Lucy fell on to the pansy bed, temporarily stunned. Mr. Josling, scarcely able at first to believe ears and eyes, rushed out with a roar like a bull, picked up Mrs. Baines round her iron stays, as though she weighed no more than a wisp, ran round to the other side of the house where there was a great horse trough full of water, and soused in this the head and huge plumed bonnet of the angry woman. And again, giving her time to catch her breath, he plunged her head and bonnet beneath the water. Then, standing her on her feet, he said, "There! that'll cool your hot blood. That is some return for your half-killing my daughter—you blasted she-tiger, you ... Be off! Or I'll set the dogs on you.... I'll..."
"Father, dear," said Clara, crying for pity and rage over the hapless Lucy, yet careful of appearances: "Father dear, don't shout so! For goodness' sake, let the old witch go, and don't attract everybody's attention. What ever will the neighbours think! Here!" she said, thrusting on Mrs. Baines the umbrella she had brought and dropped on the garden path at the moment of the assault, "be off with you, you wicked old woman. It's a mercy father ain't killed you, he's that strong. And if you've done any real harm to my sister, we'll soon let you know and have you up before the courts, you wicked old snivelling psalm-singin' Methody!"
Mrs. Baines said nothing to this counter-attack. She drained the water from her plumes with her fingers, put her flopping bonnet as straight as was possible, pressed the water from her shoulders, and made some attempt to wipe her face with a handkerchief; and then, summoning all her strength and resolution (for in reality she was much shaken and near collapse), she walked firmly past them, uttering never a word, walked slowly down the garden path, turned to the right and contrived not to halt on her way back to the station till she was well out of their sight. They were a little over-awed by her dignity.
It was decided—and Lucy when she could speak implored them to adopt this negative course—not to write to Roger, and as far as possible not to talk of this painful scene to any neighbour. But to keep it from country gossip was an impossibility. This, that, or the other farm servant had seen it, from the rafters of a barn in repair, from the stables, from the dairy window; and so the treatment old Mrs. Baines had served out to her former daughter-in-law became noised abroad, penetrated from the kitchen and still-room of Engledene House to its mistress's dressing-room. A vague rumour of it even reached the African Department of the Foreign Office and Molyneux publicly shrugged his shoulders in Sir Mulberry Hawk's room. The Carnarvons at Highclere heard a perversion of it—rather a humorous one—from one of their farmer tenants, and reconsidered their idea of asking Brentham and Mrs. Brentham over to a week-end party to relate some of their extraordinary experiences. The Vicar of Farleigh Wallop realized that something of the kind had occurred to interrupt his musings on the arrangements of the streets in Calleva Atrebatum, and when he drove over with Maud to make the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law—now convalescent and thankful to find the drum of the worst smacked ear had not been split—he was merely coldly polite and expressed very little interest in missionary questions. Indeed he took no interest in Christian Missions after 700 A.D. Up to that time he reckoned—more or less—they had been spreading the ideas of Imperial Rome, of Roman civilization.
Roger, however, though he commented little on the episode of the assault, and felt in every way the least said, soonest mended, borrowed his father-in-law's riding-horse and rode early one morning over to Tilehurst. He entered the factory, of design, just as Mr. Baines was about to take his seat in the office and run his eyes over the day's orders. "Oh, don't be alarmed!" he said to Mr. Baines, who was instinctively about to withdraw, guessing his visitor's identity. "I'm not a violent heathen like your wife. Sit down and let us talk this over like sensible men."
He then put the matter very plainly before Mr. Baines.
Mrs. Baines, summoned by half-fearful, half-exultant Eliza, had "locked herself in her bedroom, she 'ave an' ast me to go for the police!"
"Then you, too," said Roger to the startled Eliza, "remain and hear what I have to say. Since your termagant of a mistress refuses to come, you shall repeat my words to her. You are, from what my wife tells me, an old and trusted servant of the family" (Eliza bridled and pleated the hem of her apron). "When she returns to sanity, you may get a chance of saying a word to your mistress in season, even if her husband has not the courage to do so. Tell her then, if she ever annoys or slanders or upsets my wife in any way I will leave no stone unturned to punish her. And if she appears at Church Farm or anywhere else again with the intention of assaulting my wife I will knock her on the head like the mad dog she is. Now you can leave us. But I trust also to you as an honourable woman and one who was sincerely fond of poor John Baines, who ought never to be connected with these hateful sayings and doings, not to chatter about this business outside this house."
And Eliza did not. She was much impressed by Brentham's appeal. The interview with John's father even ended in a kind of reconciliation. He heard from Brentham for the first time the whole story, so far as it was known, of the circumstances which led up to the attack on the station, John's death, and Lucy's journey to the coast; of how her baby had died and how ill she had been; of the Stotts, and of Ann Jamblin's obstinacy. Roger purposely prolonged the interview. It was doing the miserable father good, and was keeping Mrs. Baines a prisoner in her bedroom just when she wanted to be busy at house-work.
Maud on her return from visiting the Joslings tightened her lips and "went for" her father as he had never been truth-told before; so Mrs. Baines, if she did harm to Lucy's good name and gave her nervous system a nasty shock, also provoked good in other directions. A disturbance of the kind seldom fails to clear the air and create a fresher atmosphere. Maud reproached her father bitterly with his incivility to his eldest son's wife; with his general indifference to the well-being of his children, his selfish absorption in his archæological work, his unfairness to them in lavishing on it funds which should have been their patrimony. She even issued a sort of ultimatum: the subsidies to the Silchester Excavation fund must cease; the curate at Farleigh must be given his congé and the Vicar—still able-bodied—carry out his own Church duties: or she would go away and earn her own living as a secretary or something or other. And she was at once, and on his authority, to ask Lucy to stay—with Roger, of course—for at least a month. He gave in. Maud had deeper plans hidden under this surface wrath. Roger was in difficulties with the Foreign Office, she guessed. He had resigned from the Indian Army. He might at any time have to forge a new career for himself and would want a little capital to start with. She reckoned that her father having originally been a well-to-do man and her mother having come to him with a substantial dowry, there ought to be a least twelve thousand pounds to be divided between the four of them. If that left her father almost entirely dependent on his income—about five hundred a year—from the twin benefices of Farleigh and Cliddesden, that would serve him right. He had no business to squander his children's money—as it really was—on a work of excavation which the County or the Nation should finance.