A Tale of a Lonely Parish Part 31

"I am sure, I am delighted, too," said the squire, who had regained his composure but kept his hold on Stamboul's collar. "He deserves all he gets, and more too," he continued. "I think he will be a remarkable man."

"I did not think you liked him so very much," said Mrs. Ambrose rather doubtfully, as she walked slowly by his side.

"Oh--I liked him very much. Indeed, I was going to ask him to stay with me for a few days at the Hall."

The inspiration was spontaneous. Mr. Juxon was in a frame of mind in which he felt that he ought to do something pleasant for somebody, to set off against the bloodthirsty designs which had pa.s.sed through his mind in the morning. He knew that if he had not been over friendly to John, it had been John's own fault; but since he had found out that it was impossible to marry Mrs. G.o.ddard, he had forgiven the young scholar his shortcomings and felt very charitably inclined towards him. It suddenly struck him that it would give John great pleasure to stop at the Hall for a few days, and that it would be no inconvenience to himself. The effect upon Mrs. Ambrose was greater even than he had expected. She was hospitable, good and kind, but she was also economical, as she had need to be. The squire was rich. If the squire would put up John during a part of his visit it would be a kindness to John himself, and an economy to the vicarage. Mr. Ambrose himself would not have gone to such a length; but then, as his wife said to herself in self-defence, Augustin did not pay the butcher's bills, and did not know how the money went. She did not say that Augustin was precisely what is called reckless, but he of course did not understand economy as she did. How should he, poor man, with all his sermons and his funerals and other occupations to take his mind off?

Mrs. Ambrose was delighted at the squire's proposal.

"Really!" she exclaimed. "That would be too good of you, Mr. Juxon. And you do not know how it would quite delight him! He loves books so much, and then you know," she added in a confidential manner, "he has never stayed in a country house in his life, I am quite sure."

"And when is he coming down?" asked Mr. Juxon. "I should be very much pleased to have him."

"To-morrow, I think," said Mrs. Ambrose.

"Well--would you ask him from me to come up and stop a week? Can you spare him, Mrs. Ambrose? I know you are very fond of him, of course, but--"

"Oh very," said she warmly. "But I think it likely he will stay some time," she added in explanation of her willingness to let him go to the Hall.

The squire felt vaguely that the presence of a guest in his house would probably be a restraint upon him, and he felt that some restraint would be agreeable to him at the present time.

"Besides," added Mrs. Ambrose, "if you would like to have him first--there is a little repair necessary in his room at the vicarage--we have put it off too long--"

"By all means." said the squire, following out his own train of thought.

"Send him up to me as soon as he comes. If I can manage it I will be down here to ask him myself."

"It is so good of you," said Mrs. Ambrose.

"Not at all. Are you going to the cottage?"

"Yes--why?"

"Nothing," said Mr. Juxon. "I did not know whether you would like to walk on a little farther with me. Good-bye, then. You will tell Short as soon as he comes, will you not?"

"Certainly," replied Mrs. Ambrose, still beaming upon him. "I will not let him unpack his things at the vicarage. Good-bye--so many thanks."

CHAPTER XVIII.

Mrs. G.o.ddard's head ached "terrible bad" according to Martha, and when the vicar left her she went and lay down upon her bed, with a sensation that if the worst were not yet over she could bear no more. But she had an elastic temperament, and the fact of having consulted Mr. Ambrose that morning had been a greater relief than she herself suspected. She felt that he could be trusted to save Mr. Juxon from harm and Walter from capture, and having once confided to him the important secret which had so heavily weighed upon her mind she felt that the burthen of her troubles was lightened. Mr. Juxon could take any measures he pleased for his own safety; he would probably choose to stay at home until the danger was past. As for her husband, Mary G.o.ddard did not believe that he would return a third time, for she thought that she had thoroughly frightened him. It was even likely that he had only thrown out his threat for the sake of terrifying his wife, and was now far beyond the limits of the parish. So great was the relief she felt after she had talked with the vicar that she almost ceased to believe there was any danger at all; looking at it in the light of her present mood, she almost wondered why she had thought it necessary to tell Mr. Ambrose--until suddenly a vision of her friend the squire, attacked and perhaps killed, in his own park, rose to her mental vision, and she remembered what agonies of fear she had felt for him until she had sent for the vicar. The latter indeed seemed to have been a sort of _deus ex maohina_ by whom she suddenly obtained peace of mind and a sense of security in the hour of her greatest distress.

All that afternoon she lay upon her bed, while Nellie sat beside her and read to her, and stroked her hands; for Nellie was in reality pa.s.sionately fond of her mother and suffered almost as much at the sight of her suffering as she could have done had she been in pain herself.

Both Mrs. G.o.ddard and the child started at the sound of Stamboul's baying, which was unlike anything they had ever heard before, and Nellie ran to the window.

"It is only Mr. Juxon and Stamboul having a game," said Nellie. "What a noise he made, though! Did not he?"

Poor Nellie--had she had any idea of what the "game" was from which the squire found it so hard to make his hound desist, she must have gone almost mad with horror. For the game was her own father, poor child. But she came back and sat beside her mother utterly unconscious of what might have happened if Stamboul had once got beyond earshot, galloping along the trail towards the disused vault at the back of the church. Mrs.

G.o.ddard had started at the sounds and had put her hand to her forehead, but Nellie's explanation was enough to quiet her, and she smiled faintly and closed her eyes again. Then, half an hour later, Mrs. Ambrose came, and would not be denied. She wanted to make Mrs. G.o.ddard comfortable, she said, when she found she was ill, and she did her best, being a kind and motherly woman when not hardened by the presence of strangers. She told her that John was coming on the next day, speaking with vast pride of his success and omitting to look sternly at Mrs. G.o.ddard as she had formerly been accustomed to do when she spoke of the young scholar. Then at last she went away, after exacting a promise from Mrs. G.o.ddard to come and dine, bringing Nellie with her, on the following day, in case she should have recovered by that time from her headache.

But during all that night Mrs. G.o.ddard lay awake, listening for the sound she so much dreaded, of a creeping footstep on the slated path outside and for the tapping at the window. Nothing came, however, and as the grey dawn began to creep in through the white curtains, she fell peacefully asleep. Nellie would not let her be waked, and breakfasted without her, enjoying with childish delight the state of being waited on by Martha alone.

Meanwhile, at an early hour, John arrived at the vicarage and was received with open arms by Mr. Ambrose and his wife. The latter seemed to forget, in the pleasure of seeing him again, that she had even once spoken doubtfully of him or hinted that he was anything short of perfection itself. And to prove how much she had done for him she communicated with great pride the squire's message, to the effect that he expected John at the Hall that very day.

John's heart leaped with delight at the idea. It was natural. He was indeed most sincerely attached to the Ambroses, and most heartily glad to be with them; but he had never in his life had an opportunity of staying in a "big" house, as he would have described it. It seemed as though he were already beginning to taste the sweet first-fruits of success after all his labour and all his privations; it was the first taste of another world, the first mouthful of the good things of life which had fallen to his lot. Instantly there rose before him delicious visions of hot-water cans brought by a real footman, of luxurious meals served by a real butler, of soft carpets perpetually beneath his feet, of liberty to lounge in magnificent chairs in the magnificent library; and last, though not least, there was a boyish feeling of delight in the thought that when he went to see Mrs. G.o.ddard he would go from the Hall, that she would perhaps a.s.sociate him henceforth with a different kind of existence, in a word, that he was sure to acquire importance in her eyes from the fact of his visit to the squire. Many a young fellow of one and twenty is as familiar with all that money can give and as tired of luxury as a broken-down hard liver of forty years; for this is an age of luxurious living. But poor John had hardly ever tasted the least of those things too familiar to the golden youth of the period to be even noticed. He had felt when he first entered the little drawing-room of the cottage that Mrs. G.o.ddard herself belonged, or had belonged, to that delicious unknown world of ease where the question of expense was never considered, much less mentioned. In her own eyes she was indeed living in a state approaching to penury, but the spectacle of her pictures, her furniture and her bibelots had impressed John with a very different idea. The squire's invitation, asking him to spend a week at the Hall, seemed in a moment to put him upon the same level as the woman to whom he believed himself so devotedly attached. To his mind the ideal woman could not but be surrounded by a luxurious atmosphere of her own. To enter the charmed precincts of those surroundings seemed to John equivalent to being transported from the regions of the Theocritan to the level of the Anacreontic ode, from the pastoral, of which he had had too much, to the aristocratic, of which he felt that he could not have enough. It was a natural feeling in a very young man of his limited experience.

He stayed some hours at the vicarage. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose thought him changed in the short time which had elapsed since they had seen him.

He had grown more grave; he was certainly more of a man. The great contest he had just sustained with so much honour had left upon his young face its mark, an air of power which had not formerly been visible there; even his voice seemed to have grown deeper and rounder, and his words carried more weight. The good vicar, who had seen several generations of students, already distinguished in John Short the budding "don," and rubbed his hands with great satisfaction.

John asked few questions but found himself obliged to answer many concerning his recent efforts. He would have liked to say something about Mrs. G.o.ddard, but he remembered with some awe and much aversion the circ.u.mstances in which he had last quitted the vicarage, and he held his peace; whereby he again rose in Mrs. Ambrose's estimation. He made up for his silence by speaking effusively of the squire's kindness in asking him to the Hall; forgetting perhaps the relief he had felt when he escaped from Billingsfield after Christmas without being again obliged to shake hands with Mr. Juxon. Things looked very differently now, however. He felt himself to be somebody in the world, and that distressing sense of inferiority which had perhaps been at the root of his jealousy against the squire was gone, swallowed in the sense of triumph. His face was pale, perhaps, from overwork, but there was a brilliancy in his eyes and an incisiveness in his speech which came from the confidence of victory.

He now desired nothing more than to meet the squire, feeling sure that he should receive his congratulations, and though he stayed some hours in conversation with his old friends, in imagination he was already at the Hall. The squire had not come down to meet him, as he had proposed, but he had sent his outlandish American gig with his groom to fetch John.

While he was at the vicarage the latter was probably too much occupied with conversation to notice that Mr. Ambrose seemed preoccupied and changed, and the vicar was to some extent recalled to his usual manner by the presence of his pupil. Mrs. Ambrose had taxed her husband with concealing something from her ever since the previous day, but the good man was obstinate and merely said that he felt unaccountably nervous and irritable, and begged her to excuse his mood. Mrs. Ambrose postponed her cross-examination until a more favourable opportunity should present itself.

John got into the gig and drove away. He was to return with the squire to dinner in the evening, and he fully expected that Mrs. G.o.ddard and Nellie would be of the party--it seemed hardly likely that they should be omitted. Indeed, soon after John had left a note arrived at the vicarage explaining that Mrs. G.o.ddard was much better and would certainly come, according to Mrs. Ambrose's very kind invitation.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the meeting which took place between Mr.

Juxon and John Short. The squire was hospitable in the extreme and expressed his great satisfaction at having John under his own roof at last. He was perhaps, like the vicar, a little nervous, but the young man did not notice it, being much absorbed by the enjoyment of his good fortune and of the mental rest he so greatly needed. Mr. Juxon congratulated him warmly and expressed a hope, amounting to certainty, that John might actually be at the head of the Tripos; to which John modestly replied that he would be quite satisfied to be in the first ten, knowing in his heart that he should be most bitterly disappointed if he were second to any one. He sat opposite to his host in a deep chair beside the fire in the library and revelled in comfort and ease, enjoying every trifle that fell in his way, feeling only a very slight diffidence in regard to himself for the present and none at all for the future. The squire was so cordial that he felt himself thoroughly at home. Indeed Mr.

Juxon already rejoiced at his wisdom in asking John to the Hall. The lad was strong, hopeful, well-balanced in every respect and his presence was an admirable tonic to the almost morbid state of anxiety in which the squire had lived ever since his interview with Policeman Gall, two days before. In the suns.h.i.+ne of John's young personality, fears grew small and hope grew big. The ideas which had pa.s.sed through Mr. Juxon's brain on the previous evening, just after Mr. Ambrose had warned him of G.o.ddard's intentions, seemed now like the evil shadows of a nightmare. All apprehension lest the convict should attempt to execute his threats disappeared like darkness before daylight, and in the course of an hour or two the squire found himself laughing and chatting with his guest as though there were no such things as forgery or convicts in the world. The afternoon pa.s.sed very pleasantly between the examination of Mr. Juxon's treasures and the conversation those objects elicited. For John, who was an accomplished scholar, had next to no knowledge of bibliology and took delight in seeing for the first time many a rare edition which he had heard mentioned or had read of in the course of his studies. He would not have believed that he could be now talking on such friendly terms with a man for whom he had once felt the strongest antipathy, and Mr. Juxon on his part felt that in their former meetings he had not done full justice to the young man's undoubted talents.

As they drove down to the vicarage that evening Mrs. G.o.ddard's name was mentioned for the first time. John, with a fine affectation of indifference, asked how she was.

"She has not been very well lately," answered Mr. Juxon.

"What has been the matter?" inquired John, who could not see his companion's face in the dark shade of the trees.

"Headache, I believe," returned the squire laconically, and silence ensued for a few moments. "I should not wonder if it rained again this evening," he added presently as they pa.s.sed through the park gate, out into the road. The sky was black and it was hard to see anything beyond the yellow streak of light which fell from the lamps and ran along the road before the gig.

"If it turns out a fine night, don't come for us. We will walk home,"

said the squire to the groom as they descended before the vicarage and Stamboul, who had sat on the floor between them, sprang down to the ground.

John was startled when he met Mrs. G.o.ddard. He was amazed at the change in her appearance for which no one had prepared him. She met him indeed very cordially but he felt as though she were not the same woman he had known so short a time before. There was still in her face that delicate pathetic expression which had at first charmed him, there was still the same look in her eyes; but what had formerly seemed so attractive seemed now exaggerated. Her cheeks looked wan and hollow and there were deep shadows about her eyes and temples; her lips had lost their colour and the lines about her mouth had suddenly become apparent where John had not before suspected them. She looked ten years older as she put her thin hand in his and smiled pleasantly at his greeting. Some trite phrase about the "ravages of time" crossed John's mind and gave him a disagreeable sensation, for which it was hard to account. He felt as though his dream were suddenly dead and a strange reality had taken life in its place. Could this be she to whom he had written verses by the score, at whose smile he had swelled with pride, at whose careless laugh he had trembled with shame? She was terribly changed, she looked positively old--what John called old. As he sat by her side talking and wondering whether he would fall back into those same grooves of conversation he had a.s.sociated with her formerly, he felt something akin to pity for her, which he had certainly never expected to feel. She was not the same as before--even the tone of her voice was different; she was gentle, pathetic, endowed even now with many charms, but she was not the woman he had dreamed of and tried to speak to of the love he fancied was in his heart. She talked--yes; but there were long pauses, and her eyes wandered strangely from him, often towards the windows of the vicarage drawing-room, often towards the doors; her answers were not always to the point and her interest seemed to flag in what was said.

John could not fail to notice too that both Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Juxon treated her with the kind of attention which is bestowed upon invalids, and the vicar's wife was constantly doing something to make her comfortable, offering her a footstool, shading the light from her eyes, asking if she felt any draught where she sat. These were things no one had formerly thought of doing for Mrs. G.o.ddard, who in spite of her sad face had been used to laugh merrily enough with the rest, and whose lithe figure had seemed to John the embodiment of youthful activity. At last he ventured to ask her a question.

"Have you been ill, Mrs. G.o.ddard?" he inquired in a voice full of interest. Her soft eyes glanced uneasily at him. He was now the only one of the party who was not in some degree acquainted with her troubles.

"Oh no!" she answered nervously. "Only a little headache. It always makes me quite wretched when I have it."

"Yes. I often have headaches, too," answered John. "The squire told me as we came down."

"What did he tell you?" asked Mrs. G.o.ddard so quickly as to startle her companion.

"Oh--only that you had not been very well. Where is it that you suffer?"

he asked sympathetically. "I think it is worst when it seems to be in the very centre of one's head, like a red-hot nail being driven in with a hammer--is that like what you feel?"

"I--yes, I daresay. I don't quite know," she answered, her eyes wandering uneasily about the room. "I suppose you have dreadful headaches over your work, do you not, Mr. Short?" she added quickly, feeling that she must say something.

"Oh, it is all over now," said John rather proudly. But as he leaned back in his chair he said to himself that this meeting was not precisely what he had antic.i.p.ated; the subject of headaches might have a fine interest in its way, but he had expected to have talked of more tender things. To his own great surprise he felt no desire to do so, however. He had not recovered from the shock of seeing that Mrs. G.o.ddard had grown old.