“That he will, heartily. Do you tell him that you had a word or two with me here, and that I’ll come up and call on him tomorrow.” Then he put his hand into his pocket, and whispering something, offered the lad money. But Sam turned away, and shook his head, and walked off. “I don’t believe that that fellow had any more to do with it than you or I,” said Fenwick.
“I don’t know what to believe,” said Gilmore. “Have you heard that the Marquis is in the town? Greenthorne just told me so.”
“Then I had better get out of it, for Heytesbury isn’t big enough for the two of us. Come, you’ve done here, and we might as well jog home.”
Gilmore dined at the Vicarage that evening, and of course the day’s work was discussed. The quarrel, too, which had taken place at the farmhouse had only yet been in part described to Mrs. Fenwick. “Do you know I feel half triumphant and half frightened,” Mrs. Fenwick said to the Squire. “I know that the Marquis is an old fool, imperious, conceited, and altogether unendurable when he attempts to interfere. And yet I have a kind of feeling that because he is a Marquis, and because he owns two thousand and so many acres in the parish, and because he lives at Turnover Park, one ought to hold him in awe.”
“Frank didn’t hold him in awe yesterday,” said the Squire.
“He holds nothing in awe,” said the wife.
“You wrong me there, Janet. I hold you in great awe, and every lady in Wiltshire more or less;—and I think I may say every woman. And I would hold him in a sort of awe, too, if he didn’t drive me beyond myself by his mixture of folly and pride.”
“He can do us a great deal of mischief, you know,” said Mrs. Fenwick.
“What he can do, he will do,” said the parson. “He even gave me a bad name, no doubt; but I fancy he was generous enough to me in that way before yesterday. He will now declare that I am the Evil One himself, and people won’t believe that. A continued persistent enmity, always at work, but kept within moderate bounds, is more dangerous nowadays, than a hot fever of revengeful wrath. The Marquis can’t send out his men-at-arms and have me knocked on the head, or cast into a dungeon. He can only throw mud at me, and the more he throws at once, the less will reach me.”
As to Sam, they were agreed that, whether he were innocent or guilty, the old miller should be induced to regard him as innocent, as far as their joint exertion in that direction might avail.
“He is innocent before the law till he has been proved to be guilty,” said the Squire.
“Then of course there can be nothing wrong in telling his father that he is innocent,” said the lady.
The Squire did not quite admit this, and the parson smiled as he heard the argument; but they both acknowledged that it would be right to let it be considered throughout the parish that Sam was to be regarded as blameless for that night’s transaction. Nevertheless, Mr. Gilmore’s mind on the subject was not changed.
“Have you heard from Loring?” the Squire asked Mrs. Fenwick as he got up to leave the Vicarage.
“Oh, yes—constantly. She is quite well, Mr. Gilmore.”
“I sometimes think that I’ll go off and have a look at her.”
“I’m sure both she and her aunt would be glad to see you.”
“But would it be wise?”
“If you ask me, I am bound to say that I think it would not be wise. If I were you, I would leave her for awhile. Mary is as good as gold, but she is a woman; and, like other women, the more she is sought, the more difficult she will be.”
“It always seems to me,” said Mr. Gilmore, “that to be successful in love, a man should not be in love at all; or, at any rate, he should hide it.” Then he went off home alone, feeling on his heart that pernicious load of a burden which comes from the unrestrained longing for some good thing which cannot be attained. It seemed to him now that nothing in life would be worth a thought if Mary Lowther should continue to say him nay; and it seemed to him, too, that unless the yea were said very quickly, all his aptitudes for enjoyment would be worn out of him.
On the next morning, immediately after breakfast, Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick walked down to the mill together. They went through the village, and thence by a pathway down to a little footbridge, and so along the river side. It was a beautiful October morning, the 7th of October, and Fenwick talked of the pheasants. Gilmore, though he was a sportsman, and shot rabbits and partridges about his own property, and went occasionally to shooting-parties at a distance, preserved no game. There had been some old unpleasantness about the Marquis’s pheasants, and he had given it up. There could be no doubt that his property in the parish being chiefly low lying lands and water meads unfit for coverts, was not well disposed for preserving pheasants, and that in shooting he would more likely shoot Lord Trowbridge’s birds than his own. But it was equally certain that Lord Trowbridge’s pheasants made no scruple of feeding on his land. Nevertheless, he had thought it right to give up all idea of keeping up a head of game for his own use in Bullhampton.
“Upon my word, if I were you, Gilmore,” said the parson, as a bird rose from the ground close at their feet, “I should cease to be nice about the shooting after what happened yesterday.”
“You don’t mean that you would retaliate, Frank?”
“I think I should.”
“Is that good parson’s law?”
“It’s very good squire’s law. And as for that doctrine of
