There was, indeed, nothing to answer. In the first flush of his determination to take the field, he had been for going straight to old Brooks the saddler, with whom he had had friendly dealings ever since his schooldays, and asking him, in effect, what he meant by it. But cool-headed Dick had restrained him.
"What can you do more than I did? I laughed, and said, 'That's a pretty story to have told about you'; and he said, 'Yes, Captain, you ought to stop it. I'll tell everybody exactly what you tell me to tell them,' and waited with his head on one side for my version. What's your version going to be when you've told him the story he heard is a lie, which he knows well enough already?"
So the Squire went to Brooks, the saddler, because he always did go in to have a chat with him at the commencement of the hunting season, but said nothing to him at all of what they were both thinking about. The chat was lively on both sides, but when he went out of the shop he knew that Brooks knew why he had come. To brazen it out.
No need to go through the places he went to, and the people he talked to. He went everywhere he had been accustomed to go, and he talked to everybody he had been accustomed to talk to. And because he was unused to playing a part, he overdid this one. He had been a hearty man with his equals. Now he was almost noisy. He had been a cordially condescending man with his inferiors. Now he was effusively patronising. He would have done better to sulk in his tent until the storm of rumour had died down. And he felt every curious look, every unasked question.
It was ominous that none of his friends—for he had many lifelong friends amongst his country neighbours, though no very intimate ones—said to him that ugly rumours were going about, and that they thought he ought to know of them so that he could contradict them. It was obvious that he knew of them, and that they thought he could not contradict them, or they would have spoken. Nobody could tell anybody else that he had heard the truth of these absurd stories from Clinton himself, and it was so and so. Nobody cut him, nobody even avoided him; it was, indeed, difficult to do so, he was so ubiquitous; but the unasked, unanswered questions behind all the surface sociality poisoned the air. The Squire was in torment in all his comings and goings.
Dick fared better, because he took things more naturally. But nobody asked him questions either. He was not an easy man to ask questions of. If they had done so, he would have been ready with his answer: "I can't tell you the truth of the story, because it's a family matter. But I'll tell you this much: Mrs. Amberley tried to blackmail my father, and he told her to go to the devil." It would not have answered much, but it would have made some impression.
But the trouble was, and Dick felt it deeply, that he could take no steps of his own. He could go to nobody and say, "I know there are ugly rumours going about against us. Tell me, as a friend, what they are, and I'll answer them." The answer, in that case, would have had to be different, and must have contained the truth of the story, if it were to be satisfying.
The Squire grew thinner and older, almost noticeably so, every day. Mrs. Clinton was in the deepest distress about him, but could do nothing. He would come home, from hunting, or from Petty Sessions, which he now attended regularly, and keep miserable silence, all his spirit gone. She and Joan were companionable with him, as far as he would let them be, and he liked to have them with him; but he would not talk, or if he roused himself to do so, it was with such painful effort that it was plain that it was only to please them, and brought no relief to himself. He would have no one asked to the house. He was afraid of refusals.
One morning a letter came to him with the stamp of a Government office, franked by the Minister at the head of that office. He opened it in surprise. It ran as follows:
DEAR MR. CLINTON,