I had not, however, concluded upon anything, when one day I accidentally met him, and we had a little talk about business, for he continued to look after the rent of my field. He informed me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton had been doing all he could to get even temporary possession of the park, as we called it; and, although I said nothing of it to Mr Coningham, my suspicion is that, had he succeeded, he would, at the risk of a law-suit, in which he would certainly have been cast, have ploughed it up. He told me, also, that Clara was in poor health; she who had looked as if no blight could ever touch her had broken down utterly. The shadow of her sorrow was plain enough on the face of her father, and his confident manner had a little yielded, although he was the old man still. His father had died a little before Sir Giles. The new baronet had not offered him the succession.
I asked him to go with me yet once more to Umberden Church—for I wanted to show him something he had over-looked in the register—not, I said, that it would be of the slightest furtherance to his former hopes. He agreed at once, already a little ashamed, perhaps, of the way in which he had abandoned me. Before we parted we made an appointment to meet at the church.
We went at once to the vestry. I took down the volume, and laid it before him. He opened it, with a curious look at me first. But the moment he lifted the cover, its condition at once attracted and as instantly riveted his attention. He gave me one glance more, in which questions and remarks and exclamations numberless lay in embryo; then turning to the book, was presently absorbed, first in reading the genuine entry, next in comparing it with the forged one.
‘Right, after all!’ he exclaimed at length.
‘In what?’ I asked.’ In dropping me without a word, as if I had been an impostor? In forgetting that you yourself had raised in me the hopes whose discomfiture you took as a personal injury?’
‘My dear sir!’ he stammered in an expostulatory tone, ‘you must make allowance. It was a tremendous disappointment to me.’
‘I cannot say I felt it quite so much myself, but at least you owed me an apology for having misled me.’
‘I had not misled you,’ he retorted angrily, pointing to the register.—‘There!’
‘You left me to find that out, though. You took no further pains in the matter.’
‘How did you find it out?’ he asked, clutching at a change in the tone of the conversation.