Villages are always concluding there is something wrong about people.
“What does he do?” inquired our village.
“Where does he get his blue coat with brass buttons, his tartan waistcoat and green satin tie with red ends? We admit all this looks like a gentleman. But yet, somehow, a gentleman is a horse of another color than this Robinson.”
George had sometimes laughed at all this, sometimes been very angry, and always stood up stoutly for his friend and lodger.
And now the fools were right and he was wrong. His friend and protege was handcuffed before his eyes and carried off to the county jail amid the grins and stares of a score of gaping rustics, who would make a fine story of it this evening in both public-houses; and a hundred voices would echo some such conversational Tristich as this:
1st Rustic. “I tawld un as much, dinn't I now, Jarge?”
2d Rustic. “That ye did, Richard, for I heerd ee.”
1st Rustic. “But, la! bless ye, he don't vally advice, he don't.”
George Fielding groaned out, “I'm ready to go now—I'm quite ready to go—I am leaving a nest of insults;” and he darted into the house, as much to escape the people's eyes as to finish his slight preparations for so great a journey.
Two men were left alone; sulky William and respectable Meadows. Both these men's eyes followed George into the house, and each had a strong emotion they were bent on concealing, and did conceal from each other; but was it concealed from all the world?
The farm-house had two rooms looking upon the spot where most of our tale has passed.
The smaller one of these was a little state parlor, seldom used by the family. Here on a table was a grand old folio Bible; the names, births, and deaths of a century of Fieldings appeared in rusty ink and various handwritings upon its fly-leaf.
Framed on the walls were the first savage attempts of woman at worsted-work in these islands. There were two moral commonplaces, and there was the forbidden fruit-tree, whose branches diverged, at set distances like the radii of a circle, from its stem, a perpendicular line; exactly at the end of each branch hung one forbidden fruit—pre-Raphaelite worsted-work.
There were also two prints of more modern date, one agricultural, one manufactural.
No. 1 was a great show of farming implements at Doncaster.
No. 2 showed how, one day in the history of man and of mutton, a sheep was sheared, her wool washed, teased, carded, etc., and the cloth *'d and *'d and *'d and *'d, and a coat shaped and sewed and buttoned upon a goose, whose preparations for inebriating the performers and spectators of his feat appeared in a prominent part of the picture.
The window of this sunny little room was open and on the sill was a row of flower-pots from which a sweet fresh smell crept with the passing air into the chamber.
Behind these flower-pots for two hours past had crouched—all eye and ear and mind—a keen old man.
To Isaac Levi age had brought vast experience, and had not yet dimmed any one of his senses. More than forty-five years ago he had been brought to see that men seldom act or speak so as to influence the fortunes of others without some motive of their own; and that these motives are seldom the motives they advance; and that their real motives are not always known to themselves, and yet can nearly always be read and weighed by an intelligent bystander.
So for near half a century Isaac Levi had read that marvelous page of nature written on black, white and red parchments, and called “Man.”
One result of his perusal was this, that the heads of human tribes differ far more than their hearts.
The passions and the heart he had found intelligible and much the same from Indus to the Pole.
The people of our tale were like men walking together in a coppice; they had but glimpses of each others' minds. But to Isaac behind his flower-pots they were a little human chart spread out flat before him, and not a region in it he had not traveled and surveyed before to-day: what to others passed for accident to him was design; he penetrated more than one disguise of manner; and above all his intelligence bored like a center-bit into the deep heart of his enemy, Meadows, and at each turn of the center-bit his eye flashed, his ear lived, and he crouched patient as a cat, keen as a lynx.
He was forgotten, but not by all.
Meadows, a cautious man, was the one to ask himself, “Where is that old heathen, and what is he doing?”
To satisfy himself, Meadows had come smoothly to the door of the little apartment, and burst suddenly into it.
There he found the reverend Israelite extended on a little couch, a bandana handkerchief thrown over his face, calmly reposing.
Meadows paused, eyed him keenly, listened to his gentle but audible, equable breathing, relieved his mind by shaking his fist at him, and went out.
Thirty seconds later Isaac awoke! spat in the direction of Meadows, and crouched again behind the innocent flowers, patient as a cat, keen as a lynx.
So then; when George was gone in, William Fielding and Mr. Meadows both felt a sudden need of being alone; each longed to indulge some feeling he did not care the other should see; so they both turned their faces away from each other and strolled apart.
Isaac Levi caught both faces off their guard, and read the men as by a lightning flash to the bottom line of their hearts.
For two hours he had followed the text, word by word, deed by deed, letter by letter, and now a comment on that text was written in these faces.
That comment said that William was rejoiced at George's departure and ashamed of himself for the feeling. That Meadows rejoiced still more and was ashamed anybody should know he had the feeling.
Isaac withdrew from his lair; his task was done.
“Those men both love that woman, and this Meadows loves her with all his soul, and she-aha!” and triumph flashed from under his dark brows. But at his age calm is the natural state of the mind and spirits; he composed himself for the present, and awaited an opportunity to strike his enemy with effect.
The aged man had read Mr. Meadows aright; under that modulated exterior raged as deep a passion as ever shook a strong nature.
For some time he had fought against it. “She is another man's sweetheart,” he had said to himself; “no good will come of courting her.” But by degrees the flax bonds of prudence snapped one by one as the flame every now and then darted at them. Meadows began to reason the matter coolly.
“They can never marry, those two. I wish they would marry or break off, to put me out of this torture; but they can't marry, and my sweet Susan is wasting her prime for nothing, for a dream. Besides, it is not as if she loved him the way I love her. She is like many a young maid. The first comer gets her promise before she knows her value. They walk together, get spoken of; she settles down into a groove, and so goes on, whether her heart is in it or not; it is habit more than anything.”
Then he watched the pair, and observed that Susan's manner to George was cool and off-hand, and that she did not seem to seek opportunities of being alone with him.
Having got so far, he now felt it his duty to think of her interest.
He could not but feel that he was a great match for any farmer's daughter; whereas “poor young Fielding,” said he compassionately, “is more likely to break as a bachelor than to support a wife and children upon 'The Grove.'”
He next allowed his mind to dwell with some bitterness upon the poor destiny that stood between him and the woman he loved.
“George Fielding! a dull dog, that could be just as happy with any other girl as with