He was thankful beyond measure that the Vicar picked him up without delay, for his voice went suddenly as husky as bran.
"Not yet! not yet!" his Reverence said. "That's quite another thing. Though, for that matter, the girl wished to prevail over my scruples even there, and persuade me to an actual date and definite consent. But no. They must possess their souls in patience until I 've had opportunity to study them under these new conditions. I 'm prepared to let her go, since her happiness requires it, but I 'm not going to throw her. Besides ... a little object lesson of this kind appeared to me desirable. As I pointed out to Pam, the man's conduct in the matter left much to be desired. Had he been possessed of the natural instincts of a gentleman he would have approached me first, before intruding himself upon the girl's affections."
"Of course," the Spawer acquiesced hurriedly.
He loathed himself for a cowardly renegade as he did so, but the priest's eye, to his guilty vision, fixed him with such a meaning glance of severity that he felt anything short of verbal agreement would betray him.
"Of course," Father Mostyn repeated, with renewed emphasis. "The proper way—indeed, the only way for a gentleman—would have been to approach me in the first instance, and receive my sanction before unsettling the girl with a suit which subsequent events might prove to be undesirable. But there, of course, you have the man, unfortunately. I daresay his nature would be quite unable to appreciate the niceness of the point—even if you explained it to him. Now you and I"—here the terrible condemnatory look seemed to be fixed on the Spawer again—"know these little matters by instinct, as it were. Such things as those are in our blood. We don't work out our conduct by free-hand and rule of three. It 's inbred in us. We act upon them as spontaneously as a pointer points. Ha!" He ticked off the first and second fingers of the left hand with the magnetic index-finger of the right. "Bread ... corkscrew..." and hesitated at the third as though uncertain whether there did not exist some still further necessity. "Ha! to be sure," he said, and wagged his shoulders, "cheese." He ambled genially out of the room again, and returned presently with a loaf of white bread on a wooden trencher, a corkscrew, a lever, and a dish of Cheddar.
"Now, come along! come along!" he said, all his being fused in the glowing warmth of hospitality, and sending forth its comforting rays even to the Spawer's chill fibres. "There 's nothing to wait for—except grace from Heaven. That's it. Draw up your chair and make yourself at home."
And bending his head over the tinned lobster: "In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
CHAPTER XXXIV
And now, thinks the Spawer, with the fine egoism of wounded love, there is not in the whole world a heart so heavy as his.
But he is wrong, for here in Ullbrig hangs a heavier.