Returning to Badsworth Hall they found no further news awaiting them than they had themselves been able to obtain. Sir Morton's fussy enquiries had brought no result—Miss Tabitha had scoured the neighbourhood in her high dogcart, calling on the Ittlethwaites and Mandeville Porehams, all in vain. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had heard anything. The sudden exit of Maryllia from the scene took everyone by surprise. And when Miss Pippitt began to hiss a scandalous whisper concerning John Walden, and a possible intrigue between him and the Lady of the Manor, the 'county' sat up amazed. Here indeed was food for gossip! Here was material for 'local' excitement!
"Old Tabitha's jealous!—that's what it is!" said Bruce Ittlethwaite of Ittlethwaite Park, to his maiden sisters,—"Ha-ha-ha! Old green- and-yellow Tabitha is afraid she'll lose her pet parson! Dammit! A pretty woman always starts this kind of nonsense. If it wasn't the clergyman, it would be somebody else—perhaps Sir Morton himself—or perhaps me! Ha-ha-ha! Dammit!"
"I don't believe a word of it!" declared the eldest Miss Ittlethwaite,—"I do not attend Mr. Walden's services myself, but I am quite sure he is an excellent man—and a perfect gentleman. Nothing that Tabitha Pippitt can ever say, will move me on that point!"
"I always had my suspicions!"—said Mrs. Mandeville Poreham, severely, when she in her turn heard the news—"I heard that Miss Vancourt had insisted—positively INSISTED on Mr. Walden's visiting her nearly every day, and I trembled for him! MY girls have gone quite crazy about Miss Vancourt ever since they met her at Sir Morton Pippitt's garden-party, but I have NEVER changed my opinion. MY poor mother always taught me to be firm in my convictions. And Miss Vancourt is a designing person. There's no doubt of it. She affects the innocence of a child—but I doubt whether I have ever met anyone QUITE so worldly and artful!"
So the drops of petty gossip began to trickle,—very slowly at first, and then faster and faster, as is their habitude in the effort to wear away the sparkling adamant of a good name and unblemished reputation. The Reverend Putwood Leveson, vengefully brooding over the wrongs which he considered he had sustained at the hands of Walden, as well as Julian Adderley, rode to and fro on his bicycle from morn till dewy eye, perspiring profusely, and shedding poisonous slanders almost as freely as he exuded melted tallow from his mountainous flesh, aware that by so doing he was not only ingratiating himself with the Pippitts, but also with Lord Roxmouth, through whose influence he presently hoped to 'get a thing or two.' Mordaunt Appleby, the Riversford brewer, and his insignificant spouse, irritated at never having had the chance to 'receive' Lord Roxmouth, were readily pressed into the same service and did their part of scandal-mongering with right good-will and malignant satisfaction. And in less than forty-eight hours' time there was no name too bad for the absent Maryllia; she was 'mixed up' with John Walden,—she had 'tried to entangle him'—there had been 'a scene with him at the Manor,'—she was 'forward,' 'conceited'—and utterly lost to any sense of propriety. Why did she not marry Lord Roxmouth? Why, indeed! Many people could tell if they chose! Ah yes!—and with this, there were sundry shakings of the head and shruggings of the shoulders which implied more than whole volumes of libel.
But while the county talked, the village listened, sagaciously incredulous of mere rumour, quiescent in itself and perfectly satisfied that whoever else was wrong, 'Passon Walden' in everything he did, said, or thought, was sure to be right. Wherefore, until they heard their 'man o' God's' version of the stories that were being so briskly circulated, they reserved their own opinions. The infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff was not more securely founded in the Roman Catholic Ritual than the faith of St. Rest in the 'gospel according to John.'
XXVII
Meanwhile Walden himself, ignorant of all the 'local' excitement so suddenly stirred up in his tiny kingdom, had arrived on a three days' visit at the house, or to put it more correctly, at the palace, of his friend Bishop Brent. It was, in strict reality a palace, having been in the old days one of the residences of Henry VII. Much of the building had been injured during the Cromwellian period, and certain modern repairs to its walls had been somewhat clumsily executed, but it still retained numerous fine old mullioned windows, and a cloistered court of many sculptured arches still eminently beautiful, though grey and crumbling under the touch of the melancholy vandal, Time. The Bishop's study had formerly been King Henry's audience chamber, and possessed a richly-wrought ceiling of interlaced oak rafters, and projecting beams smoothly polished at the ends and painted with royal emblems, from which projections no doubt, in early periods, many a banner of triumph had floated and many a knightly pennon. Bishop Brent was fond of this room, and carefully maintained its ancient character in the style of its furniture and general surroundings. The wide angle-nook and high carved chimney-piece, supported by two sculptured angel-figures of heroic size, was left unmodernised, and in winter the gaping recess was filled with great logs blazing cheerily as in olden times, but in summer, as now, it served as a picturesque setting for masses of rare flowers which, growing in pots, or cut freshly and set in crystal vases, were grouped together with the greatest taste and artistic selection of delicate colouring, forming, as it seemed, a kind of blossom-wreathed shrine, above which, against the carved chimney itself, hung a wonderfully impressive picture of the Virgin and Child. Placed below this, and slightly towarde the centre of the room, was the Bishop's table-desk and chair, arranged so that whenever he raised his head from his work, the serene soft eyes of Mary, Blessed among Women, should mystically meet his own. And here just now he sat at evening, deep in conversation with John Walden, who with the perfect unselfishness which was an ingrained part of his own nature, had for the time put aside or forgotten all his own little troubles, in order to listen to the greater ones of his friend. He had been shocked at the change wrought in seven years on Brent's form and features. Always thin, he had now become so attenuated as to have reached almost a point of emaciation,—his dark eyes, sunk far back under his shelving brows, blazed with a feverish brilliancy which gave an almost unearthly expression to his pale drawn features, and his hand, thin, long, and delicate as a woman's, clenched and unclenched itself nervously when he spoke, with an involuntary force of which he was himself unconscious.
"You have not aged much, Walden!" he said, thoughtfully regarding his old college chum's clear and open countenance with a somewhat sad smile—"Your eyes are the same blue eyes of the boy that linked his arm through mine so long ago and walked with me through the sleepy old streets of 'Alma Mater!' That time seems quite close to me sometimes—and again sometimes far away—dismally, appallingly, far away!"
He sighed. Walden looked at him a little anxiously, but for the moment said nothing.