“No,” said the vicar, “I don’t like the idea. I would not care if they’d rob me, Timson, but they will not; and this business is something I really cannot get over. If I put more in the box to make up what I reckon may be the deficiency, it seems to make no difference; and though your advice may be good, I don’t feel as if I could take it. I have acted upon some of your hints, but still we don’t find anything out.”
Mr Timson shook his head, and said, “Just so,” which might have meant anything.
After smoking a pipe or two, the churchwarden always left, declaring that he had got hold of the right end of the thread, and that he intended following up the clue, telling it mysteriously, and promising news by his next visit; for, being old and single, the vicar thought it no shame to play nightly at cribbage with his churchwarden, and in his company to smoke long clay pipes and drink whisky and water. But the only result of Mr Timson’s clue-following was the getting of himself into a tangle, and, to the vicar’s great disgust, he would seriously settle the offence upon a fresh head each time.
“I tell you what it is, Timson,” he one day exclaimed, pettishly, after listening for some time to the rumbling of the churchwarden’s mountain, and then being rewarded with no grand discovery, but a very mouse of an information,—“I tell you what it is, Timson, you are getting into your dotage.”
“No, I ain’t,” said Timson, gruffly; for Mr Timson’s life had two phases—as Mr Timson, tea-dealer, and Mr Timson, vicar’s churchwarden. In trade he metaphorically wore his apron fastened by a brass heart and a steel hook, and said, “Sir” to the world at large; while, as Mr Timson, the worthy old bachelor, who could have retired from business any day, and who smoked pipes and played cribbage at his own or the vicar’s residence, he was another man, and as sturdy and independent as an Englishman need be. “No, I ain’t,” he said, gruffly. “I’m sure now as can be that it’s old Purkis—a fat, canting, red-faced, hypocritical old sinner.”
“Don’t be so aggravating, Timson,” said the vicar. “How can you accuse him!”
“Why what does he mean by always hanging about the boxes, and polish, polish, polishing them till the steel-work grows quite thin?”
“That proves nothing,” said the vicar.
“Don’t it?” exclaimed the churchwarden. “It proves that he has always been hanging about, till the money tempted him, and he could not resist it.”
“Nonsense!” said the vicar, crossly, as he broke a piece off his pipe. “Why, the very last time you were here, you were quite sure that it was Pellet.”