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Updated: May 20, 2025
Then Mrs Janaway was seized with a sudden temerity. "Will your lordship not step in and warm yourself for a moment?" she interposed. "We have a clear fire burning, if you will overlook the smell of cooking." The clerk trembled for a moment at his wife's boldness, but Lord Blandamer accepted the invitation with alacrity.
Clerk Janaway, who was sorely chagrined to think that he should have missed an opportunity of distinguished converse, declared that he had felt the stranger's grey eyes go through and through him like a knife, and had only made believe to stop him entering the choir, in order to convince himself by the other's masterful insistence that his own intuition was correct.
A myrtle-bush which grew out of a hole in the cobbles was carefully trained against the front of a cottage in the middle of the row, and a brass plate on the door informed the wayfarer and ignorant man that "T. Janaway, Sexton," dwelt within.
It was while thus employed that Lawrence began to wonder what would have happened if Isabel had come to Wancote alone. She might have run away. But would she, while Ben was engaged in carpet-beating? Not she! Lawrence was not a fanciful man: but the red and grey remains of Clara Janaway would have set the visualizing faculty to work in the mind of a ploughboy.
"Quite as much depends upon the cooking as upon the tripe itself," remarked Mrs Janaway, bridling at the thought that her art had been left out of the reckoning; "a bad cook will spoil the best tripe. There are many ways of doing it, but a little milk and a leek is the best for me."
Set close by the way on a cross-track, which forded the brook by stepping stones and went on over the downs to Amesbury, stood a small, square, tumbledown cottage, its door opening on primeval turf, though behind it a plot of garden enclosed in a quickset hedge provided Mrs. Janaway with cabbages and gooseberries and sour apples and room to hang out the clothes.
"Thank you very much," said he; "I should be very glad to rest a few minutes before my train leaves. Pray make no apology for the smell of cookery; it is very appetising, especially at supper-time." He spoke as if he took supper every evening, and had never heard of a late dinner in his life; and five minutes later he sat at table with Mr and Mrs Janaway.
About eight o'clock on the Saturday evening, some two hours after Lord Blandamer and Westray had parted, the door of the myrtle-fronted cottage was open, and the clerk stood on the threshold smoking his pipe, while from within came a cheerful, ruddy light and a well-defined smell of cooking; for Mrs Janaway was preparing supper. "Tom," she called, "shut the door, and come to thy victuals."
He carried her indoors, leaving Janaway and his wife and the Dane lying scattered on the sunlit turf. He did not care one straw whether they lived or died. In the little front parlour, neat and fresh with its window full of white muslin and red geraniums, he laid Isabel on a sofa and rolled up her sleeve: the flesh was not much torn but the Dane's fangs had sunk in deep and clean.
It was the stranger who stood in the gap, and when the first surprise was past, the choir welcomed him as being versed in their own arts, and Clerk Janaway forgot the presumption of his entrance and even the rebellious conduct of Mr Milligan.
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