“Then you can’t have the common instincts of a gentleman. Well, good-bye! Grandfather has salvation all right this time; he said he’d put the stick about me if I dared to speak to you.”
“He won’t know.”
“Won’t know? Why I shall tell him, of course, when I get back.”
“But—but he mustn’t beat you!”
She eyed him for a moment or two in silence. “Mustn’t he? I advise you to go and tell him.” She walked away slowly, whistling; but by-and-by broke into a run and was gone, the puppy scampering behind her.
As the days grew longer and the weather milder, Taffy and his father worked late into the evenings; sometimes, if the job needed to be finished, by the light of a couple of candles.
One evening, about nine o’clock, the boy as he planed a bench paused suddenly. “What’s that?”
They listened. The door stood open, and after a second or two they heard the sound of feet tiptoeing away up the path outside.
“Spies, perhaps,” said his father. “If so, let them go in peace.”
But he was not altogether easy. There had been strange doings up at the Bryanite Chapel of late. He still visited a few of his parishioners regularly—hill farmers and their wives for the most part, who did not happen to be tenants of Squire Moyle, and on whom his visits therefore could bring no harm; and one or two had hinted of strange doings, now that the Bryanites had hold of the old Squire. They themselves had been up—just to look; they confessed it shamefacedly, much in the style of men who have been drinking overnight. Without pressing them and showing himself curious, the Vicar could get at no particulars. But as the summer grew he felt a moral sultriness, as it were, growing with it. The people were off their balance, restless; and behind their behaviour he had a sense, now of something electric, menacing, now of a hand holding it in check. Slowly in those days the conviction deepened in him that he was an alien on this coast, that between him and the hearts of the race he ministered to there stretched an impalpable, impenetrable veil. And all this while the faces he passed on the road, though shy, were kindlier than they had been in the days before his self-confidence left him—it seemed not so long ago.