And everyone who hears or tells us of them will want to know exactly where the truth lies. It will all go on behind our backs; but every now and then somebody, out of real consideration to us, as I think old Brooks told me, or out of impudent curiosity, will bring it to our notice. Then what are we to say? Oh, why can't we tell the truth?"

"We can't," said the Squire, rousing himself. "We can only contradict the lies. Well, now it has come, I am ready for it. I'll go to Brooks. I'll talk to him. I'll go and sit on the Bench. I've been sitting here doing nothing--shirking. I'm glad it has come at last."

CHAPTER VI

THE POWER OF THE STORM

The rumours grew, and spread everywhere. The story was discussed in all the clubs, in all the drawing-rooms, in every country house.

Allusions, carefully calculated to escape the law of libel by the narrowest margin, appeared in many newspapers. All about peaceful Kencote it buzzed hotly, a.s.suming many shapes, showing itself in awkward withholding of eyes, that bore the look of the cut direct, or in still more awkward geniality. It peered out at the Squire wherever he went, and he now went everywhere within the orbit in which he had moved, a respected, honoured figure, all the days of his life.

He fought gamely; his head was once more erect, his step firm. But he fought a losing battle. d.i.c.k, with his clear sight, had seen the weak spot from the first. There was no answer to make.

There was, indeed, nothing to answer. In the first flush of his determination to take the field, he had been for going straight to old Brooks the saddler, with whom he had had friendly dealings ever since his schooldays, and asking him, in effect, what he meant by it. But cool-headed d.i.c.k had restrained him.

"What can you do more than I did? I laughed, and said, 'That's a pretty story to have told about you'; and he said, 'Yes, Captain, you ought to stop it. I'll tell everybody exactly what you tell me to tell them,' and waited with his head on one side for my version. What's your version going to be when you've told him the story he heard is a lie, which he knows well enough already?"

So the Squire went to Brooks, the saddler, because he always did go in to have a chat with him at the commencement of the hunting season, but said nothing to him at all of what they were both thinking about. The chat was lively on both sides, but when he went out of the shop he knew that Brooks knew why he had come. To brazen it out.

No need to go through the places he went to, and the people he talked to. He went everywhere he had been accustomed to go, and he talked to everybody he had been accustomed to talk to. And because he was unused to playing a part, he overdid this one. He had been a hearty man with his equals. Now he was almost noisy. He had been a cordially condescending man with his inferiors. Now he was effusively patronising. He would have done better to sulk in his tent until the storm of rumour had died down. And he felt every curious look, every unasked question.

It was ominous that none of his friends--for he had many lifelong friends amongst his country neighbours, though no very intimate ones--said to him that ugly rumours were going about, and that they thought he ought to know of them so that he could contradict them. It was obvious that he knew of them, and that they thought he could not contradict them, or they would have spoken. n.o.body could tell anybody else that he had heard the truth of these absurd stories from Clinton himself, and it was so and so. n.o.body cut him, n.o.body even avoided him; it was, indeed, difficult to do so, he was so ubiquitous; but the unasked, unanswered questions behind all the surface sociality poisoned the air. The Squire was in torment in all his comings and goings.

d.i.c.k fared better, because he took things more naturally. But n.o.body asked him questions either. He was not an easy man to ask questions of. If they had done so, he would have been ready with his answer: "I can't tell you the truth of the story, because it's a family matter.

But I'll tell you this much: Mrs. Amberley tried to blackmail my father, and he told her to go to the devil." It would not have answered much, but it would have made some impression.

But the trouble was, and d.i.c.k felt it deeply, that he could take no steps of his own. He could go to n.o.body and say, "I know there are ugly rumours going about against us. Tell me, as a friend, what they are, and I'll answer them." The answer, in that case, would have had to be different, and must have contained the truth of the story, if it were to be satisfying.

The Squire grew thinner and older, almost noticeably so, every day.

Mrs. Clinton was in the deepest distress about him, but could do nothing. He would come home, from hunting, or from Petty Sessions, which he now attended regularly, and keep miserable silence, all his spirit gone. She and Joan were companionable with him, as far as he would let them be, and he liked to have them with him; but he would not talk, or if he roused himself to do so, it was with such painful effort that it was plain that it was only to please them, and brought no relief to himself. He would have no one asked to the house. He was afraid of refusals.

One morning a letter came to him with the stamp of a Government office, franked by the Minister at the head of that office. He opened it in surprise. It ran as follows: