‘So he shall, the dear!’ Julia caressed
him. ’We’ll all have a tournament
in the wet-weather shed.’
Janet whispered to me, ‘Was it—the
Returning Thanks?’
‘The what?’ said I, with the dread at
my heart of something worse than I had heard.
She hailed Julia to run and fetch the battledores,
and then told me she had been obliged to confiscate
the newspapers that morning and cast the burden on
post-office negligence. ’They reach grandada’s
hands by afternoon post, Harry, and he finds objectionable
passages blotted or cut out; and as long as the scissors
don’t touch the business columns and the debates,
he never asks me what I have been doing. He thinks
I keep a scrap-book. I haven’t often time
in the morning to run an eye all over the paper.
This morning it was the first thing I saw.’
What had she seen? She led me out of view of
the windows and showed me.
My father was accused of having stood up at a public
dinner and returned thanks on behalf of an Estate
of the Realm: it read monstrously. I ceased
to think of the suffering inflicted on me by my grandfather.
Janet and I, side by side with the captain and Julia,
carried on the game of battledore and shuttlecock,
in a match to see whether the unmarried could keep
the shuttle flying as long as the married, with varying
fortunes. She gazed on me, to give me the comfort
of her sympathy, too much, and I was too intent on
the vision of my father either persecuted by lies
or guilty of hideous follies, to allow the match to
be a fair one. So Julia could inform the squire
that she and William had given the unmarried pair
a handsome beating, when he appeared peeping round
one of the shed-pillars.
’Of course you beat ’em,’ said the
squire. ’It ‘s not my girl’s
fault.’ He said more, to the old tune,
which drove Janet away.
I remembered, when back in the London vortex, the
curious soft beauty she won from casting up her eyes
to watch the descending feathers, and the brilliant
direct beam of those thick-browed, firm, clear eyes,
with her frown, and her set lips and brave figure,
when she was in the act of striking to keep up a regular
quick fusilade. I had need of calm memories.
The town was astir, and humming with one name.
THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET
I passed from man to man, hearing hints and hesitations,
alarming half-remarks, presumed to be addressed to
one who could supply the remainder, and deduce consequences.
There was a clearer atmosphere in the street of Clubs.
Jennings was the first of my father’s more intimate
acquaintances to meet me frankly. He spoke, though
not with great seriousness, of the rumour of a possible
prosecution. Sir Weeton Slater tripped up to
us with a mixed air of solicitude and restraint, asked
whether I was well, and whether I had seen the newspapers
that morning; and on my informing him that I had just
come up from Riversley, on account of certain rumours,
advised me to remain in town strictly for the present.
He also hinted at rumours of prosecutions. ‘The
fact is——’ he began several
times, rendered discreet, I suppose, by my juvenility,
fierte, and reputed wealth.
