"Are you sure that you are right, my dear?" Mr. Penniloe asked with no little surprise. "From what your mother said just now, I hoped that I should see my old pupil very soon."
"I am afraid not, Uncle Penniloe. My dear mother seems to confuse things a little, or not quite understand them. Through her late illness, no doubt it is. We have not had a word from Tom, since that letter, which had such a wonderful effect, as I told you, when you were gone to London. And then, if you remember, he had no idea how long they were to be at Valetta. And he said nothing about their future movements very clearly. So full of his duties, no doubt, that he had no time to write long particulars. Even now he may never have heard of—of what has happened, and our sad condition. They may have been at sea, ever since he wrote. Soldiers can never tell where they may have to be."
"That has always been so, and is a part of discipline;" the Parson was thinking of the Centurion and his men. "But even if your letter should have gone astray, they must have seen some English newspapers, I should think."
"Tom is very clever, as you know, Uncle Penniloe; but he never reads a word, when he can help it. And besides that, it is only fair to remember that he is under Government. And the Government never neglects an opportunity of turning right into left, and the rest upside down. If all the baggage intended for their draft, was sent to the West Indies, because they were ordered to the East, it ought to follow that their letters would go too. But the worst of it is that one cannot be sure they will stick to a mistake, after making it."
"It is most probable that they would; especially if it were pointed out to them. Your dear father told me that they never forgive anybody for correcting them. But how then could your mother feel so sure about Tom's coming home almost immediately?"
"It puzzles me, until I have time to think;" answered Nicie, looking down. "She has never said a word to me about it, beyond praying and hoping for Tom to come home. Oh, I know, or at least I can guess, how! She may have had a dream—she believes firmly in her dreams, and she has not had time to tell me yet."
Mr. Penniloe had no right to seek further, and no inclination so to do. The meanest, mangiest, and most sneaking understrapper of that recent addition to our liberal institutions—the "Private Enquiry Firm"—could never have suspected Nicie Waldron, after looking at her, of any of those subterfuges, which he (like a slack-skin'd worm) wriggles into. But on the other hand who could suppose that Lady Waldron would endeavour to mislead her own man of business by a trumpery deceit? And yet who was that strange visitor, of whom her daughter was not allowed to speak?
Unable to understand these things, the curate shortly took his leave, being resolved, like a wise man, to think as little as he could about them, until Time—that mighty locksmith, at whom even Love rarely wins the latest laugh—should bring his skeleton key to bear on the wards of this enigma.
What else can a busy man do, when puzzled even by his own affairs? And how much more must it be so, in the business of other persons, which he doubts his right to meddle with? Perhaps it would have been difficult to find any male member of our race more deeply moved by the haps and mishaps of his fellow-creatures than this Parson of Perlycross; and yet he could take a rosier view for most of them than they took for themselves. So when he left the grounds of Walderscourt, he buttoned up his Spencer, and stepped out bravely, swinging his stick vigorously, and trusting in the Lord.
"What did 'e hat me vor, like that?" cried a voice of complaint from a brambled ditch, outside a thick copse known as Puddicombe Wood. Mr. Penniloe had not got his glasses on, and was grieved to feel rather than to see, although he was at the right end of his stick, that he had brought it down (with strong emphasis of a passage in his coming sermon) on the head of a croucher in that tangled ditch.