God's Good Man Part 59

Here turning a corner of the road which was overshaded by a huge chestnut-tree, he suddenly came face to face with the Reverend Putwood Leveson, who, squatted on the hank by the roadside, with his grand-pianoforte legs well exposed to view in tight brown knickerbockers and grey worsted stockings, was bending perspiringly over his rec.u.mbent bicycle, mending something which had, as usual, gone wrong.

"Hullo, Walden!" he said, looking up and nodding casually--"Haven't seen you for an age! What have you been doing with yourself? Always up at the Manor, I suppose! Great attraction at the Manor!--he-he- he!"

A certain quick irritation, like that produced by the teasing buzz of some venomous insect, affected Walden's nerves. He looked at the porcine proportions of his brother minister with an involuntary sense of physical repulsion. Then he answered stiffly--

"I don't understand you. I have not been visiting at the Manor at all. I dined there the night before last for the first and only time."

Leveson winked one purple puffy eyelid. Then he began his 'He-he-he'

again to himself, while he breathed hard and sweated profusely over the rubber tyre of his machine.

"Is that so?" he sn.i.g.g.e.red--"Well, that's all the better for you!-- you do well to keep away! Men of our cloth ought not to be seen there really."

And scrambling to his feet with elephantine ease, he brushed the dust from his knickers, and wiped his brows with an uncleanly handkerchief which looked as if it had been used for drying oil off the bicycle as well as off the man.

"We ought not to be seen there,"--he repeated, disregarding Walden's steady coldness of eye--"I myself made a great mistake when I wrote to the woman. I ought not to have done so. But of course I did not know--I thought it was all right." And the reverend gentleman a.s.sumed an air of mammoth-like innocence--"I am so mediaeval, you know!--I never suspect anything or anybody! I wrote to her in quite a friendly way, suggesting that I should arrange her family papers for her--I thought she might as well employ me as anyone else--and she never answered my letter--never answered a word!"

"Well, of course not!" said Walden, composedly, though his blood began to tingle hotly through his veins with rising indignation-- "Why should she? Her family papers are all in order, and no doubt she considered your application both ignorant and impertinent."

Leveson's gross countenance flushed a deeper crimson.

"Ignorant and impertinent!" he echoed--"Come, I like that! Why she ought to have considered herself uncommonly lucky to receive so much as a civil letter from a respectable man,--such a woman as she is!-- 'Maryllia Van'--he-he-he-he!"

Walden took a quick step towards him.

"What do you mean?" he demanded--"What right have you to speak of her in such a manner?"

Leveson recoiled, startled by the intense pallor of Walden's face, and the threatening light in his eyes.

"What right?" he stammered--"Why--why what do yon mean by flaring up in such a temper, eh? What does it matter to you?"

"It matters this much,--that I will not allow Miss Vaneourt to be insulted by you or anyone else!" retorted Walden, hotly--"You have never spoken to her,--you know nothing about her,--so hold your tongue!"

The Reverend 'Putty's' round eyes protruded with amazement.

"Hold--my--tongue!" he repeated, in a kind of stupefaction--"Are you gone mad, Walden? Do you know who you are talking to?"

John gave a short laugh. His hands clenched involuntarily.

"Oh, I know well enough!" he said--"I am talking to a man who has no more regard for a woman's name than a cat has for the mouse it kills! I am talking to a man who is an ordained Christian minister, who has less Christianity than a dog, which at least is faithful to its master!"

Leveson uttered a kind of inarticulate sound something between a gasp and a grunt. Then he fell back on his old sn.i.g.g.e.r.

"He-he, he-he-he!" he bleated--"You must be crazy, Walden!--or else you've been drinking! I've a perfect right to speak of the Abbot's Manor woman IF I like and as I like! All men have a right to do the same--she's been pretty well handed round as common property for a long time! Why, she's perfectly notorious!--everybody knows that!"

"You lie!"

And Walden sprang at him, one powerful clenched fist uplifted.

Leveson staggered back in terror,--and so for a moment they stood, staring upon one another. They did not hear a stealthy rustle among the branches of the chestnut-tree near which they stood, nor see a long lithe shadow creep towards them for the dense low-hanging foliage. Face to face, eye to eye, they remained for a moment's s.p.a.ce as though ready to close and wrestle,--then suddenly Walden's arm dropped to his side.

"My G.o.d!" he muttered--"I nearly struck you!"

Leveson drew a long breath of relief, and sneaked backward on his heels.

"You--you're a nice kind of 'ordained Christian minister' aren't you?" he spluttered--"With all your humbug and cant you're no better than a vulgar bully! A vulgar bully!--that's what you are! I'll report you to the Bishop--see if I don't!--brow-beating me, and putting me in bodily fear, all about a woman too! Great Scott!--a fine scandal you'll make in the Church one of these days if you're not watched pretty closely and pulled up pretty sharply--and pulled up you shall be, take my word for it! We've had about enough of your high-and-mighty airs--it's time you learned to know your place---"

The words had scarcely left his mouth when a pair of long muscular arms seized him by the shoulders, shook him briefly and emphatically, and turning him easily over, deposited him flat in the dust.

"It is time--yea verily!--it is full time you learned to know your place!" said Julian Adderley, calmly standing with legs-astride across his fat rec.u.mbent body--"And there it is--and there you are!

My dear Walden, how are you? Excuse my shaking hands with you-- having defiled myself, as the Orientals say, by touching unclean meat, I must wash first!"

For a moment Walden had been so taken aback by the suddenness of Leveson's unexpected overthrow that he could scarcely realise what had happened,--but presently when the Reverend 'Putty's' cobby legs began to sprawl uneasily on the ground, and the Eeverend 'Putty'

himself gave vent to sundry blasphemous oaths and curses, he grasped the full humour of the situation. A broad smile lit up his face.

"That was a master-stroke, Adderley!" he said, and the smile deepened into sudden laughter--"But how in the world did you come here?"

"I was here all the time,"--said Adderley, still standing across Leveson's prostrate form--"Returning to the habits of primaeval monkey as I often do, I was seated in the boughs of that venerable chestnut-tree-and I heard all the argument. I enjoyed it. I was hoping to see the Church militant belabour the Church recusant. It would have been so new--so fres.h.!.+ But as the sacred blow failed, the secular one was bound to fall. Don't get up, my excellent sir!-- don't, I beseech of you!" This to Leveson, who was trying by means of the most awkward contortions to rise to a sitting posture--"You will find it difficult--among other misfortunes your knickers will burst, and there is no tailor close at hand. Spare yourself,--and us!"

"Oh give him a hand, Adderley!" said Walden, good-naturedly. "Help him up! He's had his beating!"

"He hasn't,"--declared Julian, with a lachrymose air of intense regret--"I wish he had! He is less hurt than if he had fallen off his bicycle. He is in no pain;--would that he were!"

Here Leveson managed to partially lift himself on one side.

"a.s.sault!" he stuttered--"a.s.sault--common a.s.sault---"

"AND battery,"--said Julian--"You can summons me, my dear sir--if you feel so inclined! I shall be happy to explain the whole incident in court--and also to pay the five pounds penalty. I only wish I could have got more for my money. There's such a lot of you!--such a lot!" he repeated, musingly, "And I've only sailed round such a small portion of your vast fleshy continent!"

Walden controlled his laughter, and stooping, offered to a.s.sist Leveson to get up, but the indignant 'Putty' refused all aid, and setting his own two hands firmly against the ground, tried again to rise.

"Remove your legs, sir!" he shouted to Julian, who still stood across him in apparent abstraction--"How dare you--how dare you pin me down in this fas.h.i.+on?--how dare---"

Here his voice died away choked by rage.

"You are witty without knowing it, my fat friend!" said Julian languidly--"Legs, in slang parlance, are sometimes known as 'pins,'- -therefore, when you say I 'pin' you down, you use an expression which is, like the 'mobled queen' in Hamlet, good. Be unpinned, good priest--and remember that you must be prepared to say your prayers backwards, next time you slander a woman!"

He relaxed his position, and Leveson with an effort scrambled to his feet, covered with dust. Picking up his cap from the gutter where it had fallen, he got his bicycle and prepared to mount it. He presented a most unlovely spectacle--his face, swollen and crimson with fury, seemed twice its usual size,--his little piggy eyes rolled in his head like those of a man threatened with apoplexy--and the oily perspiration stood upon his brow and trickled from his carroty hair in great drops.

"You shall pay for this!" he said in low vindictive tones, shaking his fist at both Walden and Adderley--"There are one or two old scores to be wiped off in this village, and mine will help to increase the account! Your fine lady at the Manor isn't going to have everything her own way, I can tell you--nor you either, you-- you--you upstart!"

With this last epithet hurled out at Walden, who, shrugging his shoulders, received it with ineffable contempt, he got on his machine and worked his round legs and round wheels together furiously away. When his bulky form had disappeared, the two men he had left behind glanced at one another, and moved by the same risible emotion burst out laughing,--and once their laughter began, they gave it full vent, Walden's mellow 'Ha-ha-ha!' ringing out on the still air with all the zest and heartiness of a boy's mirth.

"Upon my word, Adderley, you are a capital 'thrower'?" he said, clapping Julian on the shoulder. "I never was more surprised in my life than to see that monstrous 'ton of man' heave over suddenly and sprawl in the dust! It was an artistic feat, most artistically executed!"

"It was--it was,--I think so myself!"--agreed Julian--"I am proud of my own skill! That pious porpoise will not forget me in a hurry. You see, my dear Walden, you merely threatened punishment,--you did not inflict it,--I suppose out of some scruple of Church conscience, which is quite a different conscience to the lay examples,--and it was necessary to act promptly. The air of St. Rest is remarkably free from miasma, but Leveson was discharging microbes from his tongue and person generally that would have been dangerous to life in another minute." He laughed again. "Were you coming my way?"

"Yes, I was," replied Walden, as they began to walk along the road together--"I am going away on a visit, and I meant to call and say good-bye to you."

Julian glanced at him curiously.

"Going away? For long?"