“Yes,” he said quietly and firmly; “and when it comes to an attack upon my brother, you’ll find that spirit a more serious thing to deal with than you expect.”
They had come through the porch out into the garden again, and were standing very near together, with the setting sun throwing a weak and watery light upon their faces. A passer-by, noticing their attitudes, looks, and tones, would have guessed that a challenge had been thrown down and taken up.
The two men bade each other good-night in a manner which showed on each side both caution and mutual respect. And having retired each to his house, they instinctively tried to get a sight each of the other. The clergyman went to his study, and seated himself with a book at the window; Ned Mitchell took the air at his back door. The vicar remained calm and smiling, and looked amused when he caught Ned’s anxious look. The colonist took things less easily.
“That parson’ll be a very difficult beggar to tackle,” he said to himself almost despondingly. “I could manage Vernon by himself, but with this old ‘Soap-your-sides’ behind him it’ll be a long job—a very long job.”
But he comforted himself before going to bed by a look at his bloodhounds!
CHAPTER XIX.
The Reverend Meredith Brander had not been Vicar of Rishton and compulsory student of the wiles of frail humanity for fourteen years for nothing. When from his study window he saw Ned Mitchell—after many yawns, several sleepy stretchings out of his arms, and an occasional nod of the head—retire from his back door and shut himself in, it seemed to the vicar by no means certain that his neighbor had gone to bed. So he withdrew a little way into the shelter of his window curtains, and remained on the watch, beguiling the time by composing a very pretty opening for next Sunday morning’s sermon, wherein the rising moon, as it showed more and more of his laurels, was used to typify the grace of repentance illuminating the dark places of the heart.
And the result justified Mr. Brander’s doubts. Ned Mitchell did, it is true, go to bed, but he speedily got up again, impelled to this freak partly by the pain in his injured leg and partly by his unsatisfied curiosity concerning the accomplishments of his dogs. The vicar smiled as, after an hour and a half’s watching, he saw Ned’s candle glimmering weakly through the blinds; first on the upper floor of the cottage, and then on the lower. Presently Ned himself re-appeared at the back door, which he set wide open, before proceeding to draw on his hands a pair of stout leather gloves. Then he retreated into the cottage again, and gave the vicar time to open his window a little way very softly. As he did so, sounds of yelping and scuffling reached his ears from the cottage, and a few moments later the hounds rushed out into the garden.
The month was May, and in this cold north country the trees both in the vicar’s garden and in that of his neighbor were as yet only thinly covered with leaves; so that there was little to hide the movements of the animals, which, after a preliminary scamper round the house and an attempt to get through the bars of the gate, began to sneak about close to the walls and under the shrubs, sniffing, prowling, scratching, like uncanny creatures half seen in the moonlight, making the branches of the evergreens sway and rustle, and uttering from time to time a yelping, whining sound, as they grubbed and searched restlessly for food. The vicar pulled aside his curtain and watched with great interest. The hounds were getting—whether by accident or led by scent he could not yet tell—nearer and nearer to the shrub under which Ned Mitchell had buried the untempting bones. Ned himself, from the upper floor of the cottage, was intently watching them. Hither and thither the brutes roamed, in apparently random search for something to appease their hunger. With nose pointed always to the earth they crept slowly along, or bounded a few paces, sometimes raising the night echoes by a deep howl, more often uttering the low, wolfish sounds of half-starved savage creatures. But aimless as their wanderings seemed to be, often as they deviated from a straight course to it, they did both come, slowly but surely, nearer to the auricula. The vicar rose from his chair; Ned Mitchell hung his whole body out of his little window. As the animals drew closer to the place where the bones were hidden, they seemed to the careful eyes of the watcher to grow more excited, to yelp and whine more savagely, to sniff the cold earth with keener nostrils. At last the muzzle of one of the hounds touched the prickly leaves of one of the lowest branches of the auricula. He drew back with a snort of pain. A minute later, however, drawn by his irresistible instinct, he returned, and, making a furious attempt to pass under the low branches, retreated again, whining and savage from the effect of the pricks he had received. The third time both dogs drew near together, and this time—regardless of the scratches inflicted by the thorny boughs on their backs—they pushed their way under the auricula, and began to grub and to scratch up the earth with might and main.
In an incredibly short space of time, considering the depth of earth with which Ned had covered them, the bloodhounds had dug up the buried bones and were crunching them ravenously with their powerful jaws. Ned, uttering a short laugh of triumph, raised his head and caught sight of the vicar, who now, regardless of concealment, was pressing close to the window panes of his study a face which looked of a greenish pallor in the moonlight. Ned watched him with an intent, glaring gaze for a few seconds; then, shutting his little window rapidly and noiselessly, he slipped out of the cottage by the front door, and, making his way round to the back stealthily under cover of the evergreens, crept along in the shadow under the dividing wall until he stood, unseen by the vicar, almost under the latter’s window. After the lapse of a few moments his curiosity was rewarded.