"Good-day ter ye," responded the gamekeeper, picking up his birds, and smoothing their mottled feathers as he went along. "I wouldn't a thought it of yon lass, though, not if the parson himself had told me. That I wouldn't."
Meantime young Storms walked toward home, smiling, nay, at times, laughing, as he went. The cruel treachery of his conversation with the keeper filled him with vicious delight. He knew well enough that the whole subject would be made the gossip of every house in the village within twenty-four hours, and revelled in the thought. If it were possible for him to marry Ruth in the end, this scandal would be of little importance to him; if not, it should be made to sting her, and poison the returning life of young Hurst. Under any circumstances, it was an evil inspiration, over which he gloated triumphantly.
So full was the young plotter's brain of this idea, that he was unconscious of the rapidity with which he approached home, until the farm-house hove in view, a long, stone building sheltered by orchards, flanked by outhouses, and clothed to the roof with rare old ivy. It was, in truth, something better than a common farm-dwelling, for an oriel window jutted out here, a stone balcony there, and the sunken entrance-door was of solid oak; such as might have given access to "The Rest" itself.
There had been plenty of shrubbery, with a bright flower-garden in front, and on one side of the house; but of the first, there was only a scattering and ragged bush left to struggle for life, here and there, while every sweet blossom of the past had given way to coarse garden vegetables, which were crowded into less and less space each year, by fields of barley or corn, that covered what had once been a pretty lawn and park.
"Ah, if I could but get this in fee simple. If he had died I might!" thought the young man, as he walked round to the back door. "If he had only died!"
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE SICK MAN WRITES A LETTER.
WILLIAM Jessup seemed to be getting better rapidly after those few words with Ruth, that had lifted a mountain of pain from his heart, pain deeper and keener than the biting anguish of his wound, or the fever which preyed upon him continually, though he scarcely felt it, now that the anguish of mind was gone.
"I shall be better, I shall be quite well, only let me get one word to him. He is so rash. Ah, when that is done, I can rest a little," he kept thinking to himself, for the subject seemed so distasteful to Ruth that he shrunk from naming it to her. "If the old man Storms would but come, I might trust him; but he always sends that lad, who frightens Ruth. Poor child, poor child!"