Mrs. Laniston had less their safety in mind than the staring of the bullet-eyed acrobat, and the fascinations of the long, unlifted eyelashes of the Beauty-man.
"If you can endure to stay with them every minute of the time, Mr. Jardine," she consented, conditionally. "Don't trust them to Francis—he is so irresponsible and flighty and young."
She felt very certain that Jardine's gravity and dignity would over-awe any possibility of an approach to familiarity which a lack of knowledge of the world on the part of the rustics, or the irrepressible gaiety of his youthful charges might superinduce.
"I'll take them first to a concert of 'high-class singing,'" Jardine said, and for his life he could not forbear a laughing grimace. "I think the sun is a little too high and too hot as yet for the fascinations of the Ferris Wheel."
Then joined by Frank he accompanied the two out on the verandah and down the flight of steps as once more with their white parasols aglare in the sunlight they took their way through the crowd in the square.
CHAPTER IX
Hilary Lloyd had had his doubts as to how serious a view Haxon might take of his discovery of the moonshining enterprise that had contrived to utilise to its own profit the presence here of the Street Fair. With the return of the morning light and its renewal of courage and hope the possible suspicion of a coalition of these interests seemed to him more remote than heretofore. His own association with the moonshiner's family might perhaps be most naturally interpreted as an accident, a fortuitous circumstance, and the extreme publicity of the appearance of the manager of the show both in the company of the girl and the old grandam would be presumed to imply an unconsciousness, an entire freedom from complicity on his part. All the morning, in a sub-acute process of the mind, he had argued these premises, pro and con. While he laboured to reassure the acrobat, to freshen his nerve, to flatter his composure, to reinstate his pride, so grievously cut down in the episode of the handbill, these mental exercises were hardly pretermitted for a moment. When, however, the perilous feat was once more safely performed and Haxon had been fed, and his nerves recuperated, Lloyd, feeling that the moment for the absolutely essential revelation had arrived and could no longer be postponed, drew him aside and intimated that he had disclosures to make of an importance that necessitated closed doors. Together they ascended the stairs to the room they shared, and even there Lloyd looked out on the balcony and down the cross-hall before he began his story.
"Gosh!" exclaimed Haxon irritably. "What's up? You scare me to death! You're gone bug-house, that's what!"
Lloyd was altogether unprepared for the appalled horror that overmastered the acrobat's every power of reasoning when the disclosure was once made. It was as if the dungeons of the Federal prisons were all agape for him, and he could not escape. For some time Lloyd could only induce him to make an effort for composure by warning him that his gasps, his half articulate exclamations like cries, so shrill and sudden they were, his disordered, hasty strides about the room—he actually fell in one of these, jarring the whole floor of the house—would bring inquiry upon them and a surprise that, unexplained, as it needs must be, would develop into suspicion, and this the briefest investigation would lead to complete discovery of the facts with their trail of false accusation.
Lloyd had expected co-operation and a division of the responsibility of devising a plan of action. He had a fund of excellent common sense. He realised that he was a man of most limited education, of an experience curiously restricted, and he did not flatter himself that he had any special native gifts of perspicacity and logic. He felt the need of help and he had longed for this moment of liberation from the solitary torment of his fears—for the sense of a comrade's support and the mental attrition of a mind fresh to these weary problems. The force with which he was flung back on his own resources stunned his capacities for the time being. The revelation had only increased the danger of immediate discovery in the absolute collapse of Haxon's self-control. Lloyd used argument and persuasion, and finally resorted to menacing warnings.