CHAPTER XXVII.
THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN.
With the limited means at their command, George and Bess were not able to wander far away.
George did not tell his young wife the nature of the trouble that had come upon him. He shrank from letting her knew the worst, that innocently even he had been mixed up with a gang of swindlers.
The blow was so cruel it almost stunned him; but by the time Bess, wondering and trembling, came to him at the railway station, he had recovered himself sufficiently to invent a fairly plausible tale.
He told her that he believed his father was in London looking for him, and he did not care to run the risk of being discovered living under an assumed name.
Bess wondered why such a discovery, which, after all, was nothing very terrible, should make her husband so white and ill and nervous; but she did not question him. She was in that sweet and comfortable stage of hero-worship when a young wife believes all her husband tells her and does exactly as she is told—a delightful condition of things, which, alas! rubs off as quickly as the gilt on the gingerbread sold at country fairs.
So she followed her husband in blind faith, and accepted his story as gospel.
They went a little way out first and put up at a small inn, living frugally, for their capital was small.
George was restless and could not stop in one place. In every footstep behind him he heard the tread of the law; in every stranger who looked at him he saw a possible detective.
Over and over again he thought the situation out to himself, and wondered whether it would not be better to make a clean breast of it to justice, say who he was, prove his innocence, and so know the worst.
But this could not be done secretly. He knew that he would be charged, under any circumstances, with uttering the forged cheque, and he remembered with horror that he had endorsed the name of Smith and Co. upon it. Then he had been living under a false name, and he had left home in debt and difficulties.
No, he would rather wander about and endure a hundred miseries as George Smith than stand forth as George Heritage, and let his private life be read by the hundred eyes of the vulgar, with sneers and jeers and contemptuous laughter.
He was terribly sensitive of ridicule, and he saw at once the ridiculous figure he should cut as the clerk, at £3 a week, to a gang of swindlers.
Once or twice he was inclined to take Bess into his confidence; but here again his sensitiveness stepped in.
He could not bear even for his wife to know that he had been fooled. Their short dream of happiness, their humble little home life, had been so real and earnest, it was with something like a shudder he contemplated shattering the past.
No, for the present he would leave her in blissful ignorance of his stupidity and failure. But as the funds grew shorter and a pinch came, he grew terribly uneasy, and his face began to wear a worn, worried look, which frightened his young wife.
They moved on now from place to place, never stopping more than a night in any one. George scarcely slept. All night in the little bed-room in the village inn where they stayed he would lie and turn from side to side, thinking and conjuring up a thousand fancied catastrophes.
When the original funds were quite gone, and the worst stared him in the face, George, still carefully concealing the real aspect of affairs from Bess, surreptitiously pawned his watch and chain and his ring.
As the future began to look blacker and blacker, he instinctively turned his footsteps towards home.
That must be the last resource.
The means of staving off the day of reckoning were diminishing rapidly, and a bold move was necessary, unless his poor Bess was to know the real horrors of poverty.
‘Anything rather than that,’ he thought to himself. ‘I will go towards home, and then, if the worst comes, I must swallow my pride, throw myself on the old man’s generosity, and get enough to leave the country till this affair blows over, or I can devise some means of setting myself right without a public exposure.’
So it came about that after wandering up and down the country, and living as frugally as possible, George found himself, at the end of a fortnight, without money and without shelter, but within a few miles of his father’s estate.
The fierce winter had melted into the genial brightness of the early Spring, once the pleasantest part of the year, but now, alas! as uncommon in these islands as the dodo or the great auk. The first tender green leaves were peeping out shyly among the branches of the trees, as though they were half afraid that winter might not be quite gone, and the air was full of the sweet invigorating essence which lends elasticity to the step of the aged wayfarer, and tempts the young to pitch decorum to the winds and to scamper about and shout and laugh.
I pity the lad or the lass whose pulse does not beat quicker on a bright spring day, whose heart does not fill to overflowing with love for Nature as he gazes on the young earth quickening into life and beauty beneath the bright smile of the early spring sun.
It was on one of those spring days that Bess and George trod the old road towards the park for the first time since their marriage.
But George was nervous and ill, and Bess, oppressed with the idea that her husband had some secret trouble which he would not allow her to share, was profoundly miserable.
One idea alone consoled her. He had told her that morning, when further subterfuge was useless, and when he was bound to confess they were penniless, that he was going to see his father. Bess was delighted to hear it. She had not dared to say so, or to urge such a step, but she felt that anything was better than the wandering, miserable life they had led lately.
Besides, should she not see her own father?
Twice since she had left home she had written a short letter, giving no address and no clue to her whereabouts, saying she was well and happy, and that her father was to have faith in her and think the best he could.
And now she was going to see him and tell him all, for George was taking her back as his wife, and there would be no need for further concealment.
At any other time the idea of seeing her father would have made her supremely happy. She had looked forward to the day when she might put her arms round his neck and tell him all so eagerly; and now that the time had come she was miserable. Alas! it was the old story. How often the cherished dream of our life is accomplished amid surroundings which make it a hollow mockery, and only serve to intensify the bitter disappointment! We can look back upon yesterday with regret, and we can look forward to to-morrow with pleasure; but, alas! to-day is ever present, and to-day is generally a very dull affair.
George and Bess sauntered along the road, dusty, tired, and travel-stained. George’s face was white and haggard, and he had let his beard grow during the fortnight, which did not add to the picturesqueness of his appearance. Bess, too, in the hurried journeyings and constant moving from pillar to post, had neglected her toilette somewhat, and had had to make shift as best she could; so that as they tramped along they might easily have been mistaken for something much lower in the social scale than the heir to the Heritage estates and his young wife.
‘We must not get to the house till dusk, Bess,’ said George, as they strolled along. ‘I couldn’t go in this sight in broad daylight.’
‘No,’ answered Bess; ‘it will be best to wait till it’s dusk, George dear; there’ll be nobody about then. Old Dick will have gone home, and there’ll only be father.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed George eagerly, ‘I’d forgotten that. You can go first and see your father, and I can come and slip into the lodge and wait about till the coast is clear, and then go up to the house.’ Now that he was nearing his home his heart was beginning to fail him, and the old pride, which trouble had broken down for a while, was beginning to reassert itself.
Just outside the village in which Heritage Park stands there is a small wood. The high road skirts it, and it forms a tempting place for the dusty wayfarer to seek shelter in for a while.
Many a tramp on his road from workhouse to workhouse wanders into this wood, and, flinging himself down, enjoys a siesta, forgetting his troubles and dreaming such dreams as it pleases Nature to send him in the place of realities.
When George and Bess came to the wood, they determined to make it their halting-place for a while. It was only afternoon, and there were a couple of good hours before it would be dark enough for them to enter the village safely.
They crept into the wood to a spot which had been a favourite one with them in their sweethearting days, and sat down.
The fresh air and the long walk had tired them, and after a while they fell asleep.
While the tired pilgrims rested, a pair of very different travellers passed leisurely along the high road.
They were an elderly clergyman and a young gentleman.
The clergyman was tall and burly, and wore his garb with a curious awkwardness, that would have impressed the critical observer with an idea that his living was a rural one.
The young gentleman, though dressed in the height of fashion, was a little gaudy about the necktie, and had a sharp, cunning look upon his face, and a decided squint in the deeply-set, eager, restless eyes, that seemed to take in the four points of the compass at once.
The clergyman and his son were staying at a local hostelry hard by for a day or two, and were enjoying the delightful walks in which the neighbourhood abounds.
They were remarkably quiet and uncommunicative at the old Lamb Inn, which had the honour of harbouring them; but evidently the fresh air had loosened their tongues.
For a clergyman and his son their style of conversation was, to say the least of it, peculiar.
‘We must do it to-night, Boss,’ said the elder; ‘soon after dusk. The swag’s all in jewels, and a grab’ll collar the lot.’
‘Right ye are, Josh,’ answered the young gentleman. ‘But I hope Jim’s give us the right tip.’
‘Trust Jim,’ said the Rev. gentleman; ‘he’s put up three jobs for me in cribs where he’s been, and I’ve always been able to put my hand on the swag jes’ as if I’d put it out for myself. There’s only the old man to tackle.’
‘No wierlence, I’ope, Josh, eh?—nothink as’ud disgrace the cloth?’
The Rev. gentleman laughed.
‘Wierlence? No. Don’t you be afeard, young un. This is only kid’s play, or I shouldn’t have brought you. The old cove ain’t likely to show fight—we shan’t give him the chance; and the servants’ll all be out of the way.’
‘Right,’ answered the young gentleman, glancing admiringly at his elegant suit. ‘I likes to do the thing like a gent, and wierlance is so doosid low nowadays.’
Perhaps if the landlord of the Lamb Inn had overheard this strange conversation between his highly respectable guests he would not have welcomed them back from their stroll with quite such a pleasant smile.