MR. CADDY, when he advised Mrs. Topple to look for clover in the road, had an even kinder thought for her than had Mr. Tarr when he advised her in the interest of healing all her pains to hunt for the magic leaf.
Mr. Caddy had grown thoughtful and silent when Mr. Hunt—who never even came back to say he was sorry for what he had done—rode over his best duck and deprived her of life. It was then, in the innocence of Mr. Caddy’s heart, who fancied that the wicked are sometimes punished, that he decided that could Mr. Hunt be persuaded to drive over a human being he might get hanged for it.
When a child, Mr. Caddy had known the Maidenbridge hangman and had liked him.
‘’Twouldn’t hurt poor Mrs. Topple to die all of a sudden,’ Mr. Caddy had wisely informed his friends in the pond, ‘for ’tain’t here upon earth that she mid find thik fine clover; ’tis in they golden fields of heaven.’
With this praiseworthy desire to get Mrs. Topple, as soon as convenient to the angels, to the upper meadows where all the clover has four leaves, he advised the lady to look in the road for what she wanted, knowing how fast Mr. Hunt drove his car round the worst corners.
If any one person in the Mockery world was believed by all, that person was Mr. Caddy. For he who knows all the ins and outs of everything, all the bedtime manners, all the happy courting in the woods and meadows, all the many and merry ways of country matters that are used in the shaping of a man—how could such a one be ever doubted when he gave advice?
Mrs. Topple believed that Mr. Caddy had pointed out to her, as he had done to so many a Mockery maiden, the way to be happy, and so as soon as the holidays were come she began to hunt in the lanes as he had advised her to do. And she had just knelt beside a bank that had itself crept a little too far into the road for safety, to pick the very thing that she had searched so diligently for all that warm summer, a four-leaf clover, when Mr. Hunt, who was in a hurry to send the Dodder policeman after Mrs. Moggs—for ever since he had seen her happy curls he had wished her in prison—ran into her.
Mr. Hunt’s car was a heavy one, and the bonnet struck Mrs. Topple’s head, and took from her all thought of her happiness by rendering her utterly unconscious of anything at all.
Mr. Hunt rushed on, and soon discovered the Dodder policeman, who was talking to a girl in the road, and sent him off to Mockery to arrest Mrs. Moggs, and also to look to a woman who had had a seizure in the lane, after falling down a high bank, to the immediate danger of any poor motorist who might want to pass.
The policeman found Mrs. Topple dead with the clover in her hand.