THE VICAR'S SECRET
[THE VICAR'S SECRET]
The windows at the rear of Acton Chase, an old house in Worcestershire, look on a quaint bowling-green flanked by yew hedges, and backed by a stream of good size, on the farther side of which a sparsely timbered slope leads up to the home farm. It leads also to half a dozen smaller farms, which once formed the Chase. Zigzag up this slope runs a track--probably it has so run for centuries, for at the foot of it is a ford--which in spring is almost invisible, but in autumn is brown and rutty. The Chase has long been a Roman Catholic house, and up this track dead-and-gone squires, debarred from converse with their neighbours, have ridden a-hunting, mornings innumerable; so that to-day people sitting in the garden towards evening are apt to see them come trailing home, their horses jaded, and themselves calling for the black-jack.
Our story is not of these, but of two men who strolled down this path on an evening no farther back than last August. They seemed, outwardly at least, ill-matched. The one, a young fellow under thirty, fair-haired, pink-cheeked, prim-looking, was of middle size. He was dressed as a clergyman, but more neatly and trimly than the average country clergyman dresses. The other was one of the tallest and thinnest men ever seen outside a show--a man whose very clothes, his worn jacket and shrunken knickerbockers, had the air of sharing his attenuation. He looked like a gamekeeper, and was, in fact, the squire's son-in-law, Jim Foley.
"I really cannot make you out," he said, as the two sighted the house; and, shifting his gun to the other shoulder, he took occasion to glance at his companion. "What do you do, old boy? You never kill anything, unless it is a trout now and then. Now I could not live without killing. Must kill something every day!"
"And do you?"
"Seldom miss," the long man rejoined cheerfully, "except on a hunting day when we draw blank. Rats, rabbits, otters, pike, sometimes a hawk, sometimes, as to-day, a brace of wood-pigeons. And game and foxes in their season. Must kill something, my boy."
His companion glanced at him, looked away again, and sighed.
"Well, what is that for?" Foley asked, in the tone of an aggrieved man.
"I was only thinking," the other replied drily, "what a lucky fellow you were to have nothing to do but kill."
The tall man whistled. "I say," he said, "for a man who is to be married in a week or so, you are in roaring spirits, ain't you? I tell you what it is, my boy; you do not take very kindly to your bliss. I can see Patty flitting about in the garden like a big white moth, waiting, I have no doubt, for a word with her lord; and your step lags, and your face is grave, and you try to be cynical! What is up?"
The younger man laughed, but not merrily; and there was a tinge of sullenness in his tone as he answered, "Nothing! A man cannot always be grinning."
"No; but pâti de foie gras is not a man's ordinary meat," Jim retorted imperturbably. "Jones!"
"Well?" the other said snappishly.
"You are in a mess, my boy--that is my opinion! Now, don't take it amiss," Jim continued drily. "I am within my rights. I am one of the family, and if the squire is blind and Patty is young, I am neither. And I am not going to let this go on until I know more, my boy. You have something on your mind of which they are ignorant."
The young clergyman turned his face to his companion, and Jim Foley, albeit of the coolest, was taken aback by the change which anger or some other emotion had wrought in it. Even the clergyman's voice was altered. "And what if I have?" he said, stopping so suddenly that the two confronted one another. "What if I have, Mr. Foley?"
Jim deliberately shut his eyes and opened them, to make sure that the tragic spirit, so suddenly infused into the pleasant landscape, with its long shadows and its distant forge-note, was no delusion. Satisfied, he rose to the occasion. "This," he said, outwardly unmoved. "You must get rid of it. That is all, Jones."
"And if I cannot?"
"Will not, you mean."
"No, cannot!" the clergyman replied with vehemence.
"Then," Jim drawled--"I am not a moral man, don't mistake me, but I belong to the family--your majesty must go elsewhere for a wife! And a little late to do so!" he continued, harshness in his tone. "What! you are not coming to the house?"
"No!" the other cried violently. And, without a word of farewell, he turned his back on his companion, and strode away through the lush grass to a point a little higher up the stream, where a plank-bridge gave access to the Chase outbuildings, and through them to the village.
Foley stood awhile, looking after him. "Well," he said, speaking gently, as if rallying himself on some weakness, "I am afraid--I really am afraid that I am a little astonished. I should know men by now, yet I did think that if any one could show a clean bill of health it was the vicar. He is smug, he is next door to a prig. The old women swear by him, the young ones dote on him. They say he is on foot from morning till night, and not one blank day in a fortnight! And now--pheugh! I wonder whether I ought to have knocked him down. Poor little Patty! There is not a better girl in the country--except the Partridge!"
He looked pathetically at the gardens below him; then, seeing that the chimneys of the house were smoking briskly, he bethought him of dinner, and strode down to the gate with his usual air of insouciance.
Meanwhile the young clergyman gained the side avenue, and walked rapidly towards the village, his eyes dazzled by the low beams of the sun which shone in his face, and his mind confounded by the tumult of his thoughts. A crisis which he had long foreseen, often dreaded, and as often postponed, was now imminent, the power to control it gone from his hands. He looked on the past with regret, and forward with shame. That which had once been feasible--nay, as it seemed to him now, easy--time and his cowardice had rendered impossible. He stood aghast at his own feebleness; not considering that the routine of parish work and the satisfaction derived from small duties done, had weakened his moral fibre; even as the peace of the life about him, and the transparent truthfulness of those, with whom his lot was cast, had made the task of disclosure more formidable. He had fallen--no, he had not fallen; but he had put off the act which honour demanded so long that, though the day of grace was still his, there could be no grace in the doing.
The rooks, streaming homeward in some order of their own, were cawing overhead as he opened the gate and entered the vicarage garden, where the great hollyhocks stood in rows, and the peaches, catching the last rays of the sun aslant, were glowing against the southern gable. To the stranger--to the American, in particular--who looked in as he passed, it seemed a paradise, that garden. But--for peaches are not peace, nor hollyhocks either--its owner passed through it with compressed lips and tingling cheeks. He entered the porch, where one or two packing-cases told of coming changes; then he stood irresolute in the cool hall, remembering that he had intended to dine at the Chase, and that there was nothing prepared for him here. Not that he had an appetite, but dinner was a decent observance, and it seemed to him that not to dine would be to lose his hold on life and fall into abysses before his time.
It is well, when we are unfortunate, to consider how much worse a minute, a few seconds, may see us. A faint sound at his elbow caused him to turn. The door of the dining-room was ajar, and through the opening a face peered at him. The young vicar did not start, but he drew a deep breath, and stiffened as he gazed. A minute, and his lips--while the other face, with a shifty smile, half mockery, half shame, returned his look--formed the word "Father!"
It was not audible two paces away. But as it fell the clergyman glanced round with a gesture of alarm, and at a single stride he was in the dining-room, and had shut the door behind him. The other man--a shambling creature, grey-haired and blear-eyed and unwashed, with a beard of a week's growth--fell back to the table and leaned against it. His rusty black clothes and his broken boots seemed to share, rather than to impart, the look of decay which marked his person. The vicar, with his back against the door, looked at him and shuddered, and then looked again, his face hard and his eyes gloomy. "Well," he said, in a low stern voice, "what is the meaning of this? You know our agreement. Why have you broken it, sir?"
The old man pursed up his lips, and, with his head on one side, contemplated his questioner in silence. Then he said suddenly, "Blow the agreement!"
The vicar winced as if he had been struck. But he found words again.
"If you can do without the money," he said, "so much the better. But----"
"Blow the money!" cried the old man, with the same violence. Notwithstanding his words, he stood in awe of his son, and was trying to gain courage by working himself into a passion. "What is money?" he continued. "I want no money! I am coming to live with you. You are going to be married. I heard of it, though you kept it close, my boy! I heard of it, and I said to myself, 'Good! I will go and live with my boy. And his wife shall take care of my little comforts.'"
The younger man shivered. He thought of Patty, and he looked at the old man before him, sly, vicious, gin-sodden--and his father! "You do not want to live with me," he answered coldly. "You could not bear to live with me for one week, and you know it. Will you tell me what you do want, and why you have left Glasgow?"
"To congratulate you!" his father answered, with a drunken chuckle. "Walter Jones and Patty Stanton--third time of asking! Oh, I heard of it! But not through you. Why," he continued, with a quick change to ferocity, "would you not ask your own father to your wedding, you ungrateful boy?"
"No," the vicar replied sternly, "he being such as he is, I would not."
"Oh, you are ashamed of him, are you? You have kept him dark, I fancy?" the old man replied, grinning with wicked enjoyment as he saw how his son winced at each sentence, how his colour went and came. "Well, now you will have the pleasure of introducing me to the squire, and to daughter Patty, and to all your friends. It will be a pleasant surprise for them. I'll be bound you said I was dead."
"I have not said you were dead."
"Don't you wish I was?"
"God keep me from it!" the vicar groaned.
On that, the two men stood looking at each other, the one neat, clean-shaven, conventional, the other vile with the degradation of drink. Though the windows stood open, the room was full of the smell of spirits, and seemed itself soiled and degraded. Suddenly the younger man sat down at the table, and, burying his face between his hands, fell into a storm of weeping.
His father shifted his feet, and licking his lips nervously, looked at him in maudlin shame; then from him to the sideboard, in search of his supporter under all trials. But the sideboard was bare, the doors closed, the key invisible. Mr. Jones grew indignant. "There, stop that foolery!" he said brutally. "You make me sick."
The rough adjuration restored the young man's nerve, and he looked up, his cheeks wet with tears. Tears in a man are shameful; but this tragedy was one not to be evaded by manliness, or, indeed, by any help of men. "Tell me what it is you want," he said wearily.
"More money," his father snarled. The liquor with which he had primed himself was losing its effect. "I cannot live on what you give me. Glasgow is a dear place. The money ought to be mine; all of it!"
"You have had two hundred a year--one-half of my mother's money."
"I know. I want three."
"Well, you cannot have it," the son answered languidly. "If you must know, I have agreed to settle one-half of my income on my wife now, and the other half at your death. Therefore it will not be in my power to allow you more. You have spent your own fortune, and you have no claim on my mother's money."
"Very well," Mr. Jones answered, his head trembling with rage and weakness. "Then I stay with you. I stay here. Your father-in-law that is to be will be glad to meet his old friend again--I have no doubt. We were at college together. I dare say he will acknowledge me, if my own son is too proud to do so. I shall stay here until I am tired of the country."
The young man looked at him in despair. Supplication he knew would avail him nothing, and the only threat he could use--that he would stop his father's allowance--would have no terrors, for he could not execute it. To let his father go to the workhouse would increase the scandal a hundred times. He rose at last and went out. His housekeeper had come in, and he told her, keeping his burning face averted, to prepare a bed and get supper for two. He shrank--he whose life in Acton had been so full of propriety--from saying who his guest was. Let his father proclaim himself if he would; that would be less painful. The truth must out. Once before, at his first curacy, the young man, younger then and more hopeful, had tried the work of reformation. He had made a home for his father, and done what he could. And the end had been hot, flaming shame, and an exposure which had driven him to the other end of England.
When he left the house next morning, though his mind was made up to go to the squire and tell him all, he lingered on the white dusty road. The sunlight fell about him in dazzling chequers, and, save for the humming of the bees overhead and the whirr of a reaping-machine in a neighbouring field, the stillness of the August noon hung with the haze over the landscape. His heart, despite his resolution, grew hot within him, as he looked around, and contrasted the peacefulness of nature with the tumult of shame and agitation in his own breast. There was the school which he opened with prayers four times a week. Between the trees he caught a grey glimpse of the church--his church. As he looked his secret grew more sordid, more formidable.
He turned at last with an effort to enter the gates, and saw Patty and her sister, Mrs. Foley, coming down the avenue. They were still a long way off, their light frocks and parasols flitting from sunlight to shadow, and shadow to sunlight, as they advanced. The young man halted. Had Patty been alone, he would have gone to her and told her all; and surely, surely, though he doubted it at this moment, he would have won comfort--for love laughs at vicarious shame. But the Partridge's presence frightened him. Mrs. Foley, round and small and plump, in all things the antithesis of her husband, had yet imbibed something of Jim's dryness. The vicar feared her under the present circumstances, and he turned and fled down the road. He would let them pass--probably they were going to the vicarage--and he would then step up and see the squire.
He was right in supposing that the ladies were going to the vicarage. As they went in that direction, they came upon a strange dissolute old man whom they eyed with wondering dislike, and to whom they gave a wide berth as they passed. They had not gone by long before a third person came through the lodge gates and sauntered after them. This was Jim Foley, come out, with his hands in his pockets and a one-eyed terrier at his heels, to smoke his morning pipe. He, too, espied the old toper, and at sight of him took his pipe from his mouth and stood in the middle of the road, an expression of surprise on his features; while Mr. Jones, becoming aware of him too late--for his faculties were not of the sharpest in the morning--also stood by some instinct and looked, with a growing sense of unpleasant recognition, at his lanky figure.
"Hallo!" said Jim. Mr. Jones did not answer, but stood blinking in the sunshine. He looked more blear-eyed and shabby, more hopelessly gone to seed, than he had looked in the vicarage dining-room.
"Hallo!" said Foley again. "My old friend Wilkins, I think!"
"My name is Jones," the man muttered.
"Ah, Jones is it? Jones vice Wilkins resigned," Jim replied, with ironical politeness. "Come down to Acton upon a little matter of business, I suppose. Now look here, Jones vice Wilkins," he continued, pointing each sentence with a wave of his pipe, "I see your game. You have come down here to screw out a ten-pound note, by threatening to tell the squire some old story of my turf days. That is it, isn't it?"
Mr. Jones opened his mouth to deny the charge but thought better of it; either because of the settled scepticism which Foley's face expressed, or because he saw a ten-pound note in the immediate future. He remained silent.
"Just so," Foley went on with a nod, replacing his pipe in his mouth and his hand in his pocket. "Well, it won't do. It won't do, do you understand? Because, do you see, you have not accounted for the last pony I sent you to put on Paradox for the Two Thousand. And I will just trouble you for it and three to the back of it. Three to one was the starting price, I think, Mr. Jones."
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 appetite for a country walk was spoiled by the meeting, tottered onwards too, in the opposite direction, rather than seem, by turning, to be dogging 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 passing 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 passed 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 glass 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 glass, 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 passed 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!
"But I did not tell you," the clergyman replied, driving his stick into the ground and working it about while his face grew scarlet--"and I take great shame to myself that I did not, Mr. Stanton--that my father was much----"
"Good heavens, Jones!" Jim broke out, his patience exhausted. "What on earth has your father to do with it? Yesterday you gave me to understand that you had some entanglement which weighed on your mind. And I thought that you had come here to make a clean breast of it. Instead of which--for Heaven's sake man, don't make me think that you are not running straight!"
The vicar glared at him, while the squire gazed at both. "But that old man," Jones said at last, almost at choking point by this time, "whom you saw this afternoon was----"
Jim struck in again savagely. "We do not want to know anything about him either. As for him, he is----"
"My father!"
"He is dead," Jim persisted, raising his hand for silence, and determined to keep his man to the point and to have things straightened out. "We do not want to hear anything about him. He is dead. We want----"
"Who is dead?"
The question was the vicar's. He wheeled round as he put it, his face white, his voice changed. The squire, who, like most listeners, had learned more than the talkers, saw his tremendous agitation, and, grasping some idea of the truth, tried to intercept Foley's answer. But he was too late. "The old fellow we went to see off," Jim said, almost lightly. "He is dead. Died in a fit half an hour ago, I tell you."
"Dead?"
"Yes, dead. At least the doctor says so."
The vicar put his hands to his face, and turned away, his back shaking. The others looked at him. "He was--he was my father!" he murmured--almost under his breath. And even Jim, his eyes as wide as saucers, understood.
"Fetch some wine, you fool" the squire muttered, giving him a nudge. And he put his arm round the clergyman, and led him to a seat in the shade. There, I think, Walter Jones prayed that he might not be thankful. Man is weak. And conventional man very weak.
Once a gentleman always a gentleman, was the squire's motto. There was no attempt at concealment. The poor man, whose life had been so unlovely, lay at peace at last in the best room at the vicarage, and was presently, with some tears of pity shed by gentle eyes, laid in a quiet corner of the churchyard. There was talk, of course, but the talk was confined to the village, where the possession of a drunken father was not uncommon, or uncharitably considered. The worst of the dead man was known only to Jim Foley, and he kept it even from his wife; while any Spartan thoughts which the squire might otherwise have entertained, any objections he might have raised to his daughter's match, were rendered futile and quixotic by the strange mode in which the denouement had been reached in his presence. He consented, and all--after an interval--went well. But the vicar will sometimes, I think, in the days to come, when prosperity laps him round, wander to the churchyard and recall the hot noon when he walked the roads haunted by that strange sense of forlornness and ruin.