“Mother,” said Laura quickly, intercepting the angry reply which was on Mrs. Hammond’s lips, “if Mr. Clode thinks in that way, can he be blamed for telling us? We are not the town. What he has told us he has told us in confidence.”
“A confidence Mrs. Hammond has made me bitterly regret,” he rejoined, taking skilful advantage of her intervention.
Mrs. Hammond grunted. She was still angry, but she felt herself baffled. “Well, I do not understand these things, perhaps,” she said. “But I do not agree with Mr. Clode, and I am not going to pretend to.”
“I am sure he does not wish you to,” said Laura sweetly. “Only you did not quite understand, I think, that he was only giving us his private opinion. Of course he would not tell it to the town.”
“Well, that makes a difference, of course,” Mrs. Hammond allowed. “But now, however, I will say good-morning! I shall go straight to the rectory now and inquire. Are you coming, Laura?”
Laura thought it better to go and with a bright little nod, tripped off after her mother. Mr. Clode, thus deserted, walked slowly down the drive, wondering whether he had been premature in his revolt. He did not think so; and yet he wished he had not been so hasty—that he had not shown his hand quite so early. The truth was, he had been a little carried away by the events of the previous afternoon. But, even now, the more he thought of it, the more hopeless seemed the rector’s position. Openly denounced by his patron as an impostor, at war with his church-warden, disliked by a powerful section of the parish, one action already commenced against him and another threatened—what else could he do but resign? “He may say he will not to-day and to-morrow,” the curate thought, smiling darkly to himself, “but they will be too much for him the day after.”
And whether Mr. Clode told this opinion of his in the town or not, it was certainly a very common one. Never had Claversham been treated to such a dish of gossip as this. On the evening of the bazaar, before the unsold goods had been cleared from the tables, the wildest rumors were already afloat in the town. The rector had been arrested; he had decamped; he was to be tried for fraud; he was not in holy orders at all; Mrs. Bedford would have to be married over again! With the morning these reports died away, and something like the truth came to be known—to the inexpressible satisfaction of Dr. Gregg and his like. The doctor was in and out of half the houses in the town that day. “Resign!” he would say with a shriek—“of course he will resign! And glad to escape so easily!” Dr. Gregg, indeed, was in his glory now. The parts were reversed. It was for him now to meet the rector with a patronizing nod; only, for some reason best known to himself, and perhaps connected with an essential distinction between the two men, he preferred to celebrate his triumph figuratively, and behind Lindo’s back.
What was said, and how it was said, can well be imagined. When a man who for some cause has held his head a little above his neighbors stumbles and falls, we know what is likely to be said of him. And the young rector knew, and in his heart and in his study suffered horribly. All the afternoon of the day after the bazaar he walked the town with a smile on his face, ostensibly visiting in his district, really vindicating his pride and courage. He carried his head as high as ever, and the skirts of his long black coat fluttered as bravely as before. Dr. Gregg, who saw him from the reading-room window, gave it as his opinion that he did not know what shame meant. But at heart the young man was unutterably miserable. He knew that inquisitive eyes were upon his every gesture; that he was watched, jeered at, worst of all—pitied. He guessed, as the day wore on, drawing the inference from the curate’s avoidance of him, that even Clode had deserted him; and this, perhaps, almost as much as the resentment he harbored against Lord Dynmore, hardened him in his resolve not to resign or abate one tittle of his rights.
He fancied he stood alone. But, of course, there were some who sympathized with him, and some who held their tongues and declined to commit themselves to any opinion. Among the latter Mr. Bonamy was conspicuous—to the intense disgust of Dr. Gregg, whose first expression, indeed, on hearing the news had been, “What nuts for Bonamy!” As a fact, however, the snappish little doctor had never found his friend so morose and unpleasant as when he tried to sound him on this subject. He espied him on the other side of the street, and rushed across, stuttering almost before he reached him, “Well? He will have to resign, won’t he?”
“Who?” said Mr. Bonamy, standing still, and fixing his cold gray eyes on the excited little man. “Who will have to resign?”