Harry had not heard a word before. At this distance it was impossible for him to catch a syllable, and he was glad of it. He would watch his men and bide his time. It might be his best policy to do nothing, to say nothing, for the present; but he would keep an eye on the house while he thought it over.
The difficulty was for the observer himself to escape observation. The road was so quiet that if he strolled up and down, those other saunterers in the garden could not fail to have their attention attracted to him sooner or later. It was so narrow that they had only to look up in order to see him leaning against the paling of the opposite house. This house, however, was unoccupied, and behind the paling, in the segment of a circle formed by the shortest of suburban carriage drives, grew a clump of laurels which tempted Harry to do a very foolish thing. He crept into the garden of the unoccupied house, and from a point of vantage among the laurels he watched the two men in the garden over the way.
Up and down they walked, backward and forward, and their low voices never ceased; backward and forward, up and down; and now the light of a lamp made oval flames of Lowndes's glasses, now the taller Scrafton's cormorant profile was stamped for an instant on the lighted blinds, while the loathsome sound of his snuff-taking came again and again across the quiet road.
So these men were friends: and Lowndes had carefully implied that they were not even acquainted. Why should he have gone out of his way to do that? He had flown into a temper when that careful implication was inadvertently ignored; and had afterwards so feared the tell-tale effect of this unguarded outbreak that he had gone all the way to Teddington with elaborate apologies and ingenious explanations.
Stay: no: he had gone to Teddington with an ulterior motive, which only this instant dawned upon Harry Ringrose. Now he thought of it, there had been an obvious absence of premeditation about both the apology and the explanation; in fact, he had never before heard the fluent Lowndes hesitate so often for a word. Why? Because he had gone to Teddington that morning with quite another object, and at last Harry saw what it was.
He remembered Mrs. Bickersteth's announcement that this term Mr. Scrafton was coming half-an-hour earlier than formerly. He remembered how cleverly Lowndes had contrived to discover that Scrafton was already in the house. He had never forgotten Scrafton's face on hearing the new master's name. The thing was plain as daylight, and Harry only wondered how and why he had not seen it at once. Gordon Lowndes had gone to Teddington simply and solely to intercept his friend Scrafton, and to warn him that he was about to meet a son of the missing Henry Ringrose.
But why warn him? What had Harry's father been to Scrafton, or Scrafton to Harry's father? The lad's blood ran hot with suspicion, ran cold with surmise: there were the two men who could tell him the truth, there within twenty yards of him: he heard their every footfall in the gravel, heard one taking snuff, and the other talking, talking, talking in an endless whisper. Yet he could not walk boldly across the road and challenge them to tell him the truth! He was not sure that it would be a wise thing to do, but it galled him to feel that he could not do it. Lowndes loved a scene as much as he hated one, but Harry felt he could have stood up to Lowndes alone. Scrafton was a loathly being, but he would not have daunted Harry by himself. It was the two together, the coarse bully and the keen-witted man of the world, strong men both, whom the lad could not bring himself to challenge in cold blood. He had, indeed, too much sense; but, in an agony of self-upbraiding consciousness, he kept blaming and hating himself for having too little pluck. He thought of the motto on his bedroom wall at home. He would have it down; it was not for him. It was only for those who had some pluck to lose.
And as he cowered in the garden of the empty house, a white face among the leaves, impotent, bewildered, self-tormenting, the front door opened across the road, and a supple, strong figure stood so straight in the mouth of the lighted passage, a silhouette crowned with gold by the lamp within. For an instant Harry's heart seemed to stop, and the next instant to rush from his keeping to that lighted door. He had forgotten the existence of Fanny Lowndes.
"Dinner is ready," she said. Harry heard the words distinctly: there was no reason to lower that honest voice. But he thought that he detected an unwonted note of fear—one of disgust he could swear to—and instantly his mind was going over every conversation he had ever had with the girl, hunting for that unwonted note which was yet not entirely unfamiliar. He felt certain that he had heard it before.
"One moment," replied Lowndes; and his voice sank once more, and so continued volubly for some minutes: then the pair went in.