This programme was a far bolder one than that with which Mrs. Corklemore had first arrived at the Hall. But she was getting on so well, that of course her views and desires expanded. All she meant at first was to gain influence over her host, and irrevocably estrange him from his surviving son, by delicate insinuations upon the subject of fratricide; at the same time to make Eoa do something beyond forgiveness, and then to confide the reward of virtue to obituary gratitude.
Could anything be more innocent, perhaps we should say more laudable? What man of us has not the privilege of knowing a dozen Christian mothers, who would do things of nobler enterprise for the sake of their little darlings?
But now, upon the broader gauge which the lady had selected, there were two things to be done, ere ever the train got to the switches. One was, to scatter right and left, behind and before, and up and down, wonder, hesitancy, expectation, interrogation, commiseration, and every other sort of whisper, confidential, suggestive, cumulative, as to poor Sir Cradockʼs condition. The other thing was to find out the effect in the main of his marriage–settlement. And this was by far the more difficult.
Already Mrs. Corklemore had done a little business, without leaving a tongue–print behind her, in the distributory process; and if Mr. Rosedew could just have been brought, after that rude dismissal, to say that he had indeed observed sad eccentricity, growing strangeness, on the part of his ancient friend, why then he would be committed to a line of most telling evidence, and the parish half bound to approval.
But Johnʼs high sense of honour, and low dislike of Georgie, had saved him from the neat, and neatly–baited, trap.
That morning Mr. Rosedewʼs path was beset with beauty, though his daughter failed to meet him; inasmuch as she very naturally awaited him on the parish road. When he had left the chase, and was fetching a compass by the river, along a quiet footway, elbowed like an old oak–branch, overlapped with scraggy hawthorns, paved on either side with good intention of primroses, there, just in a nested bend where the bank overhangs the stream, and you would like to lie flat and flip in a trout fly about the end of April, over the water came lightly bounding, and on a mossy bank alighted, young Eoa Nowell.
“To and fro, thatʼs the way I go; donʼt you see, Uncle John, I must; only the water is so narrow. It scarcely keeps me in practice.”
“Then your standard, my dear, must be very high. I should have thought twice about that jump, in my very best days!”
“You indeed!” said Eoa, with the most complacent contempt; eyeing the parsonʼs thick–set figure and anterior development.
“Nevertheless,” replied John, with a laugh, “it is but seven and forty years since I won first prize at Sherborne, both for the long leap and the high leap; and proud enough I was, Eoa, of sixteen feet four inches. But I should have had no chance, thatʼs certain, if you had entered for the stakes.”