“I will stop as long as you like, sir,” said the servant submissively, but with wonder apparent both in his voice and face.
“Very well. I wish it for the present, no matter why. Perhaps because I would see that you lead an honest life for awhile.”
“And — how shall I live, sir?” said the culprit timidly.
“For the present you may continue to draw your half-sovereign a week,” the curate answered hastily, his face reddening, he best knew why. “Possibly I may tell Mr. Lindo at once. Possibly I may give you another chance, and tell him later, if I find you deserving. What is your address?”
“I am at the Bull and Staff,” muttered Felton. It was a small public house of no very good repute.
“Well, stay there,” Stephen Clode answered after a moment’s thought. “But see you get into no harm. And since you are living on the rector’s bounty, you may say so.”
The man looked puzzled as well as relieved, but, stealing a doubtful glance at the curate’s dark fate, he found his eyes still upon him, and cowered afresh. “Yes, take care,” said Clode, smiling unpleasantly as he saw the effect his look produced. “Do not try to evade me or it will be the worse for you, Felton. And now go! But see you take nothing from here.”
The detected one cast a sly glance at the half-rifled box which still lay on the carpet at his feet, a few gold coins scattered round it; then he looked up again. “It is all there, sir,” he said, cringing. “I had but just begun.”
“Then go!” said the curate, pointing with emphasis to the door. “Go, I tell you!”
The man’s presence annoyed and humiliated him so that he felt a positive relief when the valet’s back was turned. Left alone he stood listening, a cloud on his brow, until the faint sound of the outer door being pulled to reached his ear, and then, stooping hastily, he gathered up the sovereigns and half-sovereigns, which lay where they had fallen, and put them into the box. This done, he rose and laid the box itself upon the table by his side. And again he stood still, listening, a dark shade on his face.
Long ago, almost at the moment of his entrance, he had seen the pale shimmer of papers at the back of the little cupboard. Now, still listening stealthily, he thrust in his hand and drew out one of the bundles and opened it. The papers were parish accounts in his own handwriting! With a gesture of fierce impatience he thrust them back and drew out others, and, disappointed again in these, exchanged them hastily for a third set. In vain! The last were as worthless to him as the first.
He was turning away baffled and defeated, when he saw lying at the back of the lower compartment of the cupboard, whence the cash-box had come, two or three smaller packets, consisting apparently of letters. The curate reached hastily for one of these, and the discovery that it contained some of Lindo’s private accounts, dated before his appointment, made his face flush and his fingers tremble with eagerness. He glanced nervously round the room and stopped to listen; then, moving the candle a little nearer, he ran his eye over the papers. But here, too, though the scent was hot, he took nothing, and he exchanged the packet for one of the others. Looking at this, he saw that it was indorsed in Lindo’s handwriting, “Letters relating to the Claversham Living.”
“At last,” Clode muttered, his eyes burning, “I have it now.” The string which bound the packet was knotted tightly, and his fingers seemed all thumbs as he labored to unfasten it. But he succeeded at last, and opening the uppermost letter (they were all folded across), saw that it was written from Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “My dear sir,” he read; and then — with a mighty crash sounding awfully in his ears — the door behind him was flung open just as he had flung it open himself an hour before, and, dropping the letter, he sprang round, to find the rector confronting him with a face of stupid astonishment.
CHAPTER IX.
TOWN TALK.
He was a man, as the reader will perhaps have gathered, of many shifts, and cool-headed; but for a moment he felt something of the anguish of discovery which had so tortured the surprised servant. The table shook beneath his hand, and it was with difficulty he repressed a wild impulse to overturn the candle, and escape in the darkness. He did repress it, however; nay, he forced his eyes to meet the rector’s, and twisted his lips into the likeness of a smile. But when he thought of the scene afterward he found his chief comfort in the reflection that the light had been too faint to betray his full embarrassment.
Naturally the rector was the first to speak. “Clode!” he ejaculated softly, his surprise above words. “Is it you? Why, man,” he continued, still standing with his hand on the door and his eyes devouring the scene, “what is up?”
The money-box stood open at the curate’s side, and the letters lay about his feet where they had fallen. The little cupboard yawned among the books. No wonder Lindo’s amazement, as he gradually took it all in, rather increased than diminished, or that the curate’s tongue was dry and his throat husky when he at last found his voice. “It is all right. I will explain it,” he stammered, almost upsetting the table in his agitation. “I expected you before,” he added fussily, moving the light.
“The dickens you did!” slipped from the rector. It was difficult for him not to believe that his arrival had been the last thing expected.
“Yes,” returned the curate, with a little snap of defiance. He was recovering himself, and could look the other in the face now. “But I am glad you did not come before, all the same.”
“Why?”
“I will explain.”
The light which the one candle gave was not so meagre that Clode’s embarrassment had altogether escaped Lindo; and had the latter been a suspicious man he might have had queer thoughts, and possibly expressed them. As it was, he was only puzzled, and when the curate said he would explain, answered simply, “Do.”
“The truth is,” said Stephen Clode, beginning with an effort, “I have taken a good deal on myself, and I am afraid you will blame me, Mr. Lindo. If so, I cannot help it.” His face flushed, and he beat a tattoo on the table with his fingers. “I came across,” he continued, “to borrow a book a little before ten. The lights here were out; but, to my surprise, your house-door was open.”
“As I found it myself!” the rector exclaimed.
“Precisely. Naturally I had misgivings, and I looked into the hall. I saw a streak of light proceeding from the doorway of this room, and I came in softly to see what it meant. I heard a man moving about in here, and I threw open the door much as you did.”
“Did you?” said Lindo eagerly. “And who was it — the man, I mean?”
“That is just what I cannot tell you,” replied the curate. His face was pale, but there was a smile upon it, and he met the other’s gaze without flinching. He had settled his plan now.
“He got away, then?” said the rector, disappointed.
“No. He did not try either to escape or to resist,” was the answer.
“But was he really a burglar?”
“Yes.”
“Then where is he?” The rector looked round as if he expected to see the man lying bound on the floor. “What did you do with him?”
“I let him go.”
Lindo whistled; and when he had done whistling still stood with his mouth open and a face of the most complete mystification. “You let him go?” he repeated mechanically, but not until after a pause of half a minute or so. “Why, may I ask?”
“You have every right to ask,” the curate answered with firmness, and yet despondently. “I will tell you why — why I let him go, and why I cannot tell you his name. He is a parishioner of yours. It was his first offence, and I believe him to be sincerely penitent. I believe, too, that he will never repeat the attempt, and that the accident of my entrance saved him from a life of crime. I may have been wrong — I dare say I was wrong,” continued the curate, growing excited — excitement came very easily to him at the moment— “but I cannot go back from my word. The man’s misery moved me. I thought what I should have felt in his place, and I promised
him, in return for his pledge that he would live honestly in the future, that he should go free, and that I would not betray his name to any one — to any one!”
“Well!” exclaimed the rector, his tone one of unbounded admiration in every sense of the word. “When you do a thing nobly, my dear fellow, you do do it nobly, and no mistake! I wonder who it was! But I must not ask you.”
“No.” said Clode. “And now,” he continued, still beating the tattoo on the table, “you do not blame me greatly?”
“I do not, indeed. No. Only I think perhaps that you should have retained the right to tell me.”
“I should have done so,” said the curate regretfully.
“He has taken nothing, I suppose?” the rector continued, turning to the cupboard, and, not only satisfied with the explanation, but liking Clode better than he had liked him before.
“No,” the other answered. “I was putting things straight when you entered and startled me. He had dropped the money about the floor, but you will find it right, I think. He has made a mess among the papers, I fear, and damaged the cupboard door in forcing it, but that is the extent of the mischief. By the way,” the curate added, “I have a key to this cupboard at my lodgings. Williams gave it to me. He only kept parish matters here. I must let you have it.”
“Right,” said the rector carelessly; and, a few more words having passed between them as to the attempted robbery, and the manner in which the outer door had been opened, the curate took his hat and prepared to go. “You had a pleasant party, I suppose?” he said, pausing and turning when halfway across the hall.
“A very pleasant one,” Lindo answered with enthusiasm.
“They are nice people,” said Clode smoothly.
“They are — very nice. You told me I should find them so, and you were right. Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
Such harmless words! And yet they roused the curate’s jealousy anew. As he walked home, the church clock tolling midnight above his head, he drank in no peaceful influence from the dark stillness or the solemn sound. He was gnawed by fresh hatred of the man who had surprised and confounded him, and forced him to lie and quibble in order to escape from a dishonorable position. If you would make a man your enemy come upon him when he is doing something of which he is ashamed. He will fear you afterward, but he will hate you more. In the curate’s case it was only he who knew himself discovered, so that he had no ground for fear. But he hated none the less vigorously.
And, somehow, in a few days an ugly rumor of which the new rector was the subject began to gain currency in the town. It was an ill-defined rumor, coming to one thing in one person’s mouth and to a different thing in another’s — a kind of cloud on the rector’s fair fame, shifting from moment to moment, and taking ever a fresh shape, yet always a cloud.
One whispered that he had obtained the presentation as the reward of questionable services rendered to the patron. Another that he had forged his own deed of presentation, if such a thing existed. A third that he had been presented by mistake; and a fourth that he had deceived the authorities as to his age. It was noticeable that these rumors began low down in the social scale of the town and worked their way upward, which was odd; and that, whatever form the rumor took, there was not one who heard it who did not within a fortnight or three weeks come to associate it with the presence of a seedy, down-looking, unwholesome man, who was much about the rector’s doorway, and, when he was not there, was generally to be found at the Bull and Staff. Whether he was the disseminator of the reports, or, alike with the rector, was the unconscious subject of them, was not known; but at sight of him — particularly if he were seen, as frequently happened, in the rector’s neighborhood — people shrugged their shoulders and lifted their eyebrows, and expressed a great many severe things without using their tongues.
To the circle of the rector’s personal friends the rumors did not reach. That was natural enough. To tell a person that his or her intimate friend is a forger or a swindler is a piquant but somewhat perilous task. And no one mentioned the matter to the Hammonds, or to the archdeacon, or to the Homfrays of Holberton, or the other county people living round, with whom it must be confessed that, after that dinner-party at the Town House, he consorted perhaps too exclusively. It might have been thought that even the townsfolk, seeing the young fellow’s frank face passing daily about their streets, and catching the glint of his fair curly hair when, the wintry sunlight pierced the lanthorn windows and fell in gules and azure on the reading-desk, would have been slow to believe such tales of him.
They might have been; but circumstances and Mr. Bonamy were against him. The lawyer did not circulate the stories; he had not even mentioned them out-of-doors, nor, for aught the greater part of Claversham knew, had heard of them at all. But all his weight — and with the Low-Church middle-class in the town it was great — was thrown into the scale against the rector. It was known that he did not trust the rector. It was known that day by day his frown on meeting the rector grew darker and darker. And the why and the wherefore not being understood — for no one thought of questioning the lawyer, or observed how frequently of late the curate happened upon him in the street or the reading-room — many concluded that he knew more of the clergyman’s antecedents than appeared.
There was one person, and perhaps only one, who openly circulated and rejoiced in these rumors. That was a man whom Lindo met daily in the street and passed with a careless nod and a word, not dreaming for an instant that the spiteful little busybody was concerning himself with him. The man was Dr. Gregg, the snappish, ill-bred man who had chanced upon Lindo and the Bonamy girls breakfasting together at Oxford. The sight, it will be remembered, had not pleased him, for he had long had a sneaking liking for Miss Kate himself, and had only refrained from trying to win her because he still more desired to be of the “best set” in Claversham. He had been ashamed, indeed, up to this time of his passion; but, reading on that occasion unmistakable admiration of the girl in the young clergyman’s face, and being himself rather cavalierly treated by Lindo, he had somewhat changed his views. The girl had acquired increased value in his eyes. Another’s appreciation had increased his own, and, merely as an incident, the man who had effected this has earned his hearty jealousy and ill-will. And this, while Lindo thought him a vulgar but harmless little man.
But if the rector, immersed in new social engagements, did not see whither he was tending, others, though they knew nothing of the unpleasant tales we have mentioned, saw more clearly. The archdeacon, coming into town one Saturday five or six weeks after Lindo’s arrival, did his business early and turned his steps toward the rectory. He felt pretty sure of finding the young fellow at home, because he knew it was his sermon day. A few yards from the door he fell in, as it chanced, with Stephen Clode. The two stood together talking, while the archdeacon waited to be admitted, and presently the curate said, “If you wish to see the rector, archdeacon, I am afraid you will be disappointed. He is not at home.”
“But I thought that he was always at home on Saturdays?”
“Generally he is,” Clode replied, looking down and tracing a pattern with the point of his umbrella. “But he is away to-day.”
“Where?” said the archdeacon rather abruptly.
“He has gone to the Homfrays’ at Holberton. They have some sort of party to-day, and the Hammonds drove him over.” Despite himself, the curate’s tone was sullen, his manner constrained.
“Oh!” said the archdeacon thoughtfully. The Homfrays were his very good friends, but of the county families round Claversham they were reckoned the fastest and most frivolous. And he sagely suspected that a man in Lindo’s delicate position might be wiser if he chose other companions. “Lindo seems to see a good deal of the Hammonds,” he remarked after a pause.
“Yes,” said Clode. “It is very natural.”
“Oh, very natural,” the archdeacon hastened to say; but his tone clearly expressed the opinion that “toujours Hammonds” was not a
good bill of fare for the rector of Claversham. “Very natural, of course. Only,” he continued, taking courage, for he really liked the rector, “you have had some experience here, and I think it would be well if you were to give him a hint not to be too exclusive. A town rector must not be too exclusive. It does not do.”
“No,” said Clode.
“It is different in the country, of course. And then there is Mr. Bonamy. He is unpleasant, I know, and yet he is honest after a fashion. Lindo must beware of getting across with him. He has done nothing about the sheep yet, has he?”
“No.”
“Well, do not let him, if you can help it. You are not urging him on in that, are you?”
“On the contrary,” the curate answered rather warmly, “I have all through told him that I would not express an opinion on it. If anything, I have discouraged him in the matter.”
“Well, I hope he will let it drop now. I hope he will let it drop.”
They parted then, and the archdeacon, sagely revolving in his mind the evils of exclusiveness, strolled back to the hotel where he put up his horses. On his way, casting his eye down the wide, quiet street, with its old-fashioned houses on this side and that, he espied Mr. Bonamy’s tall spare figure approaching, and he purposely passed the inn and went to meet him. As a county magnate the archdeacon could afford to know Mr. Bonamy, and even to be friendly with him. I am not sure, indeed, that he had not a sneaking liking and respect for the rugged, snappish, self-made man.
“How do you do, Mr. Bonamy?” he began. And then, after saying a few words about closing a road in which he was interested, he slid into a mention of Lindo, with a view to seeing how the land lay. “I have just been to call on your rector,” he said.
“You did not find him at home,” replied Bonamy, with a queer grin, and a little jerk of his head which sent his hat still farther back.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 24