MAT CRABTREE AND JOHN PRIOR BEAR THE BURDEN.

Mat Crabtree was riding post-haste to Haybridge before he started on his search, for which he had no more clue than has been laid before the reader. He was not without a notion that Lambert might have taken refuge in his late father’s house in Mat’s absence, doubling back, like many another creature that feels itself at bay, to its starting point. He was likely enough to display the unrepentant prodigal’s alacrity in repairing to his injured relations--not to say that he has sinned, but to dare them to dissever the tie they did not knot, which has long been a whip to scourge them. He would make it an excuse for brazening out his offence and his disgrace, and for demanding their aid to escape just retribution.

In addition, Mat Crabtree had to set his house in order for what might be an absence of some duration. Lambert Crabtree might have gone abroad by this time. He might have reason to fear such disclosures as would render it only prudent in him to retire precipitately from the scene of action--either concealing his identity or repairing to one or other of the few refuges left, from which an international treaty would not dislodge him.

Mat Crabtree rode with bent head and a weight upon his breast, looking neither to his sheep on the hill nor to his cattle in the meadows. He could take no comfort from his roomy white house, with the well-kept green of turf and trees, and palings, which looked wholesome, fresh, and bright even on this breathless, lowering day. Crossing his threshold he was met by his housekeeper, who, before he could ask a question, gave him a visitor’s card.

Lambert would not offer a card at his brother’s house. The thought passed silently across Mat’s mind as he instinctively took up the bit of pasteboard and read, ‘Major Coplestone, R.A.’

All the rosiness had gone out of Mat Crabtree’s face when he confronted his visitor. Mat was paler than the sallow invalid. When the latter looked at honesty abashed in the person of his host, he rose gallantly to the occasion, and played a soldier and man’s part in remembering old friendship, and showing himself just in awarding blame only where blame was due.

‘Never mind, Mat,’ he said, wringing the hand he had to take; ‘it is not so bad that it cannot be borne. I heard from my solicitor the day after I landed that the bonds were a missing. I was coming straight to Lambert when I was told that he had not returned. I learnt what was up in Newton. I knew I should hear the truth from you, but I did not intend to put you out. There is no use in crying over spilt milk, eh?’ with a grimace of his lank jaws which might stand for a smile. ‘It only means going back to India with the dregs of a life which would not have been much good here now, and of trusting to the boys and girls doing for themselves and looking after their mother when I am gone. Perhaps it is best for them, after all.’

‘I wish I could change places with you, Jem Coplestone, I do indeed,’ was Mat’s sole reply.

But the generous forbearance of the injured man did the other good and helped him to judge less harshly and be less resentful with regard to his own share of the wrong which had been inflicted so unsparingly.

The storm in the sky had burst and passed away before Mat Crabtree set out again. The sinking sun shone forth and gilded with a tender light the raindrops which were hanging thickly on every twig and leaf. The birds began to sing their vesper hymn. The cattle and sheep lowed and bleated in sympathy. The whole earth looked tranquil, pure, and sweet, as if its stains had been washed away in a tempest of Heaven’s tears, so that the world of sin and sorrow was for a blessed moment forgiven and at peace. The merciful blue sky was overhead. There was only a soft bank of pearly clouds far to the south to show where the storm rack had rolled.

Mat was riding to a railway station, but not to Newton. As it happened, he had taken a road which his brother and he had often traversed together as boys, when they went to say their lessons with the vicar’s sons at the neighbouring vicarage. Lambert had looked up to Mat in those far-off days. There had been comradeship, common proprietorship, in many cherished possessions and family affection, till the inevitable separation, when the elder preceded the younger at a public school and at college. But even then, when Lambert’s time came, he had been put under Mat’s care. The middle-aged man still remembered with what anxious counsels from his father, what wistful charges from his mother, the trust had been given. How had he fulfilled his obligation when his brother and he had drifted so far apart? Had he, the elder, been high-handed, domineering, impatient? He had been a scholar, while Lambert was but a sorry student. He recalled his affront at the lad’s deficiencies, though it was small blame to Lambert that he had not been endowed with the pondering brains which make men book-learned. Would that the lack were the worst which could be laid at Lambert’s door to-day. Mat, with his cool head, his intellectual pursuits, his tendency to fall among men who ‘sapped’ and were steady like himself, without much credit to them, could not so much as comprehend the temptations which visit lads like Lambert. Indeed he, Mat, had quickly deprived himself of any chance of comprehending them by the intolerant dislike and contempt with which he had shaken himself free from what he had chosen to regard as disparaging associations, and left Lambert to take his chance unhampered by a supercilious preaching prig of an elder brother. How would it have been if he had been larger-hearted, more liberal-minded, as a love of truth and knowledge ought to have made him?

Where was Lambert now? What was this miserable bank robbery which had been eclipsed within the last few hours by the failure of the bank. Who had been the thief or thieves, so well acquainted with the details of the house as not only to steal but to hide the booty upon the premises? There was one thing to be devoutly thankful for--all agreed that Lambert had been absent. Jack Prior was the man who had slept in the house, and it was impossible to suspect Jack.

Where had Lambert betaken himself to? The sweat-drops bathed Mat Crabtree’s forehead as he asked himself the question and contemplated the hideous possibilities in such cases. The perpetration of actual fraud added to the misery caused by mingled greed and spendthrift self-indulgence, bringing the man within the clutches of the law, headed the list. Then followed his name dishonoured throughout the country, till all who bore it were constrained to walk softly for the rest of their days. Next came knavish, despicable flight to avoid richly deserved punishment. This was succeeded by wolfish remorse and Judas-hued despair, impelling him to make an unwarrantable exit from the waste, howling wilderness of trouble into which his reckless steps had carried him. He bequeathed the wilderness as a fitting region for his unfortunate family and friends to inhabit during the natural term of their lives. For the miserable catalogue was wound up by an impious entrance, unsummoned, into the ante-chamber of the King of kings.

Over at Redcot, John Prior was questioning his son in the privacy of the father’s study. It was a faded room, with neglected bookcases and a far less inhabited, not to say genial, air than the library at Haybridge possessed. As Jack looked round him he was assailed by fragmentary recollections of trying interviews with the head of the house following hard upon youthful delinquencies, especially by that most painful _tête-à-tête_ when Jack had to divulge to his father the extent of his college failures and debts.

John Prior himself had for once forgotten the unpalatable past in the grievous present. ‘And so it is ended,’ he kept saying, as he walked up and down the room. ‘Crabtree’s Bank is broken. The scoundrel has ruined the whole town and neighbourhood.’

‘It will be the worse for him.’ Jack uttered a platitude for want of anything better to say.

His father turned upon him.

‘The usual cant,’ he said. ‘He himself has the worst of it; he will find a pack of fools ready to proclaim it, and so he appropriates the very pity of the thing, after he has taken all else--even if he end by shuffling off the coil on weaker shoulders, and making away with his dastardly self.’

‘Surely it will not come to that,’ cried Jack, aghast at this new suggestion. ‘Susie----’

‘Not a word more than you can help to her, boy,’ interrupted Mr. Prior, speaking so hastily that both he and Jack failed to consider how long it was since he had employed the old familiar term, the sound of which nevertheless thrilled the two men. ‘Not a hint of what I have said to your mother or any other of the women. This is not a subject for them. Let Lambert Crabtree stay away as long as he chooses without awakening premature horrors in their minds. They will hear soon enough if anything has happened.’

It was clear that John Prior could not take the advice he gave, that he was conjuring up terrible visions which any moment might realise. It was curious how in his disordered frame of mind, without any striking of colours or declaration of amnesty, he sought companionship from his son, and kept Jack with him discussing the worst features of the calamity and the blood-curdling dread which was not to be whispered to the women. Jack’s presence served two purposes. He had not much knowledge of business--indeed, his father had always resented his son’s ignorance in this respect--but he knew a good deal more than the women. He was, in proportion, a better qualified listener to the calculations and speculations which the stoppage of Crabtree’s Bank called forth from every man in the district.

More than that, Jack’s hale young life might keep away the ghosts that were in imminent danger of intruding on John Prior at this date. He saw them when he lingered in that dim and cheerless study. He heard them when he paced up and down behind backs, amidst the antiquated glass and gilt of the drawing-room, in the company of the ladies, yet keeping himself and his heaviest cares and worst alarms apart from the women. He both heard and saw these importunate ghosts when he strolled out for a smoke or a breath of air, and stood in the shadow of one or other of the disused outbuildings, given over to the rats and the bats, where he had held his interviews with Mr. Isaac Evans. But the fantastic company were most oppressive when he wandered instinctively from mere habit as far as the quarry, where the wild roses had shed their petals, and nuts were beginning to form on the hazel bushes.

More than one ghost became a constant attendant on John Prior wherever he went. One was a grisly, coarse, brawling ghost--that of Lambert Crabtree as he had urged and threatened on the gusty April day by the Rats’ Ditch in the Dutch clover-field at Ladslove. Another was a dainty, girlish ghost, a strangely incongruous figure, as she shrank out of sight in the black and crape of the widow of a fraudulent bankrupt suicide. And there was the semblance of two children, with strongly-marked hereditary traits, coming up hand-in-hand to their grandfather to look him in the face and demand why he had killed their father and made them beggars.

So far as one woman was concerned, Mr. Prior might have spared his solicitude. Susie, who ought to have been the most smitten by the ruin of the bank and tortured by the uncertainty of her position, took everything quietly, and was, unless by fits and starts when she elected to bewail herself as a martyr, remarkably cool and composed. She was even in better condition than those mourners of whom it is emphatically reported that they are as well as can be expected. No doubt she made large eyes at the accounts which Jack--never good at slurring over a story of which he was full, and not seeing himself called on to attempt the feat in relation to his experience of the morning--poured forth to more sympathetic listeners. He told them to Mrs. Prior, hanging intent and full of sorrow on his words; to Jane, fighting rebelliously against the decree that there was no help for the misfortune; to Miss Gray, a wistful hearer of the tale. Susie glanced round with quick inquiry, as a child itself unaffected by the narrative might have glanced, took in the expressions of the various faces, and adapted herself to them. She uttered a few protestations that it could not be so bad as Jack represented. Lamb would set all right when he came back. It was abominably stupid of Lamb to stay away at such a time, but he would be there presently, perhaps he was there already, and, of course, he would reopen the bank and arrange about paying the people their money. Surely they could do without it for one day. She did not mean to say that Jack was talking fudge, but there was so much exaggeration in the world--had they not found it so? Mam-ma need not be so vexed. There was no occasion for Jane’s mounting her high-horse and calling for redress to pillaged shopkeepers. Miss Gray had a fine faculty for being struck dumb, but it was wasted in the present instance. She, Susie, wished that Lamb were only at Redcot to laugh a little at their doleful, angry faces.

However much or little of her assurances Susie believed, it was evident that she attached no significance to her husband’s continued absence. Yet the other women were beginning suspiciously to avoid reference to it. They hurried over any inevitable allusion to the subject, with a falter of the tongue and a flutter of the eyelids, to hide the palsy of the lips and the scared gleam of the eyes behind the veil.

As for that simple, learned lady, Bennet Gray, she was still racked by a distracting sense of the loss of Mrs. Prior’s esteem, which lay at the bottom of her affection. The mistress of the house was even more scrupulously courteous than before to the stranger within her gates. But it was a strained and artificial courtesy, devoid of every particle of the salt of thorough respect, kindly regard, and affectionate interest which had permeated it before, and made it as natural and easy as the process of breathing. From the moment of the betrayal which Jack’s blunder had brought about the preceding evening, a door had been closed and an iron bolt drawn, shutting out all save the most formal intercourse between the two women, who, in spite of the difference in their ages, had so much in common, and had been so strongly attracted towards each other. ‘She won’t let her glance rest upon me. She declines to catch my eye. I daren’t do anything for her,’ lamented the hapless offender. ‘She sat ever so long trying to thread her needle this afternoon--neither of her daughters saw it--nobody noticed it except me. But she kept her back to me, and I could not come round and offer to put through the silk, as I might have done last week, when she would have patted me on the shoulder and hoped I should never want young eyes to serve me when my sight failed. Oh, dear Mrs. Prior, Jack’s mother, will you never forgive me, and will you seek to keep him from me? You cannot do that, but you can make us all miserable.’

As a matter of fact, Jack was kept apart from Bennet, either by his father or his mother, in the exigencies of the case, for the rest of the day. Even if there had been the opportunity, Bennet felt paralysed by the trouble around her. She was losing all heart for the telling of her secret, which she began to be tempted to regard as such a little wretchedly worldly secret, though it was to have aroused unalloyed joy and thankfulness according to its owner’s old foolish notions. Still less could Bennet commence her explanation by divulging the full particulars to Jane, and throwing herself upon her friend’s generosity, supposing poor Jane could have been torn from her grieved preoccupation with other matters to listen to it.

The fault was not in Jane, she had from first to last stood by Bennet in the most trying circumstances. So far from being hostile now, there was a shy softness, an eager friendliness in Jane’s recent bearing towards Bennet, of which the latter could have easily availed herself had she retained the wish. But Bennet Gray, who had a brave heart and a high spirit naturally, was for the moment baffled and broken down.

Mrs. Prior was a little better off than the sinner against good faith whom the elder woman felt bound to punish, though the punishment should recoil on the inflictor’s head. The wife and mother was swift to detect the almost fretful movement of the husband and father towards his son in the family anxiety. As death breaks all other engagements, so sharp calamity sometimes dissolves long-standing mists and chills of prejudice and alienation, and restores in some sort kindred obligations. It was the one subdued glimmer of satisfaction in Mrs. Prior’s sorrow and mortification for all connected with her, in her almost intolerable pain with regard to those among them who had made the community suffer, that father and son were in the slightest measure in accord and in association. She did not appear to mind that John Prior did not extend his confidence to her, and had even ceased to growl his complaints into her ears. She was content to efface herself for Jack; Jack, who yet had forgotten her, stolen a march upon her, combined with another who had no doubt deluded him as she had deluded his mother, to deceive and mock her, and render her foolish and contemptible in her own eyes and those of her family, her neighbours, her very servants.