Captain Puffin came a step closer.
“Now I’ll tell you what it is, Miss Mapp,” he said. “If you dare to say that I was drunk, Major and I, my fren’ the Major and I will say you were drunk. Perhaps you think my fren’ the Major’s drunk too. But sure’s I live, I’ll say we were taking lil’ walk in the moonlight and found you trying to post a letter with no ’dress on it, and couldn’t find the slit to put it in. But ’slong as you say nothing, I say nothing. Can’t say fairer than that. Liberal terms. Mutual Protection Society. Your lips sealed, our lips sealed. Strictly private. All trespassers will be prosecuted. By order. Hic!”
Miss Mapp felt that Major Benjy ought instantly to have challenged his ignoble friend to another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, made her certain that her nose was turning red. She still boiled with rage, but her mind grew cold with odious apprehensions: she was like an ice-pudding with scalding sauce… There they all stood, veiled in vapours, and outlined by the red light that streamed from the still-open door of the intoxicated Puffin, getting colder every moment.
“Yessorno,” said Puffin, with chattering teeth.
Bitter as it was to accept those outrageous terms, there really seemed, without the Major’s support, to be no way out of it.
“Yes,” said Miss Mapp.
Puffin gave a loud crow.
“The ayes have it, Major,” he said. “So we’re all frens again. Goonight everybody.”
Miss Mapp let herself into her house in an agony of mortification. She could scarcely realize that her little expedition, undertaken with so much ardent and earnest curiosity only a quarter of an hour ago, had ended in so deplorable a surfeit of sensation. She had gone out in obedience to an innocent and, indeed, laudable desire to ascertain how Major Benjy spent those evenings on which he had deceived her into imagining that, owing to her influence, he had gone ever so early to bed, only to find that he sat up ever so late and that she was fettered by a promise not to breathe to a soul a single word about the depravity of Captain Puffin, on pain of being herself accused out of the mouth of two witnesses of being equally depraved herself. More wounding yet was the part played by her Major Benjy in these odious transactions, and it was only possible to conclude that he put a higher value on his fellowship with his degraded friend than on chivalry itself… And what did his silence imply? Probably it was a defensive one; he imagined that he, too, would be included in the stories that Miss Mapp proposed to sow broadcast upon the fruitful fields of Tilling, and, indeed, when she called to mind his bellowing about worm-casts, his general instability of speech and equilibrium, she told herself that he had ample cause for such a supposition. He, when his lights were out, was abetting, assisting and perhaps joining Captain Puffin. When his window was alight on alternate nights she made no doubt now that Captain Puffin was performing a similar rôle. This had been going on for weeks under her very nose, without her having the smallest suspicion of it.