"A tinker!" he cried,—"that's a vagrant; and I'm a magistrate, and I've a great mind to send you to the treadmill,—that I have. What do you do here, I say? You have not answered my question."
"What does I do 'ere?" said Mr. Sprott. "Vy, you had better ax my crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me."
"What! my nephew knows you?"
"W-hew," whistled the tinker, "your nephew is it, sir? I have a great respek for your family. I 've knowed Mrs. Fairfilt the vashervoman this many a year. I 'umbly ax your pardon." And he took off his hat this time.
Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what happened that night, but it was what is called "a curious coincidence" that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire, and that that day he had called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of a very high spirit, and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried about him, with his tracts and glue-pots.
The next morning there was an inquiry made for the tinker, but he had disappeared from the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER XVI.
It was a fortunate thing that the dejeune dansant so absorbed Mr. Richard Avenel's thoughts that even the conflagration of his rick could not scare away the graceful and poetic images connected with that pastoral festivity. He was even loose and careless in the questions he put to Leonard about the tinker; nor did he send justice in pursuit of that itinerant trader; for, to say truth, Richard Avenel was a man accustomed to make enemies amongst the lower orders; and though he suspected Mr. Sprott of destroying his rick, yet, when he once set about suspecting, he found he had quite as good cause to suspect fifty other persons. How on earth could a man puzzle himself about ricks and tinkers when all his cares and energies were devoted to a /dejeune dansant/? It was a maxim of Richard Avenel's, as it ought to be of every clever man, "to do one thing at a time;" and therefore he postponed all other considerations till the /dejeune dansant/ was fairly done with. Amongst these considerations was the letter which Leonard wished to write to the parson. "Wait a bit, and we will both write!" said Richard, good- humouredly, "the moment the dijeune dansant is over!"
It must be owned that this fete was no ordinary provincial ceremonial.
Richard Avenel was a man to do a thing well when he set about it,—
"He soused the cabbage with a bounteous heart."