“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”
Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.
“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress, you know.”
And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a voice like a rook, came and claimed her.
“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”
Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening. When at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and prepared to go home. She was about to get into it, when she observed a familiar figure standing among the few midnight loafers who had gathered without the shadow of the porch.
“Hurley!” she exclaimed.
The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching his hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed and trusted them. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society, with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a common cause of honouring her. Inez asserted that, living, as she did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her lips.
Well, Miss Belmont had once coaxed Jim Hurley into being her handy man, foreseeing his redemption in an innocent association with flowers and the cult of the artless cabbage. He proved loyal to her, gained her confidence, knew all about the button and other matters of family moment. But the contiguity of the kitchen-garden with Squire Thorneycroft’s pheasant-coops was too much for hereditary proclivities. He stole eggs, sold them, was detected, prosecuted, sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and disappeared. Miss Belmont herself met him on his discharge from the jail gates, but he was not to be induced to return. The wild man was in his brain, and off he had gone, with Parthian shots of affection, in quest of fun. And for two years she had not seen him again until to-night, when his scratch of red hair and beard—which always looked as if he had just pulled his head out of a quickset—suddenly blew into flame before her. And then there followed a shock of distress.
“Jim! Why, what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?”