That week seemed to many, on looking back, a strangely mad time, days informed with a wildness for which there was no discernible reason--men and women and children were seized that week with some licence that they loved while it lasted, but that they looked back upon with fear when it was over. What had come over them? Who had been grinning at them?
The strange things that occurred that week seemed to have no individual agent. No one was responsible. But life, after that week, was for many people in the town never quite the same again.
On the afternoon of Thursday, June 17, Ronder stood at the window of his study and looked down upon the little orchard, the blazing flowers, the red garden-wall, and the tree-tops on the descending hill, all glazed and sparkling under the hot afternoon sun. As he looked down, seeing nothing, sunk deeply in his own thoughts, he was aware of extreme moral and spiritual discomfort. He moved back from the window, making with his fingers a little gesture of discontent and irritation. He paced his room, stopping absent-mindedly once and again to push in a book that protruded from the shelves, staying to finger things on his writing-table, jolting against a chair with his foot as he moved. At last he flung himself into his deep leather chair and stared fixedly at an old faded silk fire-guard, with its shadowy flowers and dim purple silk, seeing it not at all.
He was angry, and of all things in the world that he hated, he hated most to be that. He had been angry now for several weeks, and, as though it had been a heavy cold that had descended upon him, he woke up every morning expecting to find that his anger had departed--but it had not departed; it showed no signs whatever of departing.
As he sat there he was not thinking of the Jubilee, the one thought at that time of every living soul in Polchester, man, woman and child--he was thinking of no one but Brandon, with whom, to his own deep disgust, he was at last implacably, remorselessly, angry. How many years ago now he had decided that anger and hatred were emotions that every wise man, at all cost to his pride, his impatience, his self-confidence, avoided. Everything could be better achieved without these weaknesses, and for many years he had tutored and trained himself until, at last, he had reached this fine height of superiority. From that height he had suddenly fallen.
It was now three weeks since that luncheon at Carpledon, and in one way or another the quarrel on the road home--the absurd and ludicrous quarrel-- had become known to the whole town. Had Brandon revealed it? Or possibly the coachman? Whoever it was, every one now knew and laughed. Laughed! It was that for which Ronder would never forgive Brandon. The man with his childish temper and monstrous conceit had made him into a ludicrous figure. It was true that they were laughing, it seemed, more at Brandon than at himself, but the whole scene was farcical. But beyond this, that incident, trivial though it might be in itself, had thrown the relationship of the two men into dazzling prominence. It was as though they had been publicly announced as antagonists, and now, stripped and prepared, ringed in by the breathless Town, must vulgarly afford the roughs of the place the fistic exhibition of their lives. It was the publicity that Ronder detested. He had not disliked Brandon--he had merely despised him, and he had taken an infinite pleasure in furthering schemes and ambitions, a little underground maybe, but all for the final benefit of the Town.
And now the blundering fool had brought this blaze down upon them, was indeed rushing round and screaming at his antagonist, shouting to any one who would hear that Ronder was a blackguard and a public menace. It had been whispered--from what source again Ronder did not know--that it was through Ronder's influence that young Falk Brandon had run off to Town with Hogg's daughter. The boy thought the world of Ronder, it was said, and had been to see him and ask his advice. Ronder knew that Brandon had heard this story and was publicly declaring that Ronder had ruined his son.
Finally the two men were brought into sharp rivalry over the Pybus living. Over that, too, the town, or at any rate the Cathedral section of it, was in two camps. Here, too, Brandon's vociferous publicity had made privacy impossible.
Ronder was ashamed, as though his rotund body had been suddenly exposed in all its obese nakedness before the assembled citizens of Polchester. In this public quarrel he was not in his element; forces were rising in him that he distrusted and feared.
People were laughing...for that he would never forgive Brandon so long as he lived.