“It looks good enough to me,” said Kifflin at last. “But then I’m such a simple fellow someone has always got me on the hip.”
Wigglesworth laughed, not very enthusiastically. “That’s exactly my case, to the letter.” He returned the coin.
“The constable,” said Mr. Dangerfield gravely, “will be along soon to look at this coin. If he finds it to be false I suppose he’ll examine every person in the village.”
At that moment a country girl went by outside carrying a basket over her arm and crying, “Fresh new eggs! Who’ll buy my new fresh eggs?”
Kifflin turned about quickly. “There she is, Will. I hope you’ll excuse us, Mrs. St. Clare, but we came to ask if we might wait upon you later in the day. We overslept and came out in search of some eggs for our dinner. Good-day, madame. Good-day, sir.”
He and Wigglesworth bowed, backed their way out of the room, and once outside turned and started off in all haste. Their pace increased, they passed the girl without giving her so much as a glance, and when they had gone two hundred yards broke into an open run and at last cut off the main street and disappeared from sight. Amber and Mr. Dangerfield, who had gone out to watch, looked at each other and then burst into laughter.
“Look at ’em go!” cried Amber. “I vow they won’t stop for breath till they’ve reached Paris!”
She shut the door again and gave a little sigh. “Well, I hope I’ve learnt my lesson. I vow I’ll never put my trust in strangers again.”
He was smiling down at her. “A young lady as pretty as you are should be suspicious of all strangers.” He said it with the air of a man who intends to be very gallant, without ever having had much practice. And when she answered the compliment with a quick upward slanting glance he cleared his throat and his ruddy face darkened. “Hem—I wonder, Mrs. St. Clare, if you’d care to put your trust in this stranger long enough to walk to the well with him?”
Confidence was beginning to sweep through Amber, and the intoxication she always felt when she knew a man was attracted to her. “Of course I would, sir. I think I know an
Amber had acted in numerous plays depicting the rigid austere hypocritical life of the City families and, though all of them had been bitter and satirical and slanderously exaggerated, she had taken them for literal truth. Consequently, she thought she knew exactly what Samuel Dangerfield would admire in a woman; but she soon discovered that her own instinct was a surer guide.
For as she became better acquainted with him she began to realize that even though he was a City merchant and a Presbyterian he was nevertheless a man. And she found to her surprise that he bore no resemblance at all to the sanctimonious severe dour old humbugs who had occasioned such derisive laughter at His Majesty’s Theatre.
If he was not frivolous, neither was he grimly sober; his disposition was a happy one and he laughed easily. He had worked hard all his life, for he had accumulated most of that vast fortune himself, but he was all the more susceptible to a young woman’s gaiety now. His family life had been a close one, but that had given him perhaps a sense of loss, and of curiosity. Amber came into his life like a spring gale, fresh, invigorating, a challenge to whatever he had of dormant venturesomeness. She was everything he had never known before in a woman, and much he had scarcely suspected.
It was not long before they were spending hours out of every day together, and though Samuel insisted that she must grow bored with the company of an old man and urged her to become acquainted with the few young people who were there, Amber insisted that she hated young fellows who were always so silly and empty-headed and thought of nothing but dancing or gambling or going to the play. She kept in close and never went out when she could avoid it, for she was afraid that someone else might recognize her.
And she thought that she could guess pretty well what he would think of an actress, by his opinion of the Court in general. For one day, after some mention of King Charles, he said: “His Majesty could be the greatest ruler our nation has ever had but, unfortunately, not only for him but for all of us, the years of exile were his ruin. He learned a set of habits and a way of living during that time from which he can never escape—partly, I’m afraid, because he doesn’t want to.”
Amber, stitching on a piece of embroidery borrowed from Nan’s work-basket, observed soberly that she had heard Whitehall had grown a most wicked place.
“It is wicked. Wicked and corrupt. Honour is a sham, virtue a laughing-stock, marriage the butt for vulgar jests. There are still decent and honest men aplenty at Whitehall, as everywhere else in England—but knaves and fools elbow them aside.”
