"Ah!... where does this Saul Parker live?"
"He lives with his mother in a cottage on the Quarry Road. She is the widow of a quarry-man."
"It was along the Quarry Road, I think, that Miss Brabourne and her brother went to the cliff yesterday? I wish you would kindly take me back to the village that way. I should like to see the idiot, foolish as you think my theory sounds. Is he very small and puny?"
"Oh, no—a great fellow, taller than I am," admitted Claud, with a vague, vague wonder growing in him as to whether, after all, the stranger had chanced upon the truth of what had baffled them all this summer.
And—the absurdity of the idea!
Even as this sentiment crossed his mind, he could not help owning that, though he could reiterate that it was absurd, he could give no substantial reasons for his opinion. Everyone would have thought it absurd—anyone in Edge Valley to whom the suggestion had been made would have passed it by with a contemptuous laugh. The idiot was probably the only person in the whole place whose goings and comings were never challenged—who wandered in and out as he listed, now in this farm kitchen, now in that, kindly tolerated for the sake of his beautiful face and his affliction. It was of little use to question him.
"Where have 'ee been, my lad? Haow's yer moother?" or any other like civility. A soft smile or a gurgling laugh would be the only response at times, or, if mischievously inclined, he might give an answer which was not the true one.
Yet, now that Claud began to think over what he knew of the boy....
His intense aversion to strangers was one point in his character which rose to immediate remembrance. He recalled Wynifred's story of how she had caught him in the act of throwing a stone at Mr. Haldane when his back was turned; and Clara Battishill's complaints of his cruelty were also fresh in his memory.
But Godfrey he knew to be the special terror of Saul's life, and the object of his untold hatred. Godfrey set his bull-dog at the idiot, laughed at him, bullied him—one blow from that heavy cudgel which Saul habitually dragged after him would be more than enough to avenge his wrongs on the frail boy. And yet—and yet——