CHAPTER VI

The stillness, the balm, the soothing influences of the night worked their own spell; and, after a time, rubbed out the mental wrinkles and brought a sense of restfulness and peace.  It could not well do otherwise with such a nature as his.  The night was all a-musk with mignonette and roses, the sky all a-glitter with stars.  A gunshot distant the river ran—­a silver thing ribboning along between the dark of bending trees; somewhere in the darkness a nightingale shook out the scale of Nature’s Anthem to the listening Night, and, farther afield, others took up the chorus of it and sang and sang with the sheer joy of living.

What a world—­God, what a world for parricides to exist in, and for the sons of men to forget the Fifth Commandment!

He walked on faster, and made his way to the arbour where Dollops waited.  The boy rose to meet him.

“Everythink all ready, sir—­see!” he said, holding up a kit bag.  “Wot’s it now, Gov’nor?—­the railway station?  Good enough.  Shall I nip off ahead or keep with you till we get there?”

“Suit yourself, my lad.”

“Thanky, sir; then I’ll walk at your heels, if you don’t mind.  I’d like to walk at your heels all the rest of my blessed life.  Did I carry it off all right, Gov’nor?  Did I do it jist as you wanted of it done?”

“To a T, my lad,” said Cleek, smiling and patting him on the shoulder.  “You’ll do, Dollops—­you’ll do finely.  I think I did a good job for the pair of us, my boy, when I gave you those two half-crowns.”

“Advanced, Gov’nor, advanced,” corrected Dollops, with a look of sheer affection.  “Let me work ’em off, sir, like you said I might.  I don’t want nothin’ but wot I earns, Gov’nor; nothin’ but wot I’ve got a right to have; for when I sees wot wantin’ money as don’t belong to you leads to; when I thinks wot that young Bawdrey chap was willin’ to do for the love of havin’ it—­”

“Don’t!” struck in Cleek, a trifle roughly.  “Drop the man’s name—­I can’t trust myself to think of it.  That the one world, the one self-same world, could hold two such widely dissimilar creations of God as that monster and ...  No matter.  Thank God, I’ve been able to do something to-night for a good woman—­I owe so much to another of her kind.  No; don’t speak—­just walk quietly and”—­jerking his thumb in the direction of the fluting nightingales—­“listen to that.  God! the man who could think evil things when a nightingale sings, isn’t fit to stand even in the Devil’s presence.”

Dollops looked at him—­half-puzzled, half-awed.  He could not understand the character of the man:  there were so many sides to it; and they came and went so oddly.  One minute, a very brute-beast in his ferocity, the next, a woman in his tenderness and a poet in his thoughts.  But if the boy was puzzled, he was, at least, discreet.  He put nothing into words:  merely walked on in silence, and left the man to his thoughts and the nightingales to their melody.