“You miserable, tattered old beggar! Have I got all out of you that you have to tell, I wonder? Anyhow, I think I know enough to hang the right rascal by. But I shall have to work, work, work.”
On the following day, just three weeks after he left Rishton, Ned Mitchell was again seen leaning over his little cottage gate, smoking a bad cigar, and staring placidly at the broken stocks in the village green. The first persons to note his return were the vicar and his brother Vernon, who strolled through the churchyard together while he was standing at his gate. The younger man changed color at the sight of the colonist; the elder wished him a cheery “Good-day.”
“Ha, Mr. Mitchell, you can’t keep up your incognito any longer. We thought you had gone back to Australia without bidding us good-bye.”
“Never fear, Parson Brander,” returned Mitchell, drily, looking straight into the clergyman’s kindly eyes; “there’s another man has got to say good-bye to you all before I go back.” He glanced from one brother to the other as he uttered these words. Vernon kept his eyes on the ground, but he looked livid. The vicar smiled, and gently shook his head.
“You’ll have to tell me this riddle by-and-by,” said he, in his genial tones.
“Whenever you please, vicar,” said Ned.
And as the two clergymen passed on, Ned Mitchell, without deigning so much as to glance at the younger, raised his hat to the Reverend Meredith Brander, a most unheard-of mark of respect for him to bestow on any dignitary of the Church.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Before the first day of his return to Rishton was over, Ned Mitchell had to submit to the threatened interrogatory of the vicar.
Ned had strolled into the churchyard, and was examining with a rather cynical expression a beautiful marble monument, one of the chief ornaments of the enclosure, on which were set forth, at great length, in gilt letters, the many virtues of his late brother, “Samuel Robert Mitchell, of Rishton Hall Farm, who departed this life February the eighteenth, eighteen hundred and——, aged thirty-nine. He was a kind husband, a devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful member of the Church,” etc., etc.