The shock which this astounding communication gave to Mrs Rimbolt can be more easily imagined than described. It explained everything--her instinctive dislike of the man from the first, his moroseness and insolence, and the cunning with which he had insinuated himself first into her husband's and then into Percy's confidence! How blind she had been not to see it all before! She might have known that he was a villain! Now, however, her duty was clear, and she would be wicked if she delayed to act upon it a moment. If Mr Rimbolt had been at home, it would have fallen on him to discharge it, but he was not, and she must do it for him.

Whereupon this worthy matron girded herself for the fray, and stalked off to the study.

Jeffreys was busy transcribing some bibliographical notes which he had brought away with him from Exeter. The work was not very engrossing, and he had leisure now and then to let his mind wander, and the direction his thoughts took was towards Mr Rimbolt's little plan of a run on the Continent for Percy and himself this summer. Jeffreys had been afraid to acknowledge to himself how much the plan delighted him.

He longed to see the everlasting snows, and the lakes, and the grand old mediaeval cities, and the prospect of seeing them with Percy, away from all that could annoy or jar--

He had got so far when the door opened, and Mrs Rimbolt stood before him.

The lady was pale, and evidently agitated beyond her wont. She stood for a moment facing Jeffreys, and apparently waiting for words. The librarian's back went up in antic.i.p.ation. If it was more about Raby, he would leave the room before he forgot himself.

"Mr Jeffreys," said the lady, and her words came slowly and hoa.r.s.ely, "I request you to leave this house in half an hour."

It was Jeffreys' turn to start and grow pale.

"May I ask why?" he said.

"You know why, sir," said the lady. "You have known why ever since you had the meanness to enter Wildtree on false pretences."

"Really, Mrs Rimbolt," began Jeffreys, with a cold shudder pa.s.sing through him, "I am at a loss--"

"Don't speak to me, sir! You knew you had no right to enter the house of honest, respectable people--you knew you had no right to take advantage of an accident to insinuate yourself into this family, and impose upon the unsuspecting good-nature of my husband. No one asked you for your character; for no one imagined you could be quite so hypocritical as you have been. You, the self-const.i.tuted friend and protector of my precious boy--you, with the stain of blood on your hands and the mark of Cain on your forehead! Leave my house at once; I desire no words. You talked grandly about claiming to be protected from insult in this house. It is we who claim to be protected from a hypocrite and a murderer! Begone; and consider yourself fortunate that instead of walking out a free man, you are not taken out to the punishment you deserve!"

When Jeffreys, stunned and stupefied, looked up, the room was empty.

Mechanically he finished a sentence he had been writing, then letting the pen drop from his hand, sat where he was, numbed body and soul.

Mrs Rimbolt's words dinned in his ears, and with them came those old haunting sounds, the yells on the Bolsover meadows, the midnight shriek of the terrified boy, the cold sneer of his guardian, the brutal laugh of Jonah Trimble. All came back in one confused hideous chorus, yelling to him that his bad name was alive still, d.o.g.g.i.ng him down, down, mocking his foolish dreams of deliverance and hope, hounding him out into the night to hide his head indeed, but never to hide himself from himself.

How long he sat there he knew not. When he rose he was at least calm and resolved.

He went up to his own room and looked through his little stock of possessions. The old suit in which he had come to Wildtree was there; and an impulse seized him to put it on in exchange for the trim garments he was wearing. Of his other goods and chattels he took a few special favourites. His Homer--Julius's collar--a cricket cap--a pocket compa.s.s which Percy had given him, and an envelope which Raby had once directed to him for her uncle. His money--his last quarter's salary--he took too, and his old stick which he had cut in the lanes near Ash Cottage.

That was all. Then quietly descending the deserted stairs, and looking neither to the right hand nor the left, he crossed the hall and opened the front door.

A pang shot through him as he did so. Was he never to see Percy again, or _her_? What would they think of him?

The thought maddened him; and as he stood in the street he seemed to hear their voices, too, in the awful clamour, and rushed blindly forth, anywhere, to escape it.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

A PLUNGE DOWNWARD.

A chill October squall was whistling through the trees--in Regent's Park, stirring up the fallen leaves on the footpaths, and making the nursemaids, as they listlessly trundled their perambulators, shiver suddenly, and think of the nursery fire and the singing kettle on the hob. The gathering clouds above sent the park-keeper off to his shed for a waterproof, and emptied the carriage-drive of the vehicles in which a few semi-grand people were taking an afternoon airing at half a crown an hour. A little knot of small boys, intently playing football, with piled-up jackets for goals, and an old parti-coloured "bouncer" for a ball, were the last to take alarm at the lowering sky; nor was it till the big drops fell in their midst that they scattered right and left, and left the park empty.

No; not quite empty. One young man sat on through the rain on the seat from which he had been watching the boys' game. A shabby, almost ragged young man, with a disagreeable face and an almost contemptuous curl of the lips, as the rain, gathering force every second, buffeted him in the face and drenched him where he sat. There were a hundred seats more sheltered than that on which he sat, and by walking scarcely fifty yards he could have escaped the rain altogether. But he sat recklessly on, and let the rain do its worst, his eyes still on the empty football field, and his ears ringing still with the merry shouts of the departed boys.

My reader, had he chanced to pa.s.s down that deserted walk on this stormy afternoon, would hardly have recognised in the lonely occupant of that seat the John Jeffreys he had seen six months ago at Clarges Street. It was not merely that he looked haggard and ill, or that his clothes were ragged. That was bad enough, but the reader has seen him in such a plight before. But what he has not seen before--or if at all, only in pa.s.sing moments--is the bitter, hard look on his face, changing it miserably. A stranger pa.s.sing him that afternoon would have said--

"There sits a man who hates all the world."

We, who know him better, would have said--

"There sits our poor dog with a bad name, deserted even by hope."

And so it was.

Jeffreys had left Clarges Street smarting under a sense of injury, but still resolved to keep up the fight for his good name, in which for so many months past he had been engaged.

Not by appealing to Mr Rimbolt. Although he knew, had Mr Rimbolt been at home, all this would not have happened, his pride forbade him now to take a single step to reinstate himself in a house from which he had been so ignominiously expelled. No, not even when that house held within its walls Percy and Raby. The idea of going back filled him with horror.

On the contrary, he would hide himself from them, even though they sought to find him; and not till his name was as good as theirs would he see them again or come near them.

Which surely was another way of resolving never to see them again; for the leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin! A bad name is a stain which no washing can efface; it clings wherever you go, and often men who see it see nothing else in you but the scar.

So thought poor Jeffreys as he slowly turned his back on all that was dear to him in life, and went out into the night of the unsympathetic city.

At first, as I said, he tried to hold up his head. He inquired in one or two quarters for work. But the question always came up--

"What is your character?"

"I have none," he would say doggedly.

"Why did you leave your last place?"

"I was turned away."

"What for?"

"Because I am supposed to have killed a boy once."

Once indeed he did get a temporary job at a warehouse--as a porter--and for a week, a happy week, used his broad back and brawny arms in carrying heavy loads and lifting weights. Hope sprang again within him as he laboured. He might yet, by beginning at the lowest step, rise above his evil name and conquer it.

Alas! One day a shilling was lost from the warehouseman's desk.

Jeffreys had been seen near the place and was suspected. He resented the charge scornfully at first, then savagely, and in an outbreak of rage struck his accuser. He was impeached before the head of the firm, and it was discovered that he had come without a character. That was enough. He was bundled out of the place at five minutes' notice, with a threat of a policeman if he made it six. And even when a week later the shilling was found in the warehouseman's blotting-paper, no one doubted that the cashiered rogue was as cunning as he was nefarious.

After that he had given up what seemed the farce of holding up his head.

What was the use, he said, when, as sure as night follows day, that bad name of his dogged him wherever he went?

So Jeffreys began to go down. In after years he spoke very little of those six months in London, and when he did it was about people he had met, and not about himself. What he did, where he lodged, how he lived, these were matters he never mentioned and never liked to be asked about.

I am quite sure myself that the reason of this silence was not shame.

He was not one of those fellows who revenge themselves on fate by deliberately going to the bad. At his worst, he had no taste for vice or any affinity for it. He may have sunk low, not because he himself was low, but because in his miserable feud with all the world he scorned not to share the lot of others as miserable as himself.

His money--he had a few pounds when he left Clarges Street--soon failed him. He made no great effort to keep it, and was relieved to see the end of it. His companions in misery soon helped him away with it, and he let them.

But when it was gone the old necessity for work came back. By day he hardly ever ventured out of his court, for fear of being seen by some one who would attempt to rescue him from his present condition. At night he wandered restlessly about in the narrow streets picking up an early morning job at Covent Garden or in the omnibus stables.

He moved his lodgings incessantly, one week inhabiting a garret in Westminster, another sharing a common room in Whitechapel, another doing without lodgings altogether. He spoke little or not at all to his fellow-miserables, not because he despised them, but because they fought shy of him. They disliked his superior ways and his ill-concealed disgust of their habits and vices. They could have forgiven him for being a criminal in hiding; that they were used to. But a man who spoke like a gentleman, who took no pleasure in their low sports, and sat dumb while they talked loud and broad, seemed to them an interloper and an intruder.