The afternoon began to wane, while we, with our two companions, yet sat talking by the brook-side. Mr. Charles had washed his face, and his travel-sore, blistered feet, and we had induced him, and the man he called Yates, to share our remnants of bread and cheese.
"Now," he said, starting up, "I am ready to do battle again, even with the Thane of Fife—who, to-night, is one Johnson, a fellow of six feet and twelve stone. What is the hour, Mr. Halifax?"
"Mr. Halifax"—(I felt pleased to hear him for the first time so entitled)—had, unfortunately, no watch among his worldly possessions, and candidly owned the fact. But he made a near guess by calculating the position of his unfailing time-piece, the sun.—It was four o'clock.
"Then I must go. Will you not retract, young gentlemen? Surely you would not lose such a rare treat as 'Macbeth,' with—I will not say my humble self—but with that divine Siddons. Such a woman! Shakspeare himself might lean out of Elysium to watch her. You will join us?"
John made a silent, dolorous negative; as he had done once or twice before, when the actor urged us to accompany him to Coltham for a few hours only—we might be back by midnight, easily.
"What do you think, Phineas?" said John, when we stood in the high-road, waiting for the coach; "I have money—and—we have so little pleasure—we would send word to your father. Do you think it would be wrong?"
I could not say; and to this minute, viewing the question nakedly in a strict and moral sense, I cannot say either whether or no it was an absolute crime; therefore, being accustomed to read my wrong or right in "David's" eyes, I remained perfectly passive.
We waited by the hedge-side for several minutes—Mr. Charles ceased his urging, half in dudgeon, save that he was too pleasant a man really to take offence at anything. His conversation was chiefly directed to me. John took no part therein, but strolled about plucking at the hedge.
When the stage appeared down the winding of the road I was utterly ignorant of what he meant us to do, or if he had any definite purpose at all.
It came—the coachman was hailed. Mr. Charles shook hands with us and mounted—paying his own fare and that of Yates with their handful of charity-pennies, which caused a few minutes' delay in counting, and a great deal of good-humoured joking, as good-humouredly borne.