We are in a perfect tangle.  On the other hand, it was never denied that Curtis and John Wiltshire were in London together at the time of Countess Fanny’s flight:  and Curtis Fakenham was one of the procession of armed gentleman conducting her in her carriage, as they supposed; and he was known to have started off, on the discovery of the cheat, with horrible imprecations against Frenchwomen.  It became known, too; that horses of his were standing saddled in his innyard at midnight.  And more, Charles Dump the postillion was taken secretly to set eyes on him as they wheeled him in his garden-walk, and he vowed it was the identical gentleman.  But this coming by and by to the ear of Curtis, he had Charles Dump fetched over to confront him; and then the man made oath that he had never seen Mr. Curtis Fakenham anywhere but there, in his own house at Hollis!  One does not really know what, to think of it.

This postillion made a small fortune.  He was everywhere in request.  People were never tired of asking him how he behaved while the fight was going on, and he always answered that he sat as close to his horse as he could, and did not dream of dismounting; for, he said, ’he was a figure on a horse, and naught when off it.’  His repetition of the story, with some adornments, and that same remark, made him the popular man of the county; people said he might enter Parliament, and I think at one time it was possible.  But a great success is full of temptations.  After being hired at inns to fill them with his account of the battle, and tipped by travellers from London to show the spot, he set up for himself as innkeeper, and would have flourished, only he had contracted habits on his rounds, and he fell to contradicting himself, so that he came to be called Lying Charley; and the people of the country said it was ’he who drained the Punch-Bowl, for though he helped to put the capital into it, he took all the interest out of it.’

Yet we have the doctor of the village of Ipley, Dr. Cawthorne, a noted botanist, assuring us of the absolute credibility of Charles Dump, whom he attended in the poor creature’s last illness, when Charles Dump confessed he had lived in mortal terror of Squire Curtis, and had got the trick of lying, through fear of telling the truth.  Hence his ruin.

So he died delirious and contrite.  Cawthorne, the great Turf man, inherited a portrait of him from his father the doctor.  It was often the occasion of the story being told over again, and used to hang in the patients’ reception room, next to an oil-painting of the Punch-Bowl, an admired landscape picture by a local artist, highly-toned and true to every particular of the scene, with the bright yellow road winding uphill, and the banks of brilliant purple heath, and a white thorn in bloom quite beautiful, and the green fir trees, and the big Bowl black as a cauldron,—­indeed a perfect feast of harmonious contrasts in colours.