He was about to speak, to say some words of congratulation—words that he had won a great prize, and that his duty to her was to make amends for the past—but the words would not come, and, bowing, he left the room, and walked hastily from the house, watched by Richard Glaire’s malicious eyes. For it was sweet revenge to him to know that the hopes he was sure the vicar felt had been blasted, and that he alone would possess Eve Pelly’s love.
“He thought to best me,” muttered Richard; and he smiled to himself, the feeling of mastering the man he looked upon as his enemy adding piquancy to a marriage that had seemed to him before both troublesome and tame.
Meanwhile the vicar went slowly down the street, with a strange, dazed look; and more than one observer whispered to his neighbour—“Say, lad; parson hasn’t been takking his drop, sewerly.”
“Nay, nay; I’d sooner believe he was ill. It can’t be that,” was the reply.
That same day, when busy out in the fields, sick at heart, and worried, after a short interview with Tom Podmore, John Maine was standing alone, and thinking of the past and present. Of the respite that had come to him, since the two men had visited the town, and of the miserable life he led at the farm, and the way in which Jessie behaved to him now; for, to his sorrow, it seemed to him that she looked upon him with a kind of horror, and avoided all communication. The keeper, Brough, came pretty frequently, and certainly she was more gracious to him than to the man who lived with her in the same house and ate at the same table.
Then he recalled that he had had a note from the vicar requesting him to call at the vicarage; but he had not been, partly from dread, partly from shame.
“But I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll be a man and go; go at once, and tell him the whole secret; and be at rest, come what may. Tom says it will be best.”
He sat down beneath a hedge bottom to secure the strap of one of his leggings, when, raising his head, he saw in the distance, crossing one of the stiles, a figure which he knew at a glance was that of one of the men he dreaded—one of those who had done their best to make him another of the Ishmaelites who war against society.
A cold chill passed over him, followed by a hot perspiration, as he watched till the figure passed out of sight, and then he began to muse.
“Come at last, then. It must be with an object.”