Henry Eardley left the Lodge with a joyous feeling of a more complicated nature than would have arisen only from satisfaction at having been relieved of painful doubts in regard to a member of his flock. His thoughts were by no means absorbed by the case of Lottie, though he went out of his way to let it be known in the cottage of Holdich, and in various dwellings in Axe, that the young maid had not been dismissed for any fault, and that she had taken nothing with her that was not honestly her own.
Mr. Eardley did what he could to clear the character of Lottie from the imputation resting upon it; but it is as easy to force back an overflowing river into its usual channel as to stay the flood of calumny when once it has spread far and wide. The vicar could not throw light on the mystery of Lottie’s hasty flight from Wildwaste, or her possession of a considerable sum of money for which she would not account.
“Folk may talk till they’re black in the face,” said Mrs. Green to her neighbour the baker, “but they can’t talk away them five bright sovereigns as I seed with these eyes. Girls can’t make gold pieces out of old tea-leaves; and if any one gave ’em to her, why don’t she say so at once?”
Young Stone returned to his lodging that evening with a black eye and a great swelling on his brow.
“O Steady, you have had one of your falls!” exclaimed Lottie, with affectionate sympathy.
The lad’s face was working with suppressed emotion. He sat down heavily, and passed his hand through his mass of shaggy light hair before he replied in his slow, peculiar drawl,—
“Bat Maule says—says he—you took fifteen pounds from your master’s desk, and he was a-goin’ to send you to jail, only Miss Isa begged and prayed, and so he let you off.”
It was a long speech for the lad to utter; his drawled-out words fell on Lottie’s ear like the drip, drip of water, which is said at length to produce madness in the victim on whose head it descends.
“And what did you say?” exclaimed the miserable Lottie, starting up from her seat.
“I didn’t say nothing, I knocked him down,” replied Steady; “but he did the like by me.”