The good ship, Rose of Delhi, came gaily into port, and took up her berth in St. Katharine’s Docks as before; for she had been chartered for London. Her owners, the Freemans, wrote at once from Liverpool to Captain Tanerton, begging him to resume command. Jack wrote back, and declined.
How is it that whispers get about! Do the birds in the air carry them?—or the winds of heaven? In some cases it seems impossible that anything else can have done it. Paul and Chandler, John Tanerton and his wife, the Squire and myself: we were the only people cognizant of the new suspicion that Alice was striving to cast on Sir Dace, one and all of us had kept silent lips: and yet, the rumour got abroad. Sir Dace Fontaine was accused of knowing more about Pym’s death than he ought to know, and Tom Chandler was in London for the purpose of investigating it. This might not have mattered very much for ordinary ears, but it reached those of Sir Dace.
Coralie Fontaine heard it from Mary Ann Letsom. In Mary Ann’s indignation at the report, she spoke it out to Coralie; and Coralie, laughing at the absurdity of the thing, repeated it to Sir Dace. How he received it, or what he said about it, did not transpire.
A stagnant kind of atmosphere seemed to hang over us just then, like the heavy, unnatural calm that precedes the storm. Sir Dace got weaker day by day, more of a shadow; Herbert Tanerton and his brother were still at variance, so far as Jack’s future was concerned; and Mr. Chandler seemed to have taken up his abode in London for good.
“Does he never mean to come back?” demanded Alice one day of the Squire: and her lips and cheeks were red with fever as she asked it. The truth was, that some cause of Paul and Chandler’s then on at Westminster was prolonging itself out—even when it did begin—unconscionably.
One morning I met Ben Rymer as he was leaving Oxlip Grange. Coralie Fontaine had walked with him to the gate, talking earnestly, their two heads together. Ben shook hands with her and came out, looking as grave as a judge.
“How is Sir Dace?” I asked him. “Getting on?”
“Getting off,” responded Ben. “For that’s what it will be now; and not long first, unless he mends.”
“Is he worse?”
“He is nearly as bad as he can be, to be alive. And yesterday, he must needs go careering off to Islip by himself to transact some business with Paul the lawyer! He was no more fit for it than—than this is,” concluded Ben, giving a flick to his silk umbrella as he marched off. Ben went in for silk umbrellas now: in the old days a cotton one would have been too good for him.