"Do you know his story? I will bet you sixpence"--and Mr. Dennant paused to swing his mallet with a proper accuracy "that he's been in prison.""Prison!" ejaculated Shelton.
"I think," said Mr. Dennant, with bent knees carefully measuring his next shot, "that you ought to make inquiries--ah! missed it!
Awkward these hoops! One must draw the line somewhere.""I never could draw," returned Shelton, nettled and uneasy; "but Iunderstand--I 'll give him a hint to go."
"Don't," said Mr. Dennant, moving after his second ball, which Shelton had smitten to the farther end, "be offended, my dear Shelton, and by no means give him a hint; he interests me very much--a very clever, quiet young fellow."
That this was not his private view Shelton inferred by studying Mr.
Dennant's manner in the presence of the vagabond. Underlying the well-bred banter of the tranquil voice, the guarded quizzicality of his pale brown face, it could be seen that Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq., J.P., accustomed to laugh at other people, suspected that he was being laughed at. What more natural than that he should grope about to see how this could be? A vagrant alien was making himself felt by an English Justice of the Peace--no small tribute, this, to Ferrand's personality. The latter would sit silent through a meal, and yet make his effect. He, the object of their kindness, education, patronage, inspired their fear. There was no longer any doubt; it was not of Ferrand that they were afraid, but of what they did not understand in him; of horrid subtleties meandering in the brain under that straight, wet-looking hair; of something bizarre popping from the curving lips below that thin, lopsided nose.
But to Shelton in this, as in all else, Antonia was what mattered.
At first, anxious to show her lover that she trusted him, she seemed never tired of doing things for his young protege, as though she too had set her heart on his salvation; but, watching her eyes when they rested on the vagabond, Shelton was perpetually reminded of her saying on the first day of his visit to Holm Oaks, "I suppose he 's really good--I mean all these things you told me about were only...."Curiosity never left her glance, nor did that story of his four days' starving leave her mind; a sentimental picturesqueness clung about that incident more valuable by far than this mere human being with whom she had so strangely come in contact. She watched Ferrand, and Shelton watched her. If he had been told that he was watching her, he would have denied it in good faith; but he was bound to watch her, to find out with what eyes she viewed this visitor who embodied all the rebellious under-side of life, all that was absent in herself.
"Dick," she said to him one day, "you never talk to me of Monsieur Ferrand.""Do you want to talk of him?"
"Don't you think that he's improved?"
"He's fatter."
Antonia looked grave.
"No, but really?"
"I don't know," said Shelton; "I can't judge him."Antonia turned her face away, and something in her attitude alarmed him.
"He was once a sort of gentleman," she said; "why shouldn't he become one again?"Sitting on the low wall of the kitchen-garden, her head was framed by golden plums. The sun lay barred behind the foliage of the holm oak, but a little patch filtering through a gap had rested in the plum-tree's heart. It crowned the girl. Her raiment, the dark leaves, the red wall, the golden plums, were woven by the passing glow to a block of pagan colour. And her face above it, chaste, serene, was like the scentless summer evening. A bird amongst the currant bushes kept a little chant vibrating; and all the plum-tree's shape and colour seemed alive.
"Perhaps he does n't want to be a gentleman," said Shelton.
Antonia swung her foot.
"How can he help wanting to?"
"He may have a different philosophy of life."Antonia was slow to answer.
"I know nothing about philosophies of life," she said at last.
Shelton answered coldly, "No two people have the same."With the falling sun-glow the charm passed off the tree. Chilled and harder, yet less deep, it was no more a block of woven colour, warm and impassive, like a southern goddess; it was now a northern tree, with a grey light through its leaves.
"I don't understand you in the least," she said; "everyone wishes to be good.""And safe?" asked Shelton gently.
Antonia stared.
"Suppose," he said--"I don't pretend to know, I only suppose--what Ferrand really cares for is doing things differently from other people? If you were to load him with a character and give him money on condition that he acted as we all act, do you think he would accept it?""Why not?"
"Why are n't cats dogs; or pagans Christians?"Antonia slid down from the wall.
"You don't seem to think there 's any use in trying," she said, and turned away.
Shelton made a movement as if he would go after her, and then stood still, watching her figure slowly pass, her head outlined above the wall, her hands turned back across her narrow hips. She halted at the bend, looked back, then, with an impatient gesture, disappeared.
Antonia was slipping from him!
A moment's vision from without himself would have shown him that it was he who moved and she who was standing still, like the figure of one watching the passage of a stream with clear, direct, and sullen eyes.
