"No, no," he said, "I am putting you out. If you were going to the post, pray go. You can leave me here and come back to me, if that be all."

The rector hesitated, his letters in his hand. He might send Sarah. But it wanted a few minutes only of nine o'clock, and, besides, he did not approve of the maids going out so late. "Well, I think I will do as you say," he answered, feeling that compliance was perhaps the truest politeness; "if you are sure that you do not mind."

"I beg you will," the curate said warmly.

The cup and saucer being at that moment brought in, the rector nodded a.s.sent. "Very well; I shall not be two minutes," he said. "Take care of yourself while I am away."

The curate, left alone, muttered, "No, you will be at least four minutes, my friend!" and waited, with his cup poised, until he heard the outer door closed. Then he set it down. a.s.suring himself by a steady look that the windows were shuttered, he rose and, quietly crossing the room, as a man might who wished to examine a book, he stood before the little cupboard among the shelves. Perhaps, because he had done the thing before, he did not hesitate. His hand was as steady as it had ever been. If it shook at all it was with eagerness. His task was so easy and so devoid of danger, under the circ.u.mstances, that he even smiled darkly, as he set the key in the lock, at the thought of the more clumsy burglar whom he had detected there. He turned the key and opened the door. Nothing could be more simple. The packet he wanted lay just where he had looked to find it. He took it out and dropped it into his breast-pocket, and, long before the time which he had given himself was up, was back in his chair by the fire, with his coffee-cup on his knee.

He might have been expected to feel some surprise at his own coolness. But, as a fact, his thoughts were otherwise employed. He was longing, with intense eagerness, for the moment when he might take the next step--when he might open the packet and secure the weapon he needed. He fingered the letters as they lay in their hiding place, and could scarcely refrain from taking them out and examining them there and then. When Lindo returned, and broke into the room with a hearty word about the haste he had made, the curate's answer betrayed no self-consciousness. On the contrary, he rather underplayed his part, his eye and voice being for, a moment so absent as to surprise his host. The next instant he was aware of this, and conducted himself so warily during the half-hour he remained that he entirely erased from the rector's mind the unlucky impression of the afternoon.

By half-past nine he was back in his own room, at his table, his hat thrown this way, his umbrella that. It took him but a feverish moment to turn up the lamp and settle himself in his chair. Then he took out the packet of letters, and, untying the string which bound them together, he opened the first--there were only six of them in all. This was the one which he had partially read on the former occasion--Messrs. Gearns & Baker's first letter. He read it through now at his leisure, without interruption, once, twice, thrice, and with a long breath laid it down again, and sat gazing, with knitted brows, into the shadow beyond the lamp's influence. There was not a word in it, not an expression, which helped him; nothing to show the recipient that he was not the Reginald Lindo for whom the living was intended.

The curate sat awhile before he opened the second, and that one he read more quickly. He dealt in the same way with the next, and the next. When, in a short minute or two, he had read them all and they lay in a disordered pile before him--some folded and some unfolded, just as they had dropped from his hands--he leaned back in his chair, and, folding his arms, sat frowning darkly into vacancy. There was not a word to help him in any one of them, not a sentence which even tended to convict the rector. He had been at all his pains for nothing. He had---- The sound of a raised voice asking for him below, and the hasty tread of a foot mounting the stairs two at a time, roused him with a start from the dream of disappointment. In a second he was erect, motionless, and listening, his hand upon and half covering the letters. A hasty knock on the outside of his door, and the touch of fingers on the handle, seemed at the last moment to nerve him to action. It was all but too late. As the rector came hurriedly into the room, the curate, his face pallid, and the drops of perspiration standing on his brow, swept the letters aside and drew a newspaper partly over them. "What--what is it?" he muttered, stooping forward, his hands on the table.

The rector was too full of the news he had brought to observe the other's agitation, the more as the lamp was between them, and his eyes were dazzled by the light. "Why, what do you think Bonamy has done?" he answered excitedly, as he closed the door behind him. He was breathing quickly with the haste he had made, and, uninvited, he dropped into a chair.

"What?" said the curate hoa.r.s.ely. He dared not look down at the table lest he should direct the other's eyes to what lay there, but he was racked as he stood there with the fear that some d.a.m.ning corner of the paper, some sc.r.a.p of the writing, should still be visible. The shame of possible discovery poured like a flood over his soul. "What is it?" he repeated mechanically. He had not yet recovered enough presence of mind to wonder why the rector should have paid this untimely call.

"He has served me with a writ!" Lindo replied, his face hot with haste and indignation, his lips curling. "At this hour of the night, too! A writ for trespa.s.s in driving out the sheep from the churchyard."

"A writ!" the curate echoed. "It is very late for serving writs."

"Yes. His clerk, who handed it to me--he came five minutes after you left--apologized, and took the blame for that on himself, saying he had forgotten to deliver it on leaving the office."

"For trespa.s.s!" said the curate stupidly. What a fool he had been to meddle with those letters! Why had he not had a little patience? Here, after all, was the catastrophe for which he had been longing.

"Yes, in the Queen's Bench Division, and all the rest of it!" replied the rector; and then he waited to hear what the curate had to say.

But Clode had nothing to say, except "What shall you do?"

"Fight!" replied Lindo briskly, getting up and approaching the table. "That of course. And it was about that I came to you. I do not think there is any lawyer here I should like to employ. Did not you tell me the other day who the archdeacon's were? Some people in Birmingham, I think?"

"I think I did," the curate answered. He had overcome his first fear, and, as he spoke, looked down at the table, on which he was still leaning. His hasty movement had disordered his own papers, but none of the tell-tale letters were visible so far as he could see. But what if the rector took up the newspaper? Or casually put it aside? The curate grew hot again, despite his great self-control. He felt himself on the edge of a precipice down which he dared not cast his eye.

"Well, can you give me their address?" the rector continued.

"Certainly!" the curate answered. Indeed he leapt at the suggestion, for it seemed to offer some chance of escape--at least a way by which he might rid himself of his visitor.

"Just write it down, that is a good fellow, then," said the rector, unconscious of what was pa.s.sing in his mind.

The curate said he would, and tore off at random---the rector was leaning his hand on the newspaper, and might at any moment be taken with a fancy to raise it--the back sheet of the first stray note that came to his fingers, and wrote the address upon it. "There, that is it," he said; and as he gave it to Lindo--he had written it standing up and stooping--he almost pushed him away from the table. "That will serve you, I think. They may be trusted, I am told. The best you can do, I am sure, will be to place the matter in their hands at once."

"I will write before I sleep!" the younger clergyman answered heartily. "You cannot think how the narrowness of these people provokes me! But I will not keep you now. I see you are busy. Come round early in the morning, will you, and talk it over?"

"I will come the moment I have had breakfast," the curate answered, making no attempt to detain his visitor.

The rector thereupon going, he stood eyeing the newspaper askance until the other's footsteps died away on the pavement outside. Then he swept it off and stood contemplating the half-dozen letters with abhorrence. He loathed and detested them. They had suddenly become to him such an incubus as his victim's body becomes to the murderer. The desire which had tempted him to the crime was gone, and he felt them only as a burden. They were the visible proof of his shame. To keep them was to become a thief, and yet he shrank with a nervous terror quite new and strange to him from the task of returning them--of going to the study at the rectory and putting them back in the cupboard. It had been easy to get possession of them; but to return them seemed a task so thankless, and withal so perilous, that he quailed before it. With shaking hands he bundled them together and locked them in the lowest drawer of his writing table. He would return them to-morrow.

CHAPTER XV.

THE BAZAAR.

Long before noon on the next day the service of the writ at the rectory was pretty well known in the town, and the course which the churchwardens had taken was freely canva.s.sed in more houses than one. But they had on their side all the advantages of prescription, while of the rector people said that there was no smoke without fire, and that he would not have become the subject of so many comments and strictures, and the centre of more than one dispute, without being in fault. There had been none of these squabbles in old Mr. Williams's time, they said. Tongues had not wagged about him. But then, they added, he had not aspired to drive tandem with the Homfrays! The town had been good enough for him. He had not wanted to have everything his own way, or thought himself a little Jupiter in the place. His head had not been turned by a little authority conferred too early, and conferred, if all the town heard was true, in some very odd and unsatisfactory manner.

To know that all round you people are saying that your conceit has led you into trouble is not pleasant. And in one way and another this impression was brought home to the young rector more than once during these days, so that his cheek flamed as he pa.s.sed the window of the reading-room, or caught the half-restrained sniggle in which Gregg ventured to indulge when in company. Nor were these annoyances all Lindo had to bear. The archdeacon scolded him roundly for placing the matter in the hands of the lawyers without consulting him. Mrs. Hammond looked grave. Laura seemed less friendly than a while back. Clode's conduct was odd, too, and unsatisfactory. He was sometimes enthusiastic and loyal enough, ready to back up his superior as warmly as could be wished, and anon he would show himself the reverse of all this--sullen, repellent, and absolutely unsympathetic.

So that the rector was not having a very sunny time, albeit the heat of conflict kept him warm; and he threw back his head and set his fair pleasant face very hard as he strode about the town, his long-tailed black coat flapping behind him. He hugged himself more than ever on the one thing which his opponents could not take from him. When all was said and done, he must still be rector of Claversham. If his promotion had not brought him as much happiness as he had expected, if he had not been able to do in his new position all he had hoped, the promotion and the position were yet undeniable. Knowing so well all the circ.u.mstances of his appointment, he never gave two thoughts to the curious story Kate Bonamy had told him. He was sorry that he had treated her so cavalierly, and more than once he had thought with a regret almost tender of the girl and the interview. But, for the rest, he treated it as the ignorant invention of the enemy. Possibly on the strength of certain 'Varsity prejudices he was a little too p.r.o.ne to exaggerate the ignorance of Claversham.

On the day before the bazaar a visitor arrived in Claversham, in the shape of a small, dark, sharp-featured man, with a peculiarly alert manner, whom the reader will remember to have met in the Temple. Jack Smith, for he it was--we parted from him last at Euston Station--may have come over on his own motion, or acting upon a hint from Mr. Bonamy, who, since the refusal of Gregg's offer, had thought more and more of the future which lay before his girls. The house had seemed more and more dull, not to him as himself, but to him considering it in the night-watches through their eyes. Hitherto the lawyer had not encouraged the young Londoner's visits, perhaps because he dreaded the change in his way of life he might be forced to make. But now, whether he had given him a hint to come or not, he received him with undoubted cordiality.

Almost the first question Jack asked, Daintry hanging over the back of his chair and Kate smiling in more subdued radiance opposite him, was about his friend, the rector. Fortunately, Mr. Bonamy was not in the room. "And how about Lindo?" he asked. "Have you seen much of him, Kate?"

"No, we have not seen much of him," she answered, getting up to put something straight which was not much awry before.

"Father has served him with a writ, though," Daintry explained, nodding her head seriously.

Jack whistled. "A writ!" he exclaimed. "What about?"

"About the sheep in the churchyard. Mr. Lindo turned them out," Kate explained hurriedly, as if she wished to hear no more upon the subject.

But Jack was curious; and gradually he drew from them the story of the rector's iniquities, and acquired, in the course of it, a pretty correct notion of the state of things in the parish. He whistled still more seriously then. "It seems to me that the old man has been putting his foot in it here," he said.

"He has," Daintry answered solemnly, nodding any number of times. "No end!"

"And yet he is the very best of fellows," Jack replied, rubbing his short black hair in honest vexation. "Don't you like him?"

"I did," said Daintry, speaking for both of them.

"And you do not now?"

The child reddened, and rubbed herself shyly against Kate's chair. "Well, not so much!" she murmured, Jack's eyes upon her. "He is too big a swell for us."

"Oh, that is it, is it?" Jack said contemptuously.

He pressed it no farther, and appeared to have forgotten the subject; but presently, when he was alone with Kate, he recurred to it. "So, Lindo has been putting on airs, has he?" he observed. "Yet, I thought when Daintry wrote to me, after you left us, that she seemed to like him."

"He was very kind and pleasant to us on our journey," Kate answered, compelling herself to speak with indifference. "But--well, you know, my father and he have not got on well; so, of course, we have seen little of him lately."

"Oh, that is all, is it?" Jack answered, moving restlessly in his chair.

"That is all," said Kate quietly.

This seemed to satisfy Jack, for at tea he surprised her--and, for Daintry, she fairly leapt in her seat--by calmly announcing that he proposed to call on the rector in the course of the evening. "You have no objection, sir, I hope," he said, coolly looking across at his host. "He has been a friend of mine for years, and though I hear you and he are at odds at present, it seems to me that that need not make mischief between us."

"N--no," said Mr. Bonamy slowly. "I do not see why it should." Nevertheless, he was greatly astonished. He had heard that Jack and Mr. Lindo were acquainted, but had thought nothing of it. It is possible that the discovery of this friendship existing between the two led him to take new views of the rector. He continued, "I dare say in private he is not an objectionable man."

"Quite the reverse, I should say!" Jack answered stoutly.

"You have known him well?"

"Very well."

"Umph! Then it seems to me it was a pity he did not confine himself to private life," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the lawyer, with some scorn. "As a rector I do not like him."

"I am sorry for that," Jack answered cheerfully. "But I have not known much of him as a rector, though indeed, as it happened, he brought the offer of the living straight to me, and I was the first person who congratulated him on his promotion."

Mr. Bonamy lifted his eyes slowly from the teacup he was raising to his lips, and looked fixedly at his visitor, an expression much resembling strong curiosity in his face. If a question was on the tip of his tongue he refrained from putting it, however, and Jack, who by no means wished to hear the tale of his friend's shortcomings repeated, said no more until they rose from the table. Then he remarked, "Lindo dines late, I expect."

He put the question to Kate, but the lawyer answered it. "Oh, yes, he does everything which is fashionable," he answered drily. And Jack, putting this and that together, began to see still more clearly how the land lay, and on what shoals his friend had wrecked his popularity.

About half-past eight he went to the rectory, but found that Lindo was not at home. The door was opened to him, however, by Mrs. Baker, who had often seen the barrister in the East India Dock Road, and knew him well; and she pressed him to walk in and wait. "He dined at home, sir," she explained. "I think he has only slipped out for a few minutes."

He followed her accordingly across the panelled hall to the study, where for a moment a whimsical smile played upon his face as he viewed its s.p.a.cious comfort. The curtains were drawn, the fire was burning redly, and the lamp was turned half down. The housekeeper made as if she would have turned it up, but he prevented her. "I like it as it is," he said genially. "This is better than No. 383, Mrs. Baker?"

"Well, sir," she answered, looking round with an air of modest proprietorship, "it is a bit more like."

"What would you have, Mrs. Baker?" he asked, laughing. "The bishop's palace?"

"We may come to that in time, sir," she answered, folding her arms demurely. "But I do not know that I would wish it! He has a peck of troubles now, and there would be more in a palace, I doubt."

"I agree with you," Jack replied, laughing. "Troubles come thick about an ap.r.o.n, Mrs. Baker."

"Ay, the men see to that!" retorted the good lady, getting the last word and going away delighted.

Left alone, Jack lay back in an arm-chair, and, nursing his hat, wondered what Mrs. Baker would say when she discovered his connection with the Bonamys. He had not been seated in this posture two minutes before he heard the door of the house open and shut, and a man's tread cross the hall. The next moment the study door opened, and a tall man appeared at it, and stood holding it and looking into the room. The hall lamp was behind the newcomer, and Jack, seeing that he was not the rector, sat still.

The stranger, satisfied apparently that the room was empty, stepped in and closed the door behind him; and, rapidly crossing the floor, stood before one of the bookcases. He took something--a key Jack judged by what followed--from his pocket, and with it he swiftly threw open a cupboard among the books.

There was nothing remarkable in the action; but the stranger's manner was hurried and nervous, and the looker-on leaned forward, curious to learn what he was about. He expected to see him take something from the cupboard. Instead, the man appeared to put something in. What it was, however, Jack could not discern, for, leaning forward too far in his anxiety to do so, he upset his hat with some noise on to the floor.

The man turned on the instant as if he had been subjected to a galvanic shock, and stood gazing in the direction of the sound. Jack heard him draw in his breath with the sharp sound of sudden fear, and even by that light could see that his face was drawn and white. The barrister rose quietly in the gloom, the stranger at sight of him leaning back against the book-case as if his legs refused to support him. Yet he was the first to speak. "Who is there?" he said, almost in a whisper.

"A visitor," Jack answered simply. "I have been waiting to see Mr. Lindo."

The curate--for he it was--drew a long breath, apparently of relief, and in reality of such heartfelt thankfulness as he had never known before. "What a start you gave me!" he murmured, his voice as yet scarcely under his control. "I am Mr. Clode, Mr. Lindo's curate. I was putting up some parish papers, and thought the room was empty."

"So I saw," Jack answered drily. "I am afraid your nerves are a little out of order." The curate muttered something which was inaudible, and, raising his hand to the book-case, locked the cupboard door and put the key in his pocket. Then he went to the lamp and turned it up. At the same moment Jack, recovering his hat, advanced into the circle of light, and the two men looked at one another. "I am afraid if you wish to see the rector you will be disappointed," the curate said, with something of hauteur in his voice, a.s.sumed to hide his mistrust. "He was to spend the evening at Mrs. Hammond's. I doubt if he will be back before midnight."

"Then I must call another time," said Jack practically.

"If I see him first, can I tell him anything for you?" the curate persisted. Who was this man? Could he be a detective? he was wondering.

But Jack was so far from being a detective that he had already dismissed the suspicions he had at first entertained. "I think not, thank you," he answered; "I will call again."

"Can I give him any name?" Clode asked in despair.

"Well, you might say Jack Smith called," the barrister answered, "if you will be so kind."

They parted at the door, and Clode went back into the house, where he speedily learned all that Mrs. Baker knew of Mr. Smith. It dispelled his first fear. The man was not a detective; still it sent him home gloomy and ill at ease. What if so intimate a friend of the rector's as this Smith seemed to be should tell him of his curate's visit to the cupboard and the excuse which on the spur of the moment he had invented? It might go ill with him then. What explanation could he give? He tried to consider such a mishap impossible, or at all events unlikely; but not with complete success. More than ever he wished that he had not interfered with the letters.

To return to Jack. Such mild festivities as the bazaar were not uncommon in Claversham, but the Bonamy household at any rate had not been wont to look forward to them with anything approaching exhilaration. It is wonderful how some children growing up in any kind of social shadow learn the fact; and Daintry Bonamy, scarcely less than her sister, had come to regard the annual flower-show, the school sports, and the regatta with distaste and repugnance, as occasions of little pleasure and much humiliation. It was Mr. Bonamy's will, however, that they should attend, though he never went himself; and times innumerable they had done so, outwardly in pretty dresses and becoming hats, inwardly in sack-cloth and ashes.

Jack's presence changed all this, and for once the girls went up to dress quite gaily. If Kate reflected that Jack's intimacy with the rector would be likely to bring them also into contact with him, she said nothing; and from Jack--for the present at least--it was mercifully hidden that, with all his kindness, his unfailing good-humor, his wit, his devotion to her, his chief attraction in the girl's eyes lay in the fact that he was another man's friend.

When they entered the a.s.sembly Room it was already well filled, the main concourse being about the two stalls at the end of the room over which the archdeacon's wife and Mrs. Hammond respectively ruled. Here the great people were mainly to be seen; and an acute observer would soon have discovered that between those who habitually hung about this end and those who surrounded the four lower stalls there was a great gulf fixed. Those on the one side of this examined the dresses of those on the other with indulgent interest, and, for the most part, through double eyegla.s.ses; while those on the other hand either returned the compliment and made careful notes, or looked about deferentially for a glance of recognition. The man who should have bridged that gulf, who should have been equally at home with Mrs. Archdeacon and the hotel-keeper's wife, was the rector. But as the rector had entered, the unlucky word "writ" had caught his ears, and he was in his most unpleasant humor. He felt that the whole room was talking of him--the majority with a narrow dislike, a few with sympathy. Was it unnatural that, forgetting his situation, he should throw in his lot with his friends, who were ever so much the pleasanter, the wittier, the more amusing, and present a smiling front of defiance to his opponents or those whom he thought to be such? At any rate, that was what he was doing, and no one could remark the carriage of his head or the direction of his eyes without feeling that there was something in the town complaint that the new clergyman was above his work.

Jack and his party did not at once come across him. They found enough to amuse them at the lower end of the room--the more as to the barrister the great and little with whom he rubbed shoulders were all one. Strange to say, he did not discern any great difference even in their dress! With Daintry hanging on his arm and Kate at his side he was content, until, turning suddenly in the thick of the crowd to speak to the elder girl, he saw her face turn crimson. At the same moment she bowed slightly to some one behind him. He looked round quickly, with a sharp jealous pang at his heart, to see who had called forth this show of emotion, and found himself face to face with the rector.

Lindo had looked forward to this meeting; he had prepared himself for it; and yet, occurring in this way, it shook him out of his self-possession. He colored almost as deeply as the girl had, and, though he held out his hand with scarcely a perceptible pause, the action was nervous and jerky. "By Jove! is it you, Jack?" he exclaimed, his tone a mixture of old cordiality and new antagonism. "How do you do, Miss Bonamy?" and he held out his hand to the girl also, who just touched it with her fingers and drew back. "It is pleasant to see your cousin's face again," he went on more glibly, yet clearly not at his ease even now. "I was sorry that I was not in last night when he called."

"Yes, I was sorry to miss you," Jack answered slowly, his eyes on his friend's face. He could not quite understand matters. The girl's embarra.s.sment had been almost a revelation to him, and yet it flashed across his mind now that the cause of it might have been only the quarrel between her father and the rector. The same thing might account for Lindo's shy, ungenial manner. And yet--and yet he could not quite understand it, and, whether he would or no, his face grew hard. "You heard I had looked in?" he added.

"Yes; Mrs. Baker told me," Lindo answered, moving to let some one pa.s.s him, and glancing aside to smile a recognition.

"She looks the better for the change, I think."

"Yes; she gets more fresh air now."

"It does not seem to have done you much good."

"No?"

Certainly there was something amiss. These were old, tried college friends, or had been so a few weeks back, and they had nothing more to say to one another than this! The rector's self-consciousness began to infect the other, sowing in his mind he knew not what suspicions. So that, if ever words of Daintry's were welcome, they were welcome now. "Jack is going to stay a week," she said inconsequently, standing on one leg the while with her arm through Jack's and her big eyes on the rector's face.

"I am very glad to hear it," Lindo rejoined. "He will find me at home more than once in the week, I hope."

"I will come and try," said Jack.

"Of course you will!" replied the rector, with a flash of his old manner. "I shall be glad if you will remind him of his promise, Miss Bonamy."

Kate murmured that she would.

"You like your house?" said Jack.

"Oh, very much--very much indeed."

"It is an improvement on No. 383?" continued the barrister, rather drily.

"It is--very much so!"