Jim laughed aloud. “Smiley, you’re a poet,” he said, “but you came pretty near the truth, only it was I who was kissing her hand.”
For a while longer they talked, but at length Jim proposed that the poacher should go at once to Ted Barnes, the postman, and find out whether Mrs. Darling was at the Manor or not, and if not, perhaps Ted could be induced to tell him the address to which her letters were forwarded. “Say you want to send her a couple of rabbits,” Jim suggested, with a laugh. He looked at his watch. “It will be dusk in two hours or so. Meet me here at about that time, just before it is dark.”
Smiley seemed eager to be of service, and, repeatedly touching his forelock, went off on his mission in high spirits, turning round to wave a dirty hand to his adored friend as he glided away amongst the tree trunks into the haze. Thereupon Jim set off for a walk in the direction of the neighbouring village of Bedley-Sutton, in order to pass the time; and it was an hour later that he returned to the woods of the Manor.
There was still another hour to wait before he might expect Smiley’s return; and he therefore strolled through the silent woods, visiting with gloomy curiosity the various well-remembered scenes of his days of captivity. “How could I ever have stood it?” he questioned himself; yet at the back of his mind there was the overwhelming consciousness that here was the home of his forefathers, the home he wished to hand on to his son, but that now it belonged to Dolly, a woman to whom he felt no sense of relationship, and ultimately it would pass out of his family, unless he laid claim to it anew.
The turmoil in his mind was extreme, and his dilemma was made more desperate by the thought that Monimé, whose instinctive wisdom and practical sympathy might now be so helpful, must be shut out from these events and kept in ignorance of his perplexity. He yearned to write to her and make a clean breast of it, yet he feared the blighting effect of such a confession of crude error and deception. With his whole heart he detested himself.
His wandering footsteps led him at length to a point not far distant from the bottom of the Manor garden. He had been threading his way unconsciously through undergrowth and brambles, carrying his coat over his arm and his hat in his hand; and he was about to step out on to the mossy pathway which led to the garden gate when suddenly he heard voices at no great distance, and with beating heart, he stepped back into a thicket and crouched there behind the tall-growing bracken.
A moment later he was staring with flushed face at the approaching figures of Dolly and George Merrivall, who were strolling towards him, she gazing up at her middle-aged companion, and he, his arm about her, looking down at her with his large fish-like eyes. The picture stamped itself savagely upon his mind.
Dolly was wearing a smart black coat and skirt, and a black-and-white scarf was flung around her neck. A saucy little black felt hat, adorned with a stiff feather, showed up her golden hair and the fair complexion of her childlike face. Merrivall, in a new walking-suit of grey homespun, a large cap to match, and grey stockings covering his thin legs, seemed to be clothed to approximate to the grey haze of the afternoon; and even his face appeared grey, like the dead ashes of a fire long burnt out.
Soon they were close at hand, and Jim could hear their words.