In silence I gave back the letter to the vicar and involuntarily I shivered, for the wind was very cold.
"Well?" he asked impatiently, "what do you make of it?"
"I can't make anything of it. The whole thing's a mystery."
Then I told him of my tea-time conversation with Mrs. Cushion, and of the curious constraint in her manner ever since: of how unhappy it made me, and how cordially I detested Mrs. Robinson and wished her far further than the Forest of Dean—though to the Redmarley folk the Forest of Dean is indeed as the ends of the earth.
"If I know anything of human nature," said the vicar, punctuating his remarks with vicious flicks of the finger upon Mrs. Robinson's envelope, "Mrs. Cushion is as honest and straightforward a woman as ever stepped, a good woman, a kindly woman. Has she never said anything to you about her husband?"
"Only once. I asked about him, and I saw it was a painful subject, so I never mentioned him again. I fear he was an unsatisfactory person."
"But what am I to say to this pestiferous woman? If I don't answer her, she's capable of coming over here and setting the whole village by the ears.... I should like," he added vindictively, "to throw a stone through her window." As he spoke I was reminded of Mrs. Cushion's remark, "There's something in men-folks as seems to stop growin' when they be about ten year old": for although the vicar is stout and bald, and his close-cropped beard and moustache quite white, yet there and then I seemed to see "a little boy in tore knickerbockers and a dirty face same as if 'e stood in front of me."
"Wait a day or two," I suggested; "she won't expect an answer by return because you've got to make your 'investigations,' you know."
He groaned. "How can I? If there's one thing I wholeheartedly abhor it's poking and prying into another person's affairs—it's so ... ungentlemanly. I wouldn't do it to my worst enemy, but when it's a decent, kindly body who has been my right hand in every good thing that's been done in this village ever since she came.... Look here, my dear. Perhaps you—without hurting her feelings—could find out something to satisfy Mrs. Robinson. It would come better from you."
I doubted this, but I promised the poor worried vicar to do my best. I walked back to Snig's as fast as I could, for I was chilled to the bone. It certainly was a very cold east wind.