“Right. Now, Percy. Seriously, mind. There must be no more dallying. You know what I mean?”
“Not likely, knowing what I know now.”
“Then you’d better go and get it over at once. I’ll say good-bye to the Bayfields for you. You turn round right here. Good-bye now—and one of these days you’ll bless your stars for this lucky escape.”
“Then you’ll let me hear soon, Hilary?”
“In a couple of days at the outside. Good-bye.”
A staunch handgrip, and the older man sat there, looking after the receding form of the younger.
“It strikes me,” he said to himself as he turned his horse’s head along the track again. “It strikes me that I’ve been only just in time to get that young fool out of a most deadly mess. Heavens! what a ghastly complication it would have been. Moreover, I believe he was sent out here to find out about me, and what I was doing. Well, instead of him reclaiming me, it has befallen that I have been the one marked out to reclaim him.”
Then as he sent his horse along at a brisk canter to make up the time lost during their talk, his mind reverted to himself and his own affairs. What a series of surprises had been contained within the last twenty-four hours. Could it have been only yesterday that he came along this road, serene, content, with no forewarning of what lay in store? Why, it seemed that half a lifetime’s drama had been played out within that brief space—and now, as he pressed on to overtake Bayfield’s conveyance, the tilt of which was visible some distance ahead moving through the bushes, it seemed that with every stride of his horse he was advancing into a purer atmosphere. He felt as one, who, having struck upon strange and unwelcome surprises in the foul nauseous air of some long, underground cavern, was drawing nearer and nearer again to the free, wholesome, open light of day.
Well, he had saved his young kinsman, and now he was called upon to face the payment of the price. The time he had spent here, the bright, beautiful, purifying time, was at an end. The past, of which, looking back upon, he sickened, was not to be so easily buried after all. Had it not risen up when least expected, to haunt him, to exact its retribution? Hermia would certainly keep her word; caring nothing in her vindictive spite, to what extent she blackened herself so long as she could sufficiently besmirch him. Still he would do all he could, if not to defeat her intentions, at any rate to draw half their sting. One, at all events, should remain unsullied by the mire which he well knew she would relentlessly spatter in all directions. That he resolved.
Then a faint, vague, straw of a hope, beset him. What if she had been playing a game of bluff? What if she was by no means so ready to give herself away as she had affected to be? What if—when she found there was nothing to be gained by it—she were to adopt the more prudent course, and maintain silence? It was just a chance, but knowing so well, her narrow, soulless nature, he knew it to be a slender one.