It was late when Hamlin left the Yellam cottage and bitterly cold. He walked to Pomfret Court, and found the Squire in his room. In that room hard words had passed between Squire and Parson. To-day they were friends, working together. And the marriage of their children did not adequately account for this. It was one of the unexpected results of the war.
"Dinner in five-and-twenty minutes," said Sir Geoffrey. "I'm delighted to see you, my dear fellow."
"I wish I could stop. I need your help."
The Squire rang the bell. When the butler came, dinner was postponed a quarter of an hour. Another straw to indicate a change in domestic currents. Before the war, dinner at Pomfret Court had been regarded as a sacred function, never postponed merely because the Parson wanted a word with the Squire.
"I want you to pull more strings," said Hamlin, after telling his story at some length. "You know swells at the Foreign Office. It must be possible to find out through some kind neutral at The Hague whether a prisoner of the name of Alfred Yellam was taken upon the night of the fifteenth. Very few prisoners have been taken lately; that would make the enquiry comparatively simple."
"I'll draw that cover to-morrow morning."
Hamlin thanked him and hurried away. The Squire was amazing. To travel to London in this bitter weather meant the sacrifice of what the genial Autocrat ranked high—comfort. He would go, like a terrier to a fox, straight to a Mandarin and bark at him, worry him, stick to him, till a pledge was extracted.
He thought of the trains congested by Christmas travel, the lack of porters and taxis. Obviously, the Squire recked nothing of this in his hot desire to do a kind turn to a humble neighbour.
Hamlin reflected that Christmas would be the cosier to the Autocrat after a cold excursion. He remembered hearing him say that he never appreciated his own fireside so much as after a bad day's hunting, when the wind blew chill from the north and hounds wouldn't run a yard.
Thoughts of hunting distracted the Parson as he strode back to his lonely Vicarage. What a master passion it was in everybody! The Squire hunted foxes in all weathers, regardless of weather conditions. Nothing stopped him but a hard frost. His Parson hunted men and women, a more arduous chase, hounding them out of covers where dirt, ignorance, poverty and vice hid them from view. A hard frost, such as had settled on Susan Yellam, stopped him. Others hunted fame, money, position, just as ardently. And a hard frost, like this war, stopped them.