“The Lord pardon and justify me indignation,” he muttered. “I was a priest before an author.”
It was fine, but a loaded sky, when they set forth upon their journey of twenty or so miles, Joan riding pillion behind her grandfather on the sober red nag. After much cross work over villainous tracks, they were got at last into the Southampton turnpike, when they were joined by a single horseman, riding a handsome barb, who, with a very favourable face for Joan, pulled alongside of them, as they jogged on, and fell into easy talk.
“Dost ride to overtake a bishopric, master clergyman,” says he, “that you carry with you such a sweet bribe for preferment?”
Joan looked up, softly panting. Could he somehow have got wind already of their mission, and have taken them by the way to forestall it? But her eyes fell again before the besieging gaze of the cavalier.
He was a swart man of fifty or so, with a rather sooty expression, and his under-lip stuck out. His eyes, bagging a little in the lower lids, smouldered half-shut, between lust and weariness, under the blackest brows; and, for the rest, he was dressed as black as the devil, with a sparkle of diamonds here and there in his bosom. Joan looked down breathless.
“I seek no preferment, sir, but a reasonable justice,” said the curate; and, in a little, between this and that, had ingenuously, though with a certain twinkling eye for the humour of it all, confessed his whole case to the stranger. But Joan uttered not a word.
The cavalier laughed, then frowned mightily for a while. “We will indict these petty rogues of office on a quo warranto,” he growled. “What! does not ‘cleanness of body proceed from a due reverence of God’? Go on, sir, and I will promise you the King’s consideration.”
Then he forgot his indignation, leering at the girl again.
“And what is your business with Charles, pretty flower?” said he.
But, before she could answer, whish! went Pinwires’s girth out of its buckle, and parson and girl tumbled into the road.