"He must have gone and married. The wretch!" broke in Rosamond.
"No, oh no!" cried Anne. "Only hear the rest. 'I told him that I could not see that at all, and that there was a very warm and tender remembrance of him among us all, and he nearly broke down and said, 'For Heaven's sake then, Miles, let them rest in that! There's more peace for them so.' I suppose I looked-I am sure I did not speak- as though I were a little staggered as to whether he were ashamed to be known; for he drew himself up in the old way I should have known anywhere, and told me there was no reason I should fear to shake hands with him; however his name might be blasted at home, he had done nothing to make himself unworthy of his mother and Jenny-and there was a sob again. So I let him know that up to my last letters from home Jenny was unmarried. I even remembered those descriptive words of yours, Nannie, 'living in patient peacefulness and cheerfulness on his memory.'"
"I was called on deck just then, so I gave him my home photograph-book, and left him with it. I found him crying like a child over it when I came back; I was obliged to strip it of all my best for him, for I could not move him. We went through the whole of the old story, to see if there were any hope; and when he found that Tom Vivian was dead, and George Proudfoot too, without a word about him, he seemed to think it hopeless. He believes that Proudfoot at least, if not Moy, was deeply in debt to Vivian, though not to that extent, and that Vivian probably incited them to 'borrow' from my mother's letter. He was very likely to undertake to get the draft cashed for them, and not to account for the difference. It may have helped to hasten his catastrophe. Moy I never should have suspected; Archie says he should once have done so as little; but he was a plausible fellow, and would do things on the sly, while all along appearing to old Proudfoot as a mentor to George. Archie seemed to feel his prosperity the bitterest pill of all-reigning like one of the squirearchy at Proudfoot Lawn-a magistrate forsooth, with his daughter figuring as an heiress. One thing worth note-Archie says, that when it was too late, he remembered that the under-clerk, Gadley, might not have gone home, and might have heard him explain that the letter had turned up.'"
"Gadley? Why that's the landlord of the 'Three Pigeons!'" exclaimed Rosamond. "It is Mr. Moy's house, and he supports him through thick and thin."
"Yes," said Julius, "the magistrates have been on the point of taking away his license, but Moy always stands up for him. There is something suspicious in that."
"I heard Miss Moy, with my own ears, tell Mrs. Duncombe that he was the apple of her father's eye," cried Rosamond.
"He's bribed! he's bribed! Oh, I see it all. Well, go on, Anne. If Archie isn't at home before he is a year older-"
Anne went on. "'He allowed that he would have done more wisely in facing it out and standing his trial; but he said, poor fellow, that he felt as if the earth had given way under him. There was not a soul near who believed him; they brought his father's history against him, and moreover he had been at the races, and had been betting, though in fact he had won, and not lost, and the 201. he had become possessed of was his capital, besides the little he could draw out of the bank
"'If he could only have seen Jenny in London she would have turned him back. Indeed, that first stage was to consult her, but he fancied he saw the face of the Wil'sbro' Superintendent in a cab, and the instinct of avoiding arrest carried him to Southampton, where he got a steerage berth in a sailing vessel, and came out to the Cape. He has lived hard enough, but his Scots blood has stood him in good stead, and he has made something as an ivory-hunter, and now has a partnership in an ostrich farm in the Amatongula country. Still he held to it that it was better he should continue dead to all here, since Mr. Bowater would never forgive him; and the knowledge of his existence would only hinder Jenny's happiness. You should have seen the struggle with which he said that! He left me no choice, indeed; forbade a word to any one, until I suggested that I had a wife, and that my said wife and Julius had put me on the scent. He was immensely struck to find that my sweet Nan came from Glen Fraser. He said the evenings he spent there had done more to renew his home-sickness, and made him half mad after the sight or sound of us, than anything else had done, and I got him to promise to come and see us when we are settled in the bush. What should you say to joining him in ostrich-hatching? or would it be ministering too much to the vanities of the world? However, I'll do something to get him cleared, if it comes to an appeal to old Moy himself, when I come home. Meantime, remember, you are not at liberty to speak a word of this to any one but Julius, and, I suppose, his wife. I hope-' There, Rose, I beg your pardon."
"What does he hope?" asked Rosamond.
"He only hopes she is a cautious woman."
"As cautious as his Nan, eh? Ah, Anne! you're a canny Scot, and maybe think holding your tongue as fine a thing as this Archie does; but I can't bear it. I think it is shocking, just wearing out the heart of the best and sweetest girl in the world."
"At any rate," said Julius, "we must be silent. We have no right to speak, however we may feel."
"You don't expect it will stay a secret, or that he'll go and pluck ostriches like geese, with Miles and Anne, and nobody know it? 'Twould be taking example by their ostriches, indeed!"
"I think so," said Julius, laughing; "but as it stands now, silence is our duty by both Miles and Archie, and Anne herself. We must not make her repent having told us."
"It's lucky I'm not likely to fall in with Jenny just yet," said Rosamond. "Don't leave me alone with her, either of you; if you do, it is at your peril. It is all very well to talk of honour and secrets, but to see the look in her eyes, and know he is alive, seems to me rank cruelty and heartlessness. It is all to let Miles have the pleasure of telling when he comes home."
"Miles is not a woman, nor an Irishwoman," said Julius.
"But he's a sailor, and he's got a feeling heart," said Rosamond; "and if he stands one look of Jenny, why, I'll disown him for the brother-in-law I take him for. By the bye, is not Raymond to know?"
"No," said Anne; "here is a postscript forbidding my telling him or Mrs. Poynsett."
"Indeed! And I suppose Herbert knows nothing?"
"Nothing. He was a boy at school at the time. Say nothing to him, Rose."
"Oh, no; besides, his brain is all run to cricket."
It was but too true. When the sun shone bright in April, and the wickets were set up, Herbert had demonstrated that his influence was a necessity on the village green; and it was true that his goodly and animated presence was as useful morally to the eleven as it was conducive to their triumphs; so his Rector suppressed a few sighs at the frequency of the practices and the endless matches. Compton had played Wil'sbro' and Strawyers, Duddingstone and Woodbury; the choir had played the school, the single the married; and when hay and harvest absorbed the rustic eleven, challenges began among their betters. The officers played the county-Oxonians, Cantabs- Etonians, Harrovians-and wherever a match was proclaimed, that prime bowler, the Reverend Herbert Bowater, was claimed as the indispensable champion of his cause and country.
If his sister had any power to moderate his zeal, she had had little chance of exercising it; for Mrs. Bowater had had a rheumatic fever in March, and continued so much of an invalid all the summer that Jenny seldom went far from home, only saw her brother on his weekly visits to the sick-room, and was, as Rosamond said, unlikely to become a temptation to the warm heart and eager tongue.