Part 46 (1/2)
She nodded towards the Parson.
”Eh, to be sure,” said Mr. Chichester, ”what you may call my _locus standi_ in this affair is just nothing at all. If the child had demanded my right to be putting questions to him, 'faith, I don't know what I could have answered.”
”It ain't that at all,” said Tilda, after considering awhile.
”It's your bein' a clergyman. 'E's shy of clergymen. If ever you'd seen Gla.s.son you wouldn' wonder at it, neither.”
”I'd like to persuade him that the clergy are not all Gla.s.sons.
Perhaps you might ask him to give me a chance, next time?”
”Oh, _you?_” Tilda answered, turning in the doorway and nodding gravely.
”_You're_ all right, o' course. W'y, you sit a hoss a'most well enough for a circus!”
”That child is a brick,” laughed Miss Sally as the door closed.
”At this moment,” said Mr. Chichester, ”I should be the last man in the world to dispute it. Her testimonial was not, perhaps, unsolicited; still, I never dreamed of one that tickled my secret vanity so happily.
I begin to believe her story, and even to understand how she has carried through this amazing anabasis. Shall we have the horses saddled?”
He rang the bell. Mrs. Tossell answered it, bringing with her a tray of cold meats, apple tart, syllabubs, gla.s.ses, and a flagon of home-made cider. Yes, to be sure, they might have their horses saddled; but they might not go before observing Inistow's full ritual of hospitality.
Miss Sally plied (as she put it) a good knife and fork, and the Parson was hungry as a hunter should be. They ate, therefore, and talked little for a while: there would be time for talk on the long homeward ride. But when, in Homer's words, they had put from them the desire of meat and drink, and had mounted and bidden Mrs. Tossell farewell, Parson Chichester reopened the conversation.
”You believe the child's story, then?”
”Why, of course; and so must you. Man alive, truth was written all over it!”
”Yes, yes; I was using a fas.h.i.+on of speech. And the boy?”
”Is Miles Chandon's son. On that too you may lay all Lombard Street to a china orange.” In the twilight Miss Sally leaned forward for a moment and smoothed her roan's mane. ”You know the history, of course?”
”Very little of it. I knew, to be sure, that somehow Chandon had made a mess of things--turned unbeliever, and what not--”
”Is that all?” Miss Sally, for all her surprise, appeared to be slightly relieved. ”But I was forgetting. You're an unmarried man: a wife would have taught you the tale and a hundred guesses beside.
Of all women in the world, parsons' wives are the most inquisitive.”
Mr. Chichester made no reply to this. She glanced at him after a pause, and observed that he rode with set face and looked straight ahead between his horse's ears.
”Forgive me,” she said. ”When folks come to our time of life without marrying, nine times out of ten there has been a mess; and what I said a moment since is just the flippant talk we use to cover it up. By 'our time of life' I don't mean, of course, that we're of an age, you and I, but that we've fixed our fate, formed our habits, made our beds and must lie in 'em as comfortably as we can manage. . . . I was a girl when Miles Chandon came to grief; you were a grown man--had been away for years, if I recollect, on some missionary expedition.”
”In north-east China.”
”To be sure, yes; and, no doubt, making the discovery that converting Chinamen was as hopeless a business as to forget Exmoor and the Quantocks.”
”I had put my hand to the plough--”
”--and G.o.d by an illness gently released it. I have heard . . . Well, to get back to Miles Chandon. . . . He was young--a second son, you'll remember, and poor at that; a second lieutenant in the Navy, with no more than his pay and a trifling allowance. The boy had good instincts,” said Miss Sally with a short, abrupt laugh. ”I may as well say at once that he wanted to marry me, but had been forced to dismiss the notion.”
Again she paused a moment before taking up the story.
”Well, his s.h.i.+p--the _Pegasus_--was bringing him home after two years on the Australian station. . . . Heaven help me! I'm an old sportswoman now, and understand something of the male animal and his pa.s.sions.
In those days I must have been--or so it strikes me, looking back--a sort of plain-featured Diana; 'chaste huntress'--isn't that what they called her? At any rate, the story shocked, even sickened, me a little at the time. . . . It appears that the night before making Plymouth Sound he made a bet in the wardroom--a bet of fifty pounds--that he'd marry the first woman he met ash.o.r.e. Pretty mad, was it not?--even for a youngster coming home penniless, with no prospects, and to a home he hated; for his father and mother were dead, and he and his elder brother Anthony had never been able to hit it off. . . . On the whole, you may say he got better than he deserved. For some reason or other they halted the _Pegasus_ outside the Hamoaze--dropped anchor in Cawsand Bay, in fact; and there, getting leave for sh.o.r.e, the young fool met his fate on Cawsand quay. She was a coast-guard's daughter--a decent girl, I've heard, and rather strikingly handsome. I'll leave it to you what he might have found if he'd happened to land at Plymouth. . . . He got more than half-drunk that night; but a day or two later, when the s.h.i.+p was paid off, he went back from Plymouth to Cawsand, and within a week he had married her. Then it turned out that fate had been nursing its stroke. At Sidmouth, on the second day of the honeymoon, a redirected telegram reached him, and he learnt that by Anthony's death Meriton was his, and the t.i.tle with it. He left his bride at once, and posted up to Meriton for the funeral, arriving just in time; and there I saw him, for we all happened to be at Culvercoombe for the shooting, and women used to attend funerals in those days. . . . No one knew of the marriage; but that same evening he rode over to Culvercoombe, asked for a word with me in private, and told me the whole story--pluckily enough, I am bound to say. G.o.d knows what I had expected those words in private to be; and perhaps in the revulsion of learning the truth I lashed out on him.
. . . Yes, I had a tongue in those days--have still, for that matter; not a doubt but I made him feel it. The world, you see, seemed at an end for both of us. I had no mother to help me, and my brother Elphinstone's best friend wouldn't call him the man to advise in such a business. Moreover, where was the use of advice? The thing was done, past undoing. . . Oh,” Miss Sally went on, ”you are not to think I broke my heart over it. As I've tried to explain, I was disgusted rather: I loathed the man, and--and--well, this is not the history of Sally Breward, so once more we'll get back to Miles Chandon. . . . He rode off; but he didn't ride back to Sidmouth. In his rage he did a thing that, I now see, was far baser than his original folly. I saw it as soon as my mind cleared; but--since this is a confession of a sort-- I didn't see it at the time, for I hated the woman. He wrote her a letter; stuck a cheque inside, I dare say--he was brute enough just then; and told her she might claim her price if she chose, but that he would never see her again. . . . She went back to her coast-guard people.”