So the drops of petty gossip began to trickle,—­very slowly at first, and then faster and faster, as is their habitude in the effort to wear away the sparkling adamant of a good name and unblemished reputation.  The Reverend Putwood Leveson, vengefully brooding over the wrongs which he considered he had sustained at the hands of Walden, as well as Julian Adderley, rode to and fro on his bicycle from morn till dewy eye, perspiring profusely, and shedding poisonous slanders almost as freely as he exuded melted tallow from his mountainous flesh, aware that by so doing he was not only ingratiating himself with the Pippitts, but also with Lord Roxmouth, through whose influence he presently hoped to ‘get a thing or two.’  Mordaunt Appleby, the Riversford brewer, and his insignificant spouse, irritated at never having had the chance to ‘receive’ Lord Roxmouth, were readily pressed into the same service and did their part of scandal-mongering with right good-will and malignant satisfaction.  And in less than forty-eight hours’ time there was no name too bad for the absent Maryllia; she was ‘mixed up’ with John Walden,—­she had ’tried to entangle him’—­there had been ’a scene with him at the Manor,’—­she was ‘forward,’ ’conceited’—­and utterly lost to any sense of propriety.  Why did she not marry Lord Roxmouth?  Why, indeed!  Many people could tell if they chose!  Ah yes!—­and with this, there were sundry shakings of the head and shruggings of the shoulders which implied more than whole volumes of libel.

But while the county talked, the village listened, sagaciously incredulous of mere rumour, quiescent in itself and perfectly satisfied that whoever else was wrong, ‘Passon Walden’ in everything he did, said, or thought, was sure to be right.  Wherefore, until they heard their ‘man o’ God’s’ version of the stories that were being so briskly circulated, they reserved their own opinions.  The infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff was not more securely founded in the Roman Catholic Ritual than the faith of St. Rest in the ‘gospel according to John.’

XXVII

Meanwhile Walden himself, ignorant of all the ‘local’ excitement so suddenly stirred up in his tiny kingdom, had arrived on a three days’ visit at the house, or to put it more correctly, at the palace, of his friend Bishop Brent.  It was, in strict reality a palace, having been in the old days one of the residences of Henry VII.  Much of the building had been injured during the Cromwellian period, and certain modern repairs to its walls had been somewhat clumsily executed, but it still retained numerous fine old mullioned windows, and a cloistered court of many sculptured arches still eminently beautiful, though grey and crumbling under the touch of the melancholy vandal, Time.  The Bishop’s study had formerly been King Henry’s audience chamber, and possessed a richly-wrought ceiling of interlaced oak rafters, and projecting beams smoothly polished at the ends