“There is something else, then, that makes you anxious. What is it?”
“Only that on Saturday an order came from the High Sheriff for my uncle to go to-day to Hereford and sign Prince Rupert’s Protestation. Of course he refuses to go, but I fear it may lead to trouble.”
“I trust not,” said Gabriel, gravely. “We seem so nearly through our difficulties. To-morrow night my father and mother coming, and on Wednesday our marriage and escape. By-the-bye, what of Waghorn?”
“He has been quite quiet since the Directory was adopted. My uncle cannot make him out.”
Even as they spoke of him, Peter Waghorn, in the tiled cottage by the churchyard, was musing over the Vicar’s words the last time he had heard him preach. Against his will the man had been impressed by the way in which Dr. Coke had behaved during the past few weeks under great provocation; and now as he sat carving the delicate pattern of vine leaves on the cupboard door, he remembered how on the previous day the Vicar had made his carving into a parable, and had shown in the sermon that just as no two branches, and even no two leaves were precisely alike, yet all grew from the parent vine, so it was with Christians.
This was an astonishing notion to Waghorn; he doubted whether it was sound doctrine, yet it haunted him curiously. As he sat brooding over it that Monday afternoon, there came a peremptory knock, and his door was flung open by no less a person than the Governor of Canon Frome.
Norton was now quite recovered, and evidently in a very bad humour; the wood-carver noticed that the lines of cruelty about his mouth were much more clearly marked.
“Well, scarecrow,” he observed, flinging himself into a chair. “You have news, I hope, at last of Captain Harford.”
“No news, sir,” said Waghorn. “I have watched the Vicarage and have made close inquiry in the village, but can learn naught.”
“Yet I am certain he can’t be far,” said Norton. “And find him I will. If only you’d a head on your shoulders you would have trapped him long ago.”