“Why don’t you wish anything else that’s lowering and degrading? You are as devoid of common sense as he!” retorted the parson, walking away in a fume.
Matters were in this state when we got back to Crabb Cot; to stop at it for a longer or a shorter period as fate and the painters at Dyke Manor would allow. Jack urging Robert Ashton to promise him the bailiffs post—vacant the next Midsummer; Herbert strenuously objecting to it; and Robert Ashton in a state of dilemma between the two. He would have liked well enough to engage John Tanerton: but he did not like to defy the Rector. When the Squire heard this later, his opinion vacillated, according to custom: now leaning to Herbert’s side, now to Jack’s. And the Fontaines, we found, were in all the bustle of house-moving. Their own house, Oxlip Grange, being at length ready for them, they were quitting Maythorn Bank.
“Goodness bless me!” cried the Squire, coming in at dusk from a stroll he had taken the evening of our arrival. “I never got such a turn in my life.”
“What has given it you, sir?”
“What has given it me, Johnny? why, Sir Dace Fontaine. I never saw any man so changed,” he went on, rubbing up his hair. “He looks like a ghost, more than a man.”
“Is he ill?”
“He must be ill. Sauntering down that narrow lane by Maythorn Bank, I came upon a tall something mooning along like a walking shadow. I might have taken it for a shadow, but that it lifted its bent head, and threw its staring eyes straight into mine—and I protest that a shadowy sensation crept over myself when I recognized it for Fontaine. You never saw a face so gloomy and wan. How long is it since we saw him, Johnny?”
“About nine months, I think, sir.”
“The man must be suffering from a wasting complaint, or else he has some secret care that’s fretting him to fiddle-strings. Mark my words, all of you, it is one or the other.”
“Dear me!” put in Mrs. Todhetley, full of pity. “I always thought him a gloomy man. Did you ask him whether he was ill?”