Before silence was broken again, the Magnet drew up at the Blue Ball Inn, where the lane turns off towards Perlycross, and the clergyman leaving his valise with the landlord, started upon his three-mile trudge. But before he had walked more than a hundred yards he was surprised to see, across the angle of the common, that the coach had stopped again at the top of a slight rise, where a footpath led from the turnpike road towards the northern entrance to Walderscourt. The clouds were now dispersing, and the full moon shining brightly, and the ground being covered with newly fallen snow, the light was as good as it is upon many a winter afternoon. Mr. Penniloe was wearing a pair of long-sight glasses, specially adapted to his use by a skilful optician in London, and he was as proud of them as a child is of his first whistle. Without them the coach might have been a haystack, or a whale, so far as he could tell; with them he could see the horses, and the passengers, and the luggage.
Having seen too much of that coach already, he was watching it merely as a test for his new glasses; and the trial proved most satisfactory. "How proud Fay will be," he was thinking to himself, "when I tell her that I can see the big pear-tree from the window, and even the thrushes on the lawn!" But suddenly his interest in the sight increased. The man, who was standing in the road with his figure shown clearly against a snowy bank, was no other than that dark foreigner, who had stared at him so intently. There was the slouched hat, and there was the fur cloak, and even the peculiar bend of the neck. A parcel was thrown to him from the roof, and away he went across the common, quite as if he knew the way, through furze and heather, to the back entrance of Walderscourt grounds. He could not see the Parson in the darker lane below, and doubtless believed himself unseen.
The circumstance aroused some strange ideas in the candid mind of Penniloe. That man knowing who he was from Pack's tirade, must have been desirous to avoid him, otherwise he would have quitted the coach at the Blue Ball, and taken this better way to Walderscourt; for the lane Mr. Penniloe was following led more directly thither by another entrance. What if there were something, after all, in Gowler's too plausible theory? That man looked like a Spaniard, probably a messenger from Lady Waldron's scapegrace brother; for that was his character if plain truth were spoken, without any family gloss upon it. And if he were a messenger, why should he come thus, unless there were something they wanted to conceal?
The Curate had not traversed all this maze of meditations, which made him feel very miserable—for of all things he hated suspiciousness, and that £100, though needed so sadly, would be obtained at too high a cost, if the cost were his faith in womankind—when, lo, his own church-tower rose grandly before him, its buttresses and stringing courses capped with sparkling snow, and the yew-tree by the battlements feathered with the same, and away to the east the ivy mantle of the Abbey, laced and bespangled with the like caprice of beauty, showered from the glittering stores of heaven.
He put on a spurt through the twinkling air, and the frozen snow crushed beneath his rapid feet; and presently he had shaken hands with Muggridge, and Fay in her nightgown made a reckless leap from the height of ten stairs into his gladsome arms.
CHAPTER XXV. A SERMON IN STONE.
Now Sergeant Jakes was not allowed to chastise any boys on Sunday. This made the day hang very heavy on his hands; and as misfortunes never come single, the sacred day robbed him of another fine resource. For Mr. Penniloe would not permit even Muggridge, the pious, the sage, and the prim, to receive any visitors—superciliously called by the front-door people "followers"—upon that blessed day of rest, when surely the sweeter side of human nature is fostered and inspirited, from reading-desk and lectern, from gallery and from pulpit.
However even clergymen are inconsistent, as their own wives acknowledge confidentially; and Mr. Penniloe's lectures upon Solomon's Song—a treatise then greatly admired, as a noble allegory, by High Churchmen—were not enforced at home by any warmth of practice. Thus stood the law; and of all offences upon the Sergeant's Hecatologue, mutiny was the most heinous; therefore he could not mutiny.
But surely if Mr. Penniloe could have received, or conceived, a germ of the faintest suspicion concerning this faithful soldier's alternatives on the afternoon of the Sabbath—as Churchmen still entitled it—he would have thrown open every door of kitchen, back-kitchen, scullery, and even pantry to him, that his foot might be kept from so offending. Ay, and more than his foot, his breast, and arm—the only arm he had, and therefore leaving no other blameless.