"Then pray don't repeat it to me, my love"--another yawn and an irritable one. "Gossip as you know is abhorrent to me."
"And to me--but one needs to be forearmed with the truth if one is to rebut it conclusively. Only upon such grounds should I think of mentioning this to you."
"James, have you by chance ever heard peculiar rumours about young Darcy Faircloth's parentage?"
"In mercy, Jane--what a question!--and from you! I am inexpressibly shocked."
"So was I, when--I won't mention names--when such rumours were hinted to me. I assured the person with whom I was talking that I had never heard a word on the subject. But she said, 'One can't help having eyes.'"
Here he gave her the advantage. She was not slow to make play with it.
"Now it is my turn to be shocked," she said--"and not, I think, James, without good cause."
"Yes, I apologize," the excellent man answered immediately. "I apologize; but to have so foul a suggestion of parochial scandal let loose on me suddenly, flung in my teeth, as I may say--and by you! I was taken off my guard and expressed myself coarsely. Yes, Jane, I apologize."
"Then I have you authority for contradicting these rumours?"
The Vicar of Deadham groaned in the darkness, and rustled under the bedclothes. His perplexity was great on being thus confronted by the time-honoured question as to how far, in the interests of public morality, it is justifiable for the private individual roundly to lie. Finally he banked on compromise, that permanently presiding genius of the Church of England 'as by law established.'
"You have me on the hip, my love," he told his wife quite meekly.
But, as she began rather eagerly to speak, he stopped her.
"Let be, my dear Jane," he bade her, "let be. I neither deny or confirm the rumours to which I imagine you allude. Silence is most becoming for us both. Continue to assure any persons, ill-advised and evil-minded enough to approach you--I trust they may prove but few--that you have never heard a word of this subject. You will never--I can confidently promise you--hear one from me.--I shall make it my duty to preach on the iniquity of back-biting, tale-bearing, scandal-mongering next Sunday, and put some to the blush, as I trust. St. Paul will furnish me with more than one text eminently apposite.--Let me think--let me see--hum--ah! yes."