“He ain’t fur to seek,” answered the Captain with a short laugh.
“He’s the devil and all his angels smithered into one!” raved Job.
“That’s drawrin’ of it mild,” said Captain Hap.
“This—low—matter does not trouble me,” observed Bayard, smiling with genuine and beautiful remoteness.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Captain Hap; “that’s all you know!”
XXI.
Captain Hap was wiser in his generation than the child of light. Before a week had gone by, Bayard found himself the victim of one of the cruelest forms of human persecution—the scandal of a provincial town.
Its full force fell suddenly upon him.
Now, this was the one thing for which he was totally unprepared; of every other kind of martyrdom, it seemed to him, he had recognized the possibility: this had never entered his mind.
He accepted it with that outward serenity which means in a man of his temperament the costliest expenditure of inward vitality, and, turning neither to the right nor to the left, kept on his way.