Laid up in Lavender

by Stanley John Weyman

The Archdeacon was fussing with his pile of sermons and did not turn. "What is what, my dear?" he asked.

"Why are you going to London?"

"On business, my dear; business," he said lightly.

"Yes, but what business?" replied Mrs. Yale with decision. "Cyprian, you are keeping something from me; you were not used to have secrets from me. Tell me what it is."

But he remained obstinately silent. He would not tell a lie, and he could not tell the truth.

"Is it about Jack?" with sudden conviction. "I know what it is; he has entangled himself with some girl!"

The Archdeacon laughed oddly. "You ought to know your son better by this time, my dear. He is about as likely to entangle himself with a girl as--as I am."

But Mrs. Yale shook her head unconvinced. The Archdeacon was a landowner, though a poor one. It was his ambition, and his wife's, that Jack should some day be rich enough to live at the Hall, instead of letting it, as his father found it necessary to do. But while the Archdeacon considered that Jack's way to the Hall lay over the woolsack, his wife had in view a short cut through the marriage market; being a woman, and so thinking it a small sin in a man to marry for money. Consequently she lived in fear lest Jack should be entrapped by some penniless fair one, and was not wholly reassured now. "Well, I shall be sure to find out, Cyprian," she said warningly, "if you are deceiving me."

And these words recurred disagreeably to the Archdeacon's mind on his way to town and afterwards. They rendered him as sensitive as a mole in the sunshine. He found London almost intolerable. He could not walk the streets without seeing those horrid placards, nor take up a newspaper without being stared out of countenance by the name "Kittie Latouche." While his conscience so multiplied each bill and poster and programme that in twenty-four hours London seemed to him a great hoarding of which his ward was the sole lessee.

Naturally he shrank into himself as he passed down Sidmouth Street next day. He pondered, standing on the steps of No. 14, what the neighbours thought of the house; whether they knew that "Kittie Latouche" lived there. He was spared the giggling and dirty plates on the stairs, but looking round the room at the ten photographs, and thinking what Mrs. Yale would say could she see him, he shuddered. Nervously he picked up the first pamphlet he saw on the table. It was a trifle in one act: "The Tench," Lacy's edition, by Charles Williams. He set it down with a grimace, and a word about birds of a feather. And then the door by which he had entered opened behind him, and he turned.