"Nothing of the kind, I assure you, my dear sir. It's croquet!"
The tone was one of explanation, and the words were uttered with so transparent an air of frankness, that the veins in the Dean's temples swelled and his face grew, if possible, redder than before.
"I won't stay to bandy words with you!" he cried.
"Bandy!" returned the tall man, intensely amused. "Ha, ha, ha! you thought it was hockey! Bandy! Oh, no, you play it with hoops and a mallet. Drive the balls through--so!"
And to the intense delight of the Close people, many of whom were at their windows, Mr. Swainson executed an ungainly kind of gambado upon the steps. "Disgusting," the Dean called it afterwards, when talking to sympathetic ears. Now he merely put it away from him with a wave of the hand.
"I will not discuss it now, Mr. Swainson," he said. "If your feelings of decency and of what is right and proper do not forbid this--this profanity--I can call it nothing else--I have but one word to add. The Chapter shall prevent it."
"The Chapter!" replied the other, in a tone of contempt, which gave place to temper as he continued, "you are well read in history, Mr. Dean, they tell me. Doubtless you remember what happened when King Canute bade the tide come no further. I am the tide, and you and the Chapter--sit in the chair of Canute."
The Dean, it must be confessed, was no little taken aback by this defiance. He was amazed. The two glared at one another, and the clergyman was the first to give way; baffled and disconcerted, yet swelling with rage, he strode towards the Deanery. His antagonist followed him with his eyes, then looked more airily than ever at his plot and the progress made there, considered the weather with his chin at the decanal angle, finally with a flirt of his long coat-tails he went into the house, a happy man and the owner of a vastly improved appetite.
But the Dean had more to suffer yet. At the door of his garden he ran in his haste against some one coming out. Ordinarily, great man as he was, he was also a gentleman. But this was too much. That, when the father had insulted him, the son should collide with him on his own threshold, was intolerable; at any rate at a moment when he was smarting under a sense of defeat.
"Good morning, Mr. Dean," said the young fellow, raising his hat with an evident desire to please that was the antipodes of his father's manner--only the Dean was in no mood to discriminate--"I have just been having a delightful game of croquet."