“it’s tommy!”
She was a buxom, and by no means unattractive, person of about five-and-thirty, with an irresistibly “horsey” suggestion about her appearance and gait. As the curate’s eye met hers, he turned deadly pale, and his knees trembled beneath him. That which he had dreaded for days and nights had come to pass.
“Well, I’m blest!” said the lady again, “who’d have thought of meeting you here after all these years—and in this make-up, too! But I should have known you among a thousand, all the same. Why, Tommy, you don’t mean to say they’ve gone and made a parson of you?”
The curate was desperate. His first impulse was to deny all knowledge of the woman who stood gazing into his face with a comical expression of mingled amusement and surprise. But her next words showed him the hopelessness of such a course.
“You’re not going to say you don’t know me, Tommy, though it is nigh twenty years since we were in the ring together, and you’ve got into a black coat and a dog-collar. Fancy them making a parson of you; Lord, who’d have thought it! Well, I’ve had a leg-up, too, since then. I’m Madame Benotti now. The old lady died, and he made me missus of himself and the show. He often talks about you, and wouldn’t he stare, just, to see you in this rig-out!”
By the time, the Rev. Thomas Todd had recovered himself sufficiently to speak, and had decided that a bold course was the safest.
“I’m really glad to see you again,” he said, with a shuddering thought of the fate of Ananias; “it reminds me so of the old times. But, you see, things are changed with me. You remember the old gentleman who adopted me, and took me away from the circus? Well, he sent me to school and college, and then set his heart on my becoming, as you say, a parson. I haven’t forgotten the old days, but—but you see, if the people round here knew about my having been——”
“Lor’ bless you, Tommy,” broke in the good-natured équestrienne, “you don’t think I’d be so mean as to go and queer an old pal’s pitch; you’ve nothing to fear from me; don’t be afraid, there’s nobody coming”—for the curate was looking distractedly round. “Well, I’m mighty glad to have seen you again, even in this get-up, but I won’t stop and talk to you any longer, or one of your flock might come round the corner, and then—O my! wouldn’t there be a rumpus? Ha, ha, ha!”
She laughed loudly, and the clergyman looked round again in an agony.
“Now, Tommy, good-bye to you, and good luck. But look here, before you go, just for the sake of the old times, when you were ‘little Sandy,’ and I used to do the bare-backed business, you’ll give us a kiss, won’t you, old man?”