The young man hesitated, his face crimson. His opponent’s sallow features, seamed with a hundred astute wrinkles, warned him, if the covert smiles of the others did not, that, in his present mood at any rate, he was not a match for the lawyer. He had gone too far already, as he was now aware. “No,” he replied, swallowing his rage, “but to keep you to your proper province, as I hope to keep to mine. I wish you good morning.”
He passed through them, and hurried away, more angry with them, and with himself for allowing them to provoke him, than he had ever felt in his life. He knew well that he had been foolish. He knew that he had lowered himself in their eyes by his display of temper. But, though he was bitterly annoyed with himself, the consciousness that the fault had originally lain with them, and that they had grievously misjudged him, kept his anger hot; for there is no wrath so fierce as the indignation of the man falsely accused. He called them under his breath an uncharitable, spiteful, tattling crew; and was so far unnerved in thought of them that he had entered his dining-room before he remembered that he was engaged to take the mid-day meal at the Town House, as he had done once or twice before, and then walked up with Laura to the schools.
He washed and changed hurriedly, keeping his anger hot the while, and then went across, with the tale on the tip of his tongue. Again, if he had been wise, he would have kept what had happened to himself. But the soothing luxury of unfolding his wrong to some one who would sympathize was one he could not in his soreness forego.
It was a particularly mild day for the fourth Sunday in Advent, and he found Miss Hammond still lingering before the door, She was looking for violets under the north wall, and he joined her, and naturally broke out at once with the story of what had happened. She was wearing a little close bonnet, which set off her piquant features and bright coloring to peculiar advantage, and, as far as looks went, no young man in trouble ever had a better listener. Only to stand beside her on the lawn, where the old trees shut out all view of the town and the troubles he connected with it, was a relief. Of course the search for violets was soon abandoned. “It is abominable!” she said. But her voice was like the cooing of a dove. She did everything softly. Even her indignation was gentle.
“But you have not heard yet,” he protested, “why I really was late.”
“I know what is being said,” she murmured, looking up at him, a gleam of humor in her brown eyes—“that you stayed at the Homfrays’ all night, playing cards. My maid told me as we came in—after church.”
“Ha! I knew that they were saying something of the kind,” he replied savagely. He was so stern that she felt her little attempt at badinage reproved. “The true reason was of a very different description. What spiteful busybodies they are! I started to return last evening about half-past nine, but as I passed Baer Hill Colliery I learned that there had been an accident. A man going down the shaft with the night shift had been crushed—hurt beyond help,” the rector continued in a lower voice. “He wanted to see a clergyman, and the other pitmen, some of whom had seen me pass earlier in the day, stopped me and took me to him.”
“How sad! How very sad!” she ejaculated. Somehow she felt ill at ease with him in this mood. With his last words a kind of veil had fallen between them.
“I stayed with him the night,” the rector continued. “He died at half-past nine this morning. I came straight from that to this. And they say these things of me!”
His voice, though low, was hard, and yet there was a suspicious break in it as he uttered his last words. Injustice touches a man, young and not yet hardened, very sorely; and he was overwrought. Laura, fingering her little bunch of violets, heard the catch in his voice, and knew that he was not very far from tears.