the more respectable and deserving of sympathy and admiration would Jenny Buttle have been counted. Her ladyship’s rich American sister had no “young man”; she had not at any time been asked to “walk out.” Even in the dark days of the fever, each of which had carried thought and action of hers to the scene of trouble, there had reigned unbroken silence, except for the vicar’s notes of warm and appreciative gratitude.
“You are very obstinate, Fergus,” Mr. Penzance had said.
And Mount Dunstan had shaken his head fiercely and answered:
“Don’t speak to me about it. Only obstinacy will save me from behaving like—other blackguards.”
Mr. Penzance, carefully polishing his eyeglasses as he watched him, was not sparing in his comment.
“That is pure folly,” he said, “pure bull-necked, stubborn folly, charging with its head down. Before it has done with you it will have made you suffer quite enough.”
“Be sure of that,” Mount Dunstan had said, setting his teeth, as he sat in his chair clasping his hands behind his head and glowering into space.
Mr. Penzance quietly, speculatively, looked him over, and reflected aloud—or, so it sounded.
“It is a big-boned and big-muscled characteristic, but there are things which are stronger. Some one minute will arrive— just one minute—which will be stronger. One of those moments when the mysteries of the universe are at work.”
“Don’t speak to me like that, I tell you!” Mount Dunstan broke out passionately. And he sprang up and marched out of the room like an angry man.
Miss Vanderpoel did not go to Mrs. Welden’s cottage at once, but walked past its door down the lane, where there were no more cottages, but only hedges and fields on either side of her. “Not well enough to make his rounds” might mean much or little. It might mean a temporary breakdown from overfatigue or a sickening for deadly illness. She looked at a group of cropping sheep in a field and at a flock of rooks which had just alighted near it with cawing and flapping of wings. She kept her eyes on them merely to steady herself. The thoughts she had brought out with her had grown heavier and were horribly difficult to control. One must not allow one’s self to believe the worst will come—one must not allow it.
She always held this rule before herself, and now she was not holding it steadily. There was nothing to do. She could write a mere note of inquiry to Mr. Penzance, but that was all. She could only walk up and down the lanes and think—whether he lay dying or not. She could do nothing, even if a day came when she knew that a pit had been dug in the clay and he had been lowered into it with creaking ropes, and the clods shovelled back upon him where he lay still—never having told her that he was glad that her being had turned to him and her heart cried aloud his name. She recalled with curious distinctness the effect of the steady toll of the church bell—the “passing bell.”
She could hear it as she had heard it the first time it fell upon her ear, and she had inquired what it meant. Why did they call it the “passing bell”? All had passed before it began to toll—all had passed. If it tolled at Dunstan and the pit was dug in the churchyard before her father came, would he see, the moment they met, that something had befallen her—that the Betty he had known was changed—gone? Yes, he would see. Affection such as his always saw. Then he would sit alone with her in some quiet room and talk to her, and she would tell him the strange thing that had happened. He would understand—perhaps better than she.
She stopped abruptly in her walk and stood still. The hand holding her package was quite cold. This was what one must not allow one’s self. But how the thoughts had raced through her brain! She turned and hastened her steps towards Mrs. Welden’s cottage.
In Mrs. Welden’s tiny back yard there stood a “coal lodge” suited to the size of the domicile and already stacked with a full winter’s supply of coal. Therefore the well-polished and cleanly little grate in the living-room was bright with fire.
Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow gossip a visit, was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as to cap and apron and small purple shoulder shawl, had evidently been allaying his natural anxiety as to the conduct of foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud voice the “print” under the pictures in an illustrated paper.
This occupation had, however, been interrupted a few moments before Miss Vanderpoel’s arrival. Mrs. Bester, the neighbour in the next cottage, had stepped in with her youngest on her hip and was talking breathlessly. She paused to drop her curtsy as Betty entered, and old Doby stood up and made his salute with a trembling hand
“She’ll know,” he said. “Gentry knows the ins an’ outs of gentry fust. She’ll know the rights.”
“What has happened?”
Mrs. Bester unexpectedly burst into tears. There was an element in the female villagers’ temperament which Betty had found was frequently unexpected in its breaking forth.
“He’s down, miss,” she said. “He’s down with it crool bad. There’ll be no savin’ of him—none.”
Betty laid her package of sewing cotton and knitting wool quietly on the blue and white checked tablecloth.
“Who—is he?” she asked.
“His lordship—and him just saved all Dunstan parish from death—to go like this!”
In Stornham village and in all others of the neighbourhood the feminine attitude towards Mount Dunstan had been one of strongly emotional admiration. The thwarted female longing for romance—the desire for drama and a hero had been fed by him. A fine, big young man, one that had been “spoke ill of” and regarded as an outcast, had suddenly turned the tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of the county, the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage women on their doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to each other by the roadside. Magic stories had been told of him, beflowered with dramatic detail. No incident could have been related to his credit which would not have been believed and improved upon. Shut up in his village working among his people and unseen by outsiders, he had become a popular idol. Any scrap of news of him—any rumour, true or untrue, was seized upon and excitedly spread abroad. Therefore Mrs. Bester wept as she talked, and, if the truth must be told, enjoyed the situation. She was the first to tell the story to her ladyship’s sister herself, as well as to Mrs. Welden and old Doby.
“It’s Tom as brought it in,” she said. “He’s my brother, miss, an’ he’s one of the ringers. He heard it from Jem Wesgate, an’ he heard it at Toomy’s farm. They’ve been keepin’ it hid at the Mount because the people that’s ill hangs on his lordship so that the doctors daren’t let them know the truth. They’ve been told he had to go to London an’ may come back any day. What Tom was sayin’, miss, was that we’d all know when it was over, for we’d hear
