“I a beggar for a living!” said Mr. St. John. “I who have never asked for anything in my life!” A deep flush came upon his delicate pale face. He had borne a great many more serious blows without wincing. Death had visited him, and care dwelt in his house—and he had borne these visitations placidly; but there was one flaw in his armour, and this unlooked-for assault found it out. A flame of injured pride blazed up in him, swift as fire and as glowing. “I thought I should have died without this,” he said witha groan, half fierce, half bitter. “What was it to you? I never asked you for anything! Oh, this is hard—this is very hard to bear.”
In the memory of man it had never been known that Mr. St. John thus complained before. The girls had never heard his voice raised or seen the flush of anger on his face; and they were overawed by it. This kind of sentiment too has always a certain fictitious grandeur to the inexperienced. Never to ask for anything; to wait—patient merit scorning all conflict with the unworthy—till such time as its greatness should be acknowledged. This sounds very sublime in most cases to the youthful soul.
“Well, Mr. St. John,” said Miss Maydew, “you may say I have no right to interfere; but if you had stooped to ask for something it might have been a great deal better for your family. Besides, you have not asked for anything now. I am not responsible for my actions to any one, and I hope I may do either for you or anybody else whatever I please in the way of service. If the Lord Chancellor does give you the living——”
Mr. St. John smiled. “I need not make myself angry,” he said, “for it isall sheer ignorance. The living is a college living. I don’t know what your ideas are on the subject, but the Lord Chancellor has as much to do with it as you have. Cicely, let us have tea.”
Miss Maydew shrivelled up upon her chair. She sat very quiet, and did not say a word after this revelation. What she had done would have troubled her mind little; but that she had done nothing after risking so much was hard to bear. After this little ebullition, however, the curate fell back into his usual calm. He spoke to them in his ordinary way. His voice resumed its tranquil tone. He took his tea, which was a substantial meal, doing justice to the bread and butter, and on the whole showed signs of being more concerned for Mr. Chester than he was for himself.
“I remember him at college—we were of the same college,” he said; “but he always the richest, much the best off. How little that has to say to a man’s happiness! Poor Chester was never happy; he might have been very well here. How much I have had to be thankful for here! but it was not his disposition. He was good-looking too when he was young, and did very well in everything. Any onewould have said he had a far better chance for a happy life than I had.”
The gentle old man grew quite loquacious in this contrast, though he was in general the most humble-minded of men; and the two girls sat and listened, giving wondering glances at each other, and blushing red with that shame of affection which lively girls perhaps are particularly disposed to feel when their parents maunder. This sort of domestic criticism, even though unexpressed, was hard upon Mr. St. John, as upon all such feeble good men. His last wife had adored him at all times, as much when he was foolish as when he was wise. She would have given him the fullest adhesion of her soul now, and echoed every word he said; but the girls did not. They would have preferred to silence him, and were ashamed of his gentle self-complacency. And yet it was quite true that he felt himself a happier man than Mr. Chester, and higher in the scale of merit though not of fortune; and the calm with which he took this event, which was neither more nor less than ruin to him, was fine in its way.
“But what are we to do, papa?” Cicely ventured to ask him, looking up into hisface with big anxious eyes, as he took his last cup of tea.
“My dear, we must wait and see,” he said. “There is no very immediate hurry. Let us see first who is appointed, and what the new rector intends to do.”
“But, Mr. St. John, you are a very learned man—and if it is a college living”—suggested Miss Maydew.
“It is my own college, too,” he said reflectively; “and I suppose I am now one of the oldest members of it. It would not be amiss if they let me stay here the rest of my days. But I never was distinguished. I never was a Fellow, or anything. I never could push myself forward. No—we must just wait and see what is going to happen. A few days or a few weeks will make little difference. Compose yourselves, my dears,” said Mr. St. John. “I am not very anxious after all.”
“I wonder if he would be anxious if you were all starving,” cried Miss Maydew, as the girls walked with her to the station in the evening. “Oh, Cicely, I know I oughtn’t to say anything to you about your papa. But if he has not been anxious, others have been anxious for him. Your poor mother! how she slaved tokeep everything as it ought to be; and even poor Miss Brown. It did not cost much to marry her—but it cost her her life.”
“Aunt Jane!” cried both the girls indignant.
“Well, my dears! She might have been living now, a respectable single woman, doing her duty, as she was capable of doing; instead of which what must she do but bring a couple of white-faced babies into the world that nobody wanted, and die of it. Yes, she did die of it. You don’t understand these things—you are only children. And all because he was what you call kind-hearted, and could not bear to see her cry, forsooth. As if the best of us were not obliged both to cry ourselves and to see others cry often enough! but they never thought what they were doing; and the ones to suffer will be you.”
“Aunt Jane, you ought not to speak so of papa.”
“I know I shouldn’t, my dear—and I humbly beg your pardons,” said Aunt Jane, drying her eyes.
“And we ought not to have left him unprotected,” said Cicely, with a sigh.
THEnews which so much disturbed the inhabitants of the rectory at Brentburn was already old news in Oxford, where indeed it was known and decided who Mr. Chester’s successor was to be. The august body in whose hands the appointment lay was absolutely unconscious of the existence of Mr. St. John. Several members of it, it is true, were his own contemporaries, and had been his acquaintances in the old days when these very dons themselves traversed their quadrangles with such hopes and fears in respect to the issue of an examination, as the destruction of the world or its salvation would scarcely rouse in them now; but what was it likely they could know about a man who at sixty-five wasonly a curate, who had never asked for anything, never tried for anything; but had kept himself out of sight and knowledge for a lifetime? Those of them who had a dim recollection that “old St. John” was Chester’s curate in charge, naturally thought that he held that precarious and unprofitable place for so long, because of some personal connection with the locality, or preference for it, which he was well off enough to be able to indulge. He had been poor in his youth, but probably his wife had had money, or something had fallen to him. What so likely as that something good should fall by inheritance to a man with such a patrician name? Therefore let nobody blame the dons. They might have been capable (though I don’t know whether they would have had any right to exercise their patronage so) of a great act of poetic justice, and might have given to the undistinguished but old member of their college the reward of his long exertions, had they known. But as they did not know, what could these good men do but allot it to the excellent young Fellow—already the winner of all kinds of honours—who condescended to be willing to accept the humble rectory? Everybodysaid it was not worth Mildmay’s while to shelve himself in an obscure place like Brentburn; that it was a strange thing for him to do; that he would hate it as poor Chester—also an extremely accomplished man and fellow of his college—had done. Gossips—and such beings exist in the most classical places—feared that he must want the money; though some thought he was merely disinclined to let a tolerable small living, not far from town, and in a good county, where there were many “nice families,” pass him; but very few people so far as I am aware, thought of any higher motive which a popular young don could have for such a fancy.
Mr. Mildmay was quite one of the advanced rank of young Oxford men. I have never been able to understand how it was that he continued more or less orthodox, but he had done so by special constitution of mind, I suppose, which in some tends to belief as much as in some others it tends to unbelief. He was not one of those uncomfortable people who are always following out “truth” to some bitter end or other, and refusing all compromise. Perhaps he was not so profound as are those troublesome spirits,but he was a great deal happier, and a great deal more agreeable. It is quite possible that some young reader may object to this as a shameful begging of the question whether it is not best to follow “truth” with bosom bare into whatsoever wintry lands that oft-bewildered power may lead. I don’t know; some minds have little inclination towards the sombre guesses of science, new or old; and perhaps some may prefer Roger Mildmay for the mere fact that he did not feel himself to have outgrown Christianity; which, I confess, is my own feeling on the subject. However, if it is any satisfaction to the said young reader, I may as well avow that though nature kept him from being sceptical, that kindly nurse did not hinder him from throwing himself into much semi-intellectual foolishness in other ways. To hear him talk of art was enough to make all the Academy dance with fury, and drive the ordinary learner, however little attached to the Academy, into absolute imbecility; and his rooms were as good as a show, with all the last fantastical delights of the day—more like a museum of china and knick-knacks than rooms to live in. His floors were littered with rugs, over which, inthe æsthetic dimness, unwary visitors tumbled; his walls were toned into olive greens or peacock blues, dark enough to have defied all the sunshine of the Indies to light them up. He had few pictures; but his rooms were hung with photographs “taken direct,” and a collection of old china plates, which perhaps, in their primitive colours and broad effect, “came” better than pictures in the subdued and melancholy light. But why insist upon these details? A great many highly-cultured persons have the same kind of rooms, and Mildmay was something more than a highly-cultured person. All this amused and occupied him very much—for indeed collecting is a very amusing occupation; and when he had found something “really good” in an old curiosity shop, it exhilarated him greatly to bring it home, and find a place for it among his precious stores, and to make it “compose” with the other curiosities around it. As sheer play, I don’t know any play more pleasant; and when he looked round upon the dim world ofobjets d’artthat covered all his walls, shelves, and tables, and marked the fine pictorial effect of the one brilliant spot of light which the green shade of his reading-lampprevented from too great diffusion—when, I say, looking up from his studies, Mr. Mildmay looked round upon all this, and felt that only very fine taste, and much patient labour, supported by a tolerably well-filled purse, could have brought it all together, and arranged everything into one harmonious whole, there came a glow of gentle satisfaction to the heart of the young don.
But then he sighed. All perfection is melancholy. When you have finally arranged your last acquisition, and look round upon a completeness which, even for the introduction of additional beauty, it seems wicked to disturb, what can you do but sigh? And there was more than this in the breath of melancholy—the long-drawn utterance of an unsatisfied soul in Mildmay’s sigh. After all, a man cannot live for china, for æsthetic arrangement, for furniture, however exquisite; or even for art, when he is merely a critic, commentator, and amateur—not a worker in the same. You may suppose that he was weary of his loneliness; that he wanted a companion, or those domestic joys which are supposed to be so infinitely prized in England. I am sorry to say this was not the case.The class to which Mildmay belongs are rather in the way of scouting domestic joys. A man who makes a goddess of his room, who adores china, and decks his mantleshelf with lace, seldom (in theory) wants a wife, or sighs for a companion of his joys and sorrows. For why? He does not deal much in sorrows or in joys. The deepest delight which can thrill the soul in the discovery of old Worcester or royal Dresden, scarcely reaches to the height of passion; and even if a matchless cup ofHenri Deuxwere to be shivered to pieces in your hand, your despair would not appeal to human sympathy as would the loss of a very much commoner piece of flesh and blood. And then young ladies as a class are not, I fear, great in the marks of china, and even in the feminine speciality of lace require years to mellow them into admiration of those archæological morsels which cannot be worn. Besides, the very aspect of such rooms as those I have indicated (not being bold enough to attempt to describe them) is inimical to all conjoint and common existence. Solitude is taken for granted in all those dainty arrangements; in the dim air, the dusky walls, the subdued tone. A childin the place, ye heavens! imagination shivers, and dares not contemplate what might follow.
And then Mr. Mildmay had exhausted this delight. I believe his rooms were papered with three different kinds of the choicest paper that ever came out of Mr. Morris’s hands. His curtains had been embroidered in the art school of needlework on cloth woven and dyed expressly for him. An ancient piece of lovely Italian tapestry hung over one door, and another was veiled by a glorious bit of eastern work from Damascus or Constantinople. His Italian cabinets were enough to make you faint with envy; his Venice glass—but why should I go on? The rugs which tripped you up as you threaded your way through the delicate artificial twilight were as valuable as had they been woven in gold; and no sooner was it known that Mildmay had accepted a living than all the superior classes in the southern half of England pricked up their ears. Would there be a sale? About a thousand connoisseurs from all parts of the country balanced themselves metaphorically on one foot like Raphael’s St. Michael, ready to swoop down at the first note of warning. I am not sure thatamong railway authorities there were not preparations for a special train.
Mr. Mildmay had got tired of it all. Suddenly in that dainty dimness of high culture it had occurred to him that studies of old art and accumulations of the loveliest furniture were not life. What was life? There are so many that ask that question, and the replies are so feeble. The commonest rendering is that which Faust in sheer disgust of intellectualism plunged into—pleasure; with what results the reader knows. Pleasure in its coarser meaning, in the Faust sense, and in the vulgar sensual sense, was only a disgust to such a man as Roger Mildmay. What could he have done with his fine tastes and pure habits in thecoulissesor the casinos? He would only have recoiled with the sickening sensations of physical loathing as well as mental. What then? Should he marry and have a family, which is the virtuous and respectable answer to his question? He had no inclination that way. The woman whom he was to marry had not yet risen on his firmament, and he was not the kind of man to determine on marriage in the abstract, dissociated from any individual. How then was he to know life,and have it? Should he go off into the distant world and travel, and discover new treasures of art in unsuspected places, and bring home his trophies from all quarters of the world? But he had done this so often already that even the idea almost fatigued him. Besides, all these expedients, pleasure, domesticity, travel, would all have been ways of pleasing himself only, and he had already done a great deal to please himself. Life must have something in it surely of sharper, more pungent flavour. It could not be a mere course of ordinary days one succeeding another, marked out by dinners, books, conversations, the same thing over again, never more than an hour of it at a time in a man’s possession, nothing in it that could not be foreseen and mapped out. This could not be life. How was he to get at life? He sat and wondered over this problem among his beautiful collections. He had nothing to do, you will say; and yet you can’t imagine how busy he was. In short, he was never without something to do. He had edited a Greek play, he had written magazine articles, he had read papers before literary societies, he had delivered lectures. Few, very few, were his unoccupied moments.He knew a great many people in the highest classes of society, and kept up a lively intercourse with the most intelligent, the most cultivated minds of his time. He was, indeed, himself one of the most highly cultured persons of his standing; yet here he sat in the most delightful rooms in his college, sighing for life, life!
What is life? Digging, ploughing, one can understand that; but unfortunately one cannot dig, and “to beg I am ashamed.” These familiar words suggested themselves by the merest trick of the ear to his mind unawares. To beg, the Franciscans he had seen in old Italy had not been at all ashamed; neither were the people who now and then penetrated into college rooms with—if not the Franciscan’s wallet, or the penitent’s rattling money-box—lists of subscriptions with which to beguile the unwary. For what? For hospitals, schools, missions, churches; the grand deduction to be drawn from all this being that there were a great many people in the world, by their own fault or that of others, miserable, sick, ignorant, wicked; and that a great many more people, from good or indifferent motives, on true or on false pretences, weremaking a great fuss about helping them. This fuss was in a general way annoying, and even revolting to thedilettanti, whose object is to see and hear only things that are beautiful, to encourage in themselves and others delightful sensations; but yet when you came to think of it, it could not be denied that the whole system of public charity had a meaning. In some cases a false, foolish, wrong meaning, no doubt; but yet——
If I were to tell you all the fancies that passed through Roger Mildmay’s head on the subject, it would require volumes; and many of his thoughts were fantastic enough. The fact that he had taken orders and was the man he was, made it his proper business to teach others; but he would much rather, he thought, have reclaimed waste land, or something of that practical sort. Yes, to reclaim a bit of useless moorland and make it grow oats or even potatoes—that would be something; but then unfortunately the ludicrous side of the matter would come over him. What could he do on his bit of moorland with those white hands of his? Would it not be much more sensible to pay honest wages to some poor honest man out of work, and let him dothe digging? and then where was Roger Mildmay? still left, stranded, high and dry, upon the useless ground of his present existence. Such a man in such a self-discussion is as many women are. If he works, what is the good of it? It is to occupy, to please himself, not because the work is necessary to others; indeed, it is taking bread out of the mouths of others to do badly himself that which another man, probably lounging sadly, out of work, and seeing his children starve, would do well. Let him, then, go back to his own profession; and what was he to do? A clergyman must preach, and he did not feel at all at his ease in the pulpit. A clergyman must teach, and his prevailing mood was a desire to learn. A clergyman must care for the poor, and he knew nothing about the poor. The result of all these confused and unsatisfactory reasonings with himself was that when the living of Brentburn was offered to him half in joke, he made a plunge at it, and accepted. “Let us try!” he said to himself. Anything was better than this perplexity. At the worst he could but fail.
Now, Mr. St. John, as I have said, was a member of the same college, and hadserved the parish of Brentburn for twenty years, and what was to Roger Mildmay an adventure, a very doubtful experiment, would have been to him life and living; and next on the list of eligible persons after Mr. Mildmay was the Rev. John Ruffhead, who was very anxious to marry and settle, and was a clergyman’s son well trained to his work. Such injustices are everywhere around us; they are nobody’s fault, we say—they are the fault of the system; but what system would mend them it is hard to tell. And, on the other hand, perhaps neither Mr. St. John nor Mr. Ruffhead had the same high object before them as Roger had. The old man would have gone on in his gentle routine just as he had done all those years, always kind, soothing the poor folk more than he taught them; the young man would, though sure to do his duty, have thought perhaps more of the future Mrs. Ruffhead, and the settling down, than of any kind of heroic effort to realize life and serve the world. So that on the whole, ideally, mydilettantehad the highest ideal; though the practical effect of him no one could venture to foretell.
He had decided to accept the living of Brentburn at once, feeling the offer to bea kind of answer of the oracle—for there was a certain heathenism mingling with his Christianity—to his long-smouldering and unexpressed desires; but before concluding formally he went, by the advice of one of his friends, to look at the place, “to see how he would like it.” “Like it! do I want to like it?” he said to himself. Must this always be the first question? Was it not rather the first possibility held out to him in the world—of duty, and a real, necessary, and certain work which should not be to please himself? He did not want to like it. Now, men of Mildmay’s turn of mind are seldom deeply devoted to nature. They admire a fine landscape or fine sunset, no doubt, but it is chiefly for the composition, the effects of light and shade, the combination of colours. In the loveliest country they sigh for picture galleries and fine architecture, and cannot please themselves with the mists and the clouds, the woods and the waters, the warm, sweet, boundless atmosphere itself, in which others find beauty and mystery unceasing. Yet on this occasion a different result took place; although it was contrary to his own principles, when he first came out of the prosaic little railway at Brentburnand saw at his right hand, one rich cloud of foliage rounding upon another, and all the wealth of princely trees standing up in their battalions under the full warm August sky; and on the other the sweet wild common bursting forth in a purple blaze of heather, all belted and broken with the monastic gloom of the pine-woods and ineffable blue distances of the wilder country—there suddenly fell upon him a love at first sight for this insignificant rural place, which I cannot account for any more than he could. I should be disposed to say that the scent of the fir-trees went to his head, as it does to mine; but then the very soul within him melted to the great, broad, delicious greenness of shadows in the forest; and the two between them held him in an ecstasy, in that sweet lapse of all sense and thought into which nature sometimes surprises us, when all at once, without any suspicion on our part of what she is about, she throws herself open to us, and holds out her tender arms. Mildmay stood in this partial trance, not knowing what he was doing, for—two full minutes, then he picked himself up, slightly ashamed of his ecstasy, and asked his way to the church, and said to himself(as I think Mr. Ruskin says somewhere) that mere nature without art to back her up is little, but that he might indeed permit himself to feel those indescribable sensations if he could look at all this as a background to a beautiful piece of ancient architecture in the shape of a church. Alas, poor Mr. Mildmay! I don’t know why it had never been broken to him. Ignorant persons had said “a very nice church,” perhaps out of sheer ignorance, perhaps from the commercial point of view that a new church in perfect repair is much more delightful, to a young rector’s pocket at least, than the most picturesque old one in perpetual need of restorations. But anyhow, when the church of Brentburn did burst upon him in all its newness, poor Roger put out his hand to the first support he could find, and felt disposed to swoon. The support which he found to lean on was the wooden rail, round a rather nasty duck-pond which lay between two cottages, skirting the garden hedge of one of them. Perhaps it was the odour of this very undelightful feature in the scene that made him feel like fainting, rather than the sight of the church; but he did not think so in the horror of the moment. He who hadhoped to see the distant landscape all enhanced and glorified, by looking at it from among the ancestral elms or solemn yew-trees about a venerable village spire, and old grey, mossy Saxon walls—or beside the lovely tracery of some decorated window with perhaps broken pieces of old glass glimmering out like emeralds and rubies! The church, I have already said, was painfully new; it was in the most perfect good order; the stones might have been scrubbed with scrubbing-brushes that very morning; and, worse than all, it was good Gothic, quite correct and unobjectionable. The poor young don’s head drooped upon his breast, his foot slipped on the edge of the duck-pond. Never was a more delicate distress; and yet but for the despairing grasp he gave to the paling, the result might have been grotesque enough.
“Be you poorly, sir?” said old Mrs. Joel, who was standing, as she generally was, at her cottage door.
“No, no, I thank you,” said the new rector faintly; “I suppose it is the sun.”
“Come in a bit and rest, bless you,” said Mrs. Joel; “you do look overcome. It is a bit strong is that water of hot days. Many a one comes to look at ourcheuch. There’s a power of old cheuches about, and ours is the only one I know of as is new, sir, and sweet and clean—though I says it as shouldn’t,” said the old woman, smoothing her apron and curtsying with a conscious smile.
“You are the sexton’s wife? you have the charge of it?” said Mr. Mildmay.
“Thank my stars! I ain’t no man’s wife,” said Mrs. Joel. “I be old John Joel’s widow—and a queer one he was; and the curate he say as I was to keep the place, though there’s a deal of jealousy about. I never see in all my born days a jealouser place than Brentburn.”
“Who is the curate?” asked Mr. Mildmay.
“Bless your soul, sir, he’ll be as pleased as Punch to see you. You go up bold to the big door and ask for Mr. St. John; he would always have the hartis-gentlemen and that sort in, to take a cup of tea with him. The Missis didn’t hold with it in her time. She had a deal of pride, though you wouldn’t have thought it at first. But since she’s dead and gone, Mr. St. John he do have his way; and two pretty young ladies just come from school,” said Mrs. Joel with asmirk. She was herself very curious about the stranger, who was evidently not a “hartis-gentleman.” “Maybe you was looking for lodgings, like?” she said, after a pause.
“No, no,” said Mildmay, with unnecessary explanatoriness; “I was only struck by the church, in passing, and wished to know who was the clergyman——”
“Between ourselves, sir,” said Mrs. Joel, approaching closer than was pleasant, for her dinner had been highly seasoned, “I don’t know as Mr. St. John is what you call the clergyman. He ain’t but the curate, and I do hear as there is a real right clergyman a-coming. But you won’t name it, not as coming from me? for I can’t say but he’s always been a good friend.”
“Oh no, I shall not name it. Good morning,” cried Mildmay hurriedly. A new church, a horrible duck-pond, an old woman who smelt of onions. He hurried along, scarcely aware in his haste until he arrived in front of it that the house beyond the church was the rectory, his future home.
THEgirls I need not say had been engaged in calculations long and weary during these intervening days. Cicely, who had at once taken possession of all the details of housekeeping, had by this time made a discovery of the most overwhelming character; which was that the curate was in arrears with all the tradespeople in the parish, and that the “books,” instead of having the trim appearance she remembered, were full of long lists of things supplied, broken by no safe measure of weeks, but running on from month to month and from year to year, with here and there a melancholy payment “to account” set down against it. Cicely was young and she had no money, and knew by her own experiencehow hard it was to make it; and she was overwhelmed by this discovery. She took the books in her lap and crept into the drawing-room beside Mab, who was making a study of the children in the dreary stillness of the afternoon. The two little boys were posed against the big sofa, on the carpet. The young artist had pulled off their shoes and stockings, and, indeed, left very little clothes at all upon Charley, who let her do as she pleased with him without remonstrance, sucking his thumb and gazing at her with his pale blue eyes. Harry had protested, but had to submit to the taking away of his shoes, and now sat gloomily regarding his toes, and trying to keep awake with supernatural lurches and recoveries; Charley, more placid, had dropped off. He had still his thumb in his mouth, his round cheek lying flushed against the cushion, his round white limbs huddled up in a motionless stillness of sleep. Harry sat upright, as upright as possible, and nodded. Mab had got them both outlined on her paper, and was working with great energy and absorption when Cicely came in with the books in her lap. “Oh, go away, go away,” criedMab, “whoever you are! Don’t disturb them! If you wake them all is lost!”
Cicely stood at the door watching the group. Mab had improvised an easel, she had put on a linen blouse over her black and white muslin dress. She had closed the shutters of two windows, leaving the light from the middle one to fall upon the children. In the cool shade, moving now and then a step backwards to see the effect of her drawing, her light figure, full of purpose and energy, her pretty white hand a little stained with the charcoal with which she was working, she was a picture in herself. Cicely, her eyes very red and heavy—for indeed she had been crying—and the bundle of grocery books in her apron, paused and looked at her sister with a gush of admiration, a sharp pinch of something like envy. Mab could do this which looked like witchcraft, while she could only count, and count, and cry over these hopeless books. What good would crying do? If she cried her eyes out it would not pay a sixpence. Cicely knew that she had more “sense” than Mab. It was natural. She was nineteen, Mab only eighteen, and a year is so much at that age! But Mab wasclever. She could do something which Cicely could not even understand; and she would be able to make money, which Cicely could scarcely hope to do. It was envy, but of a generous kind. Cicely went across the room quite humbly behind backs, not to disturb her sister’s work, and sat down by the darkened window, through which a fresh little breeze from the garden was coming in. It distracted her for a moment from her more serious cares to watch the work going on. She thought how pretty Mab looked, lighting up the poetical darkness, working away so vigorously and pleasantly with only that pucker of anxiety in her white forehead, lest her sitters should move. “Oh, quiet, quiet!” she said, almost breathless. “He must not either go to sleep or wake right up, till I have put them in. Roll the ball to him softly, Cicely, quite softly as if he were a kitten.” Cicely put away the terrible books and knelt down on the carpet and rolled the big ball, which Mab had been moving with her foot towards little dozing Harry, who watched it with eyes glazing over with sleep. The light and the warmth and the stillness were too much for him. Just as the ballarrived at his soft little pink toes he tumbled over all in a heap, with his head upon Charley. Mab gave a cry of vexation. “But never mind, it was not your fault,” she said, to make up for her impatience. And indeed Cicely felt it was rather hard to be blamed.
“After all it does not matter,” said Mab. “I have done enough—but I shall never never get them to look like that again. How pretty children are even when they are ugly! What pictures such things make! how anybody can help making pictures all the day long I can’t imagine. It is only that you will not try.”
“I would try if I had any hope,” said Cicely; “I would do anything. Oh, I wonder if there is anything I could do!”
“Why, of course you can teach,” said Mab, consoling her, “a great deal better than I can. I get impatient; but you shan’t teach; I am the brother and you are the sister, and you are to keep my house.”
“That was all very well,” said Cicely, “so long as there was only us two; but now look,” she cried pointing to the two children lying over one another in thelight, asleep, “there isthem—and papa——”
“They are delightful like that,” cried Mab starting up; “oh, quick, give me that portfolio with the paper! I must try them again. Just look at all those legs and arms!—and yet they are not a bit pretty in real life,” cried Mab in the fervour of her art, making a fine natural distinction.
Cicely handed her all she wanted, and looked on with wondering admiration for a moment; but then she shook her head slightly and sighed. “You live in another world,” she said, “you artists. Oh, Mab, I don’t want to disturb you, but if you knew how unhappy I am——”
“What is the matter? and why should you be more anxious than papa is?” cried Mab busy with her charcoal. “Don’t make yourself unhappy, dear. Things always come right somehow. I think so as well as papa.”
“You don’t mind either of you so long as you have—— Oh, you don’t know how bad things are. Mab! we are in debt.”
Mab stopped her work, appalled, and looked her sister in the face. This was a terrible word to the two girls, who neverhad known what it was to have any money. “In debt!” she said.
“Yes, in debt—do you wonder now that I am wretched? I don’t know even if papa knows; and now he has lost even the little income he had, and we have given up our situations. Oh, Mab! Mab! think a little; what are we to do?”
Mab let her chalk fall out of her hand. She went and knelt down by Cicely’s side, and put one soft cheek against another as if that would do any good. “Oh, how can I tell?” she said with tears in her eyes. “I never was any good to think. Is it much—is it very bad? is there anything we can do?”
Cicely shed a few tears over the butcher’s book which was uppermost. “If we were staying here for ever,” she said, “as we were all foolish enough to think when we came—we might have paid it with a struggle. I should have sent away those two maids, and tried to do everything myself.”
“Everything, Cicely?” Mab was as much appalled at the thought of life without a Betsy, as a fine lady would be denuded of her establishment. The want of a maid-of-all-work represents a dreadful coming down in life, almost morethan a greater apparent loss does. Her countenance fell, the corners of her mouth took a downward curve, and her pride received a crushing blow. Yet if you consider what Betsy was, the loss was not deadly. But as usual it was not the actual but the sentimental view of the case which struck the girls.
“Yes,” said Cicely, with a solemn paleness on her face. She felt the humiliation too. “I shouldn’t minddoingthings,” she said, her voice breaking a little; “it is what people will think. Us, a clergyman’s daughters! But what is the use even of that?” she cried; “it will do no good now. Papa must leave Brentburn, and we have not a shilling, not a penny now, to pay those things with. I think and think—but I cannot tell what we are to do.”
The two clung together in an agony of silence for a moment; how many wringings of the heart have been caused by a little money! and so often those who suffer are not those who are to blame. The ruin that seemed to be involved was unspeakable to the two girls; they did not know what the butcher and the baker might be able to do to them; nor did they know of any way of escape.
“If there was any hope,” said Cicely after a pause, “of staying here—I would go round to them all, and ask them to take pity upon us; to let us begin again paying every week, and wait till we could scrape some money together for what is past. That, I think, would be quite possible, if we were to stay; and we might take pupils——”
“To be sure,” cried Mab, relieved, springing up with the easy hope of a sanguine disposition, “and I might get something to do. In the meantime I can finish my drawing. They have not stirred a bit, look, Cicely. They are like two little white statues. It may be a pity that they were ever born, as Aunt Jane says—but they are delightful models. I almost think,” Mab went on piously, working with bold and rapid fingers, “that in all this that has happened there must have been a special providence for me.”
Cicely looked up with surprise at this speech, but she made no reply. She was too full of thought to see the humour of the suggestion. Mab’s art furnished a delightful way of escape for her out of all perplexity; but Cicely could only go back to the butcher’s book. “What could wedo, I wonder,” she said half to herself, for she did not expect any advice from her sister, “about the living? Very likely they don’t know anything about poor papa. It may be very highminded never to ask for anything,” said poor Cicely, “but then how can we expect that other people will come and thrust bread into our mouths? It is better to ask than to starve. As a matter of fact we cannot starve quietly, because if we are found dead of hunger, there is sure to be a business in the papers, and everything exposed. ‘Death, from starvation, of a clergyman’s family!’ That would make a great deal more fuss than quietly going and asking for something for papa. I am not a bold girl—at least I don’t think so,” she cried, her soft face growing crimson at the thought, “but I would not mind going to any one, if it was the Head of the College, or the Lord Chancellor, or even the Queen!”
“I wonder,” said Mab, “if we met the Queen driving in the forest—as one does sometimes—whether we might not ask her, as people used to do long ago? I don’t think she would mind. Why should she mind? She could not be frightened, or even angry, with two girls.”
Cicely shook her head. “The Queen has nothing to do with Brentburn; and why should she be troubled with us any more than any other lady? No! that sort of thing has to be done in a business way,” said the elder sister seriously. “If I could find out who was the chief man, the Head of the College——”
They had been so much absorbed that they had not heard any sound outside; and at this moment the door was suddenly thrown open, admitting a flood of cross light, and revealing suddenly the figures of the curate and some one who followed him.
“My dears!” began Mr. St. John, surprised.
“Oh, papa! you have woke them up. You have spoiled my light!” cried Mab, in despair.
Cicely started to her feet, letting the account books tumble on the floor; and the two little boys raised a simultaneous howl of sleepy woe. “Harry wants his tea,” they both piped piteously. Mr. Mildmay, whom the curate had met at the gate, looked with a surprise I cannot describe on this extraordinary scene. The white babies in the light had seemed to him at first an exquisite little “composition,” which went to his very heart; and the two other figures, half lit up by the stream of unwelcome light from the door, bewildered the young man. Who were they, or what? One indignant, holding her charcoal with artistic energy; the other, startled, gazing at himself with a hostile sentiment, which he could not understand, in her eyes.
“My love,” said the gentle curate, “you should not make a studio of the drawing-room.” Mr. St. John was not disturbed by the wailing of the little boys, to which, I suppose, he was used. “Cicely, this is Mr. Mildmay, from Oxford, who has come—to look at the parish,” he added, with a gentle sigh. “Let us have tea.”
Why did the girl look at him with that paleness of anger in her face? Mr. Mildmay’s attention was distracted from the drawing and the artist, who, naturally, would have interested him most, by the gleam of hostility, the resentment and defiance in Cicely’s eyes.
“Yes, papa,” she said shortly; and with merely an inclination of her head to acknowledge his introduction to her, she took up the children, Charley in one arm, who was half dressed; Harryunder the other, whose feet were bare, and carried them out of the room. She had divined the first moment she saw him, a dark figure against the light, who he was; and I cannot describe the bitterness that swelled like a flood through poor Cicely’s heart. It was all over, then! There was no further hope, however fantastical, from College or Chancellor, or Queen! Fantastic, indeed, the hope had been; but Cicely was young, and had been more buoyed up by this delusion, even in her despair, than she was aware of. She felt herself fall down, down into unspeakable depths, and the very heart within her seemed to feel the physical pain of it, lying crushed and sore, throbbing all over with sudden suffering. The passionate force of the shock gave her strength, or I do not think she could have carried the two children away as she did, one in each arm, while the stranger looked on amazed. Little Charley, always peaceable, held her fast round the neck, with his head against her cheek; but Harry, whom she carried under her other arm, lifted his head a little from that horizontal position, and kept up his melancholy whine. She was not fond of the children; how could shebe? and I think would gladly have “given them a shake” in the excitement and misery of her feelings. It was so hard upon the girl, that I think she might be forgiven for feeling that thus her young arms were to be hampered all her life; and, meanwhile, she felt that her father and sister would be perfectly amiable to the stranger, who was about to supplant them, and turn them out of their house. This, I am afraid, exasperated Cicely as much as anything else. “These two” would have noarrière pensée;they would be perfectly kind to him, as though he were acting the part of their best friend.
And, indeed, this was how it turned out. When she went back, having disposed of the children, to make the tea, Cicely found Mab and Mr. Mildmay in great amity over the uncompleted drawing. He had been criticising, but he had been praising as well; and Mab was flushed with pleasure and interest. She ran off laughing, to take off her blouse and wash her hands, when Cicely came in, and the elder sister, who felt that her eyes were still red, felt at the same time that her ungenial and constrained reception of him had struck the new-comer.She went and gathered up the account-books from the floor with a sigh. Despair was in her heart. How could she talk and smile as the others had been doing? As for Mr. St. John, he was as pleased with his visitor as if he had brought him something, instead of taking all hope from him. It was rarely the good man saw any but heavy parish people—the rural souls with whom indeed he was friendly, but who had nothing to say to him except about their crops and local gossip. The gossip of Oxford was much sweeter to his ears. He liked to tell of the aspect of things “in my time,” as I suppose we all do; and how different this and that was now-a-days. “I knew him when he was a curate like myself,” he said, with a soft sigh, talking of the dean, that lofty dignitary. “We were at school together, and I used to be the better man;” and this was spoken of the vice-chancellor himself; and he enjoyed and wondered to hear of all their grandeurs. He had met Mildmay on the road, looking through the gate at the rectory, and had addressed him in his suave old-world way as a stranger. Then they had talked of the church, that most natural of subjects between twoclergymen; and then, half reluctantly, half with a sense of compulsion, the stranger had told him who he was. Mr. St. John, though he was poor, had all the hospitable instincts of a prince. He insisted that his new acquaintance should come in and see the house, and hear about everything. He would have given the same invitation, he said afterwards, to any probable new resident in the parish, and why not to the new rector? for in Mr. St. John’s mind there was no gall.
But to describe Mildmay’s feelings when he was suddenly introduced into this novel world is more difficult. He was taken entirely by surprise. He did not know anything about the curate in charge. If he thought of his predecessor at all it was the late rector he thought of, who had died on the shores of the Bay of Naples after a life-long banishment from England. He could understand all that; to go away altogether after art, antiquity, Pompeii, classic editings, and æsthetic delights was perfectly comprehensible to the young Oxford man. But this—what was this? The old man before him, so gentle, so suave, so smiling, his own inferior inposition, for was he not rector elect, while Mr. St. John was but curate? Yet so far above him in years and experience, and all that constitutes superiority among gentlemen of equal breeding. Why was he here as curate? and why didthatgirl look at himself with so much suppressed passion in her eyes? and where had the other been trained to draw so well? and what was the meaning of the two children, so unlike all the others, whom his young enemy had carried off impetuously, instead of ringing the bell for their nurse as any one else would have done? Mildmay felt a thrilling sensation of newness as he sat down at the tea-table, and looked on, an interested spectator at all that was proceeding under his eyes. This in its way was evidentlylife; there was no mistaking the passion that existed underneath this quiet surface, the something more than met the eye. Was it a skeleton in the closet, as the domestic cynic says? But these were not words that seemed to apply to this calm old man and these young girls. It was life, not the quiet of books, and learned talk, and superficial discussion, but a quiet full of possibilities, full of hidden struggle and feeling. Mildmay felt as if he hadcome out of his den in the dark like an owl, and half blinking in the unusual light, was placed as spectator of some strange drama, some episode full of interest, to the character of which he had as yet no clue.
“You are looking at the furniture; it is not mine,” said Mr. St. John, “except the carpets, which, as you say, are much worn. The other things are all Mr. Chester’s. I am expecting every day to hear what is to be done with them. Most likely they will sell it; if you wanted anything——”
Mildmay made a gesture of horror in spite of himself, and Mab laughed.
“You do not think Mr. Mildmay wants all that mahogany, papa? The catafalque there, Cicely and I agreed it was more like a tomb in Westminster Abbey than anything else.”
“What is amiss with it?” said Mr. St. John. “I always understood it was very good. I am told they don’t make things nearly so strong or so substantial now. Poor Chester! He was a man of very fine taste, Mr. Mildmay. But why do you laugh, my dear? That was why he was so fond of Italy; shattered health, you know. Those men who are so fondof art are generally excitable; a little thing has an effect upon them. Cicely, give Mr. Mildmay some tea.”
“Yes, papa,” said Cicely; and gave the stranger a look which made him think his tea might be poisoned. Mr. St. John went maundering kindly—
“You said you were going to London, and had left your things at the station? Why shouldn’t you stay all night here instead? There are a great many things that I would like to show you—the church and the school for instance, and I should like to take you to see some of my poor people. Cicely, we can give Mr. Mildmay a bed?”
Cicely looked up at her father quickly. There was a half-entreaty, a pathetic wonder, mingled with anger, in her eyes. “How can you?” she seemed to say. Then she answered hesitating, “There are plenty of beds, but I don’t know if they are aired—if they are comfortable.” Strangely enough, the more reluctant she was to have him, the more inclined Mildmay felt to stay.
“It is very kind,” he said. “I cannot think how it is possible that I can have had the assurance to thrust myself upon you like this. I am afraid Miss St.John thinks it would be very troublesome.”
“Troublesome! There is no trouble at all. Cicely is not so foolish and inhospitable,” said the curate in full current of his open-heartedness. “My dear, it is fine warm weather, and Mr. Mildmay is a young man. He is not afraid of rheumatics like the old people in the parish. He and I will walk up to the station after tea and fetch his bag, and I will show him several things on the way. You will tell Betsy?”
“I will see that everything is ready,” she said, with so much more meaning in the words than was natural or necessary. Her eyes were a little dilated with crying, and slightly red at the edges; there was surprise and remonstrance in them, and she did not condescend by a single word to second her father’s invitation. This settled the question. Had she asked him, Mildmay might have been indifferent; but as she did not ask him, he made up his mind it was quite necessary he should stay.
“I shall perhaps see you finish that group,” he said to Mab, who was interested and amused by the novelty of his appearance, as her father was.
“Ah, but I shall never get them into the samepose! If papa had not come in so suddenly, waking them—besides spoiling my light——”
“I am afraid it was partly my fault,” he said; “but I did not expect to be brought into the presence of an artist.”
The colour rose on Mab’s cheeks. “Please don’t flatter me,” she said. “I want so much to be an artist. Shall I ever be able to do anything, do you think? for you seem to know.”
Cicely looked at her sister, her eyes sparkling with offence and reproach. “The people who know you best think so,” she said. “It is not right to ask a stranger. How can Mr. Mildmay know?”
How hostile she was! between her smiling pretty sister, who was ready to talk as much as he pleased, and her kind old suave father, what a rugged implacable young woman! What could he have done to her? Mildmay felt as much aggrieved when she called him a stranger, as if it had been a downright injury. “I know a little about art,” he said quite humbly; “enough to perceive that your sister has a great deal of real talent, Miss St. John.”
“Yes, yes, she is clever,” said the curate. “I hope it will be of some use to you, my poor Mab. Now, Mr. Mildmay, let us go. I want to show you the rectory fields, and the real village, which is some way off. You must not think this cluster of houses is Brentburn. It is pleasant walking in the cool of the afternoon, and, my dears, a walk will be good for you too. Come down by the common and meet us. Cicely,” he added in a half-whisper, standing aside to let his guest pass, “my dear, you are not so polite as I hoped. I wish you would look more kind and more pleased.”
“But I am not pleased. Oh, papa, why did you ask him? I cannot bear the sight of him,” she cried.
“My love!” said the astonished curate. He was so much surprised by this outburst that he did not know how to reply. Then he put his hand softly upon her forehead, and looked into her eyes. “I see what it is. You are a little feverish: you are not well. It is the hot weather, no doubt,” he said.
“Oh, papa! I am well enough; but I am very wretched. Let me speak to you when we have got rid of this man—before you go to bed.”
“Surely, my dear,” he said soothingly, and kissed her forehead. “I should advise you to lie down for a little, and keep quiet, and the fever may pass off. But I must not keep my guest waiting,” and with this Mr. St. John went away, talking cheerfully in the hall to his companion as he rejoined him. “It is trying weather,” they heard him saying. “I stopped behind for a moment to speak to my eldest daughter. I do not think she is well.”
“Will papa discuss your health with this new man?” cried Mab. “How funny he is! But don’t be so savage, Ciss. If it must be, let us make the best of it. Mr. Mildmay is very nice to talk to. Let us take whatever amusement is thrown in our way.”
“Oh, amusement!” said Cicely. “You are like papa; you don’t think what is involved. This is an end of everything. What are we to do? Where are we to go to? His name is not Mildmay; it is Ruin and Destruction. It is all I can do not to burst out upon him and ask him, oh! how has he the heart—how has he the heart to come here!”
“If you did I think he would not come,” said Mab calmly. “What a pitypeople cannot say exactly what they think. But if he gave it up, there would be some one else. We must make up our minds to it. And how beautifully poor papa behaves through it all.”
“I wish he were not so beautiful!” cried Cicely in her despair, almost grinding her white teeth. “I think you will drive me mad between you—papa and you.”
MR.MILDMAYhad a very pleasant walk. He went through Brentburn proper, which was a mile from the church on the rich woodland side of the parish, an ordinary little village, a mixture of old picturesque Berkshire cottages, with high sloping roofs and aged harmonious mossy brick walls, and very new square houses in the bilious brick of modern use—mean and clean and angular. The cottages, with their wild old gardens and mossed apple-trees delighted him; but the curate shook his head, “They will be the curse of your life,” he said solemnly, at which the young Oxford man was disposed to laugh.
A few people were standing about their doors enjoying the cool evening, at whomthe new rector looked with curiosity. They were very commonplace people, with the set hard faces so common among the rural poor, half caused by exposure to the open air, and half by the dull routine in which their life is spent. Mildmay looked at them wistfully. Were they the kind of people among whom he could find the life he sought? A few of the women were gossiping, the men stared blankly at him as he passed, saluting the curate gruffly; and evidently the wag among them made some rough joke, received with loud laughter, upon the two blackcoats.
“Yes,” said the curate mildly, “that fellow Joe Endley is one of the worst in the parish. It was at us, no doubt, they were laughing. Anything above their own level, except money, they don’t understand; and they know I have no money. Good evening, Mr. Wilkins. What a sweet evening it is!”
“Good evening, sir,” said the grocer, coming, with his apron round him from his shop-door. “I thought perhaps as you was comin’ to me, sir, along o’ the letter I sent you.”
“I did not get any letter,” said Mr. St. John, looking at the grocer in a helpless,pitiful way, which his companion remarked wonderingly. The curate seemed to shrink somehow: a painful look came upon his face.
“I sent up this afternoon with my cart,” said Wilkins, “to say as, if it was quite convenient——”
“My daughter will see to it—my daughter will see to it,” said the curate anxiously. “I am occupied at present, as you perceive, and in a hurry. She will see you, or I, to-morrow.”
And he shuffled on through the dust of the highroad, quickening his pace. His step had been the long, firm, manly step of a man still young, till they met with this interruption. But poor Mr. St. John fell into a shuffle when he met the grocer. His cheek got a hectic flush; he shrank visibly; his knees and his elbows grew prominent. He did not speak again till they had got beyond the village. Then he drew breath, and his natural outline came slowly back. “You will find much hardness among the people,” he said; “Heaven forbid that I should blame them, poor souls: they live hardly, and have hardness to bear from others; but when any question arises between them and one who has unfortunately the niceties—the feelings—that we are brought up to——” (the curate stopped); “and I never was used to it,” he said, as if to himself, in a low voice.
What did it all mean? the new rector said to himself. I think it was easy enough to divine, for my part; but then the rector was young, and had always been well off, and it did not occur to him that a grocer, simply as grocer, could have any power over a clergyman; more and more he felt convinced that some drama, some domestic tragedy, must be connected with the St. Johns, and he felt more and more eager to find it out. They went to the station, and sent a boy to the rectory with Mildmay’s portmanteau, and then they strayed home by the common, across which the setting sun threw its very last slanting arrow of gold.
“This is delightful!” said Mildmay. “What freedom! what breadth of atmosphere! One feels oneself on the moors, in the great, ample world, not shut in by walls and houses.”
“No, there is little of these,” said the curate; “and it is very healthy, I have always understood: the common is what my girls love. But I don’t see them coming.” He arched his hand over hiseyes as a defence against the light, as he looked along the road for his daughters. Mr. St. John had quite recovered himself. I don’t think that even the name of Wilkins would have discouraged him now. In the warm and balmy air he took off his hat, holding up his venerable bare head to the sky. It was a head which might have served for that of an old saint. His white hair was still thick and abundant, his eyes full of soft light, his expression tranquil as the evening. “I have come here in many troubles,” he said, “and I have always been refreshed. I don’t pretend to know much about art, Mr. Mildmay, but nature is always soothing. Greenness cools the eyes whether it is study or tears that have fevered them. But I wonder what has become of the girls.”
Mildmay was charmed by the meditative turn his companion’s remarks had taken, but the question about the girls embarrassed him.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that my intrusion has perhaps given Miss St. John some trouble.”
“No; there is the servant, you know, a very good sort of girl, and Cicely is like her dear mother—never taken bysurprise. If you are here as long as I have been you will know how pleasant it is to see a new face. We country folks rust: we fall into a fixed routine. I myself, see, was about to take this little byway unconsciously, a path I often take, forgetting there was any one with me——”
The curate looked wistfully along the thread of path; it had been worn by his own feet, and he seldom concluded his evening walk otherwise. Mildmay followed the narrow line with his eyes.
“It leads to the churchyard,” he said. “I like a country churchyard. May we go there before we go in? What a pity the church is so new! and this part of Berkshire is rich in old churches, I understand?”
“It is in good repair, and much more wholesome than the old ones,” said Mr. St. John. “They may be more picturesque. Here you can see into the rectory garden, the ground slopes so much; the church is very much higher than the common. It used to be sweet to me, looking back at the lights in the girls’ rooms, when I stood——there they are on the lawn now, Mr. Mildmay. They have not gone out, after all.”
Mildmay, looking down from the churchyard path, felt that it was dishonourable to spy upon the two girls unaware of his scrutiny, whom he could just see within the wall of the rectory garden; but he could not help feeling that this was more and more like a drama which was being played before him. He followed Mr. St. John along the narrow path to the little white stile which admitted to the churchyard. The curate ceased his tranquil talk as they entered that inclosure. He turned mechanically as it seemed, to the left hand, and went round to a white cross upon a grave turned towards the common. It was of common stone, grey with years. The curate took off his hat again, and stood by it quite simply and calmly.
“It used to be sweet to me, standing here, to see the lights in the girls’ rooms,” he said once more. The soft tranquillity of his tone suited the still twilight, the pensive silent plain. It was too still for sorrow, nor was there any touch of unhappiness in the gentle voice. Young Mildmay uncovered too, and stood wondering, reverent, with a swell of sympathy in his heart. Some men would have felt with anguish the unspeakableseparation between the mother under the dews and the twinkle of the lights in her children’s windows; but Mr. St. John was not of that mind. Yet, somehow, to have this stranger here made his loss seem fresher to him. “Cicely is very like her mother,” he said, and touched the cross softly with his hand as if caressing it, and turned away. Mr. Mildmay could see that there were two paths up the mound to the white gate, and the meaning of them struck him vividly—one was that by which they had just come from the common, the other led down straight to the rectory. His heart was more touched than I can say, by the gentle fidelity, consoled and calm, yet always tender, which had worn that double line through the grass.
Mr. St. John, however, made a hesitating pause at a corner before he took this second way home. “My other poor wife, poor Mrs. St. John, lies there; but that I can show you to-morrow,” he said, in his gentle unchanged voice, and quietly went on to the gate, leading the way. “Supper will be ready,” the curate continued, when they emerged again upon the turf. “We live a very simple primitive life here; our meals are notarranged quite as yours are, but it comes to the same thing. In short, whatever seeming differences there are, all ways of living come to much the same thing.”
Did they so? Mr. St. John’s meaning was of the simplest. He meant that whether you called your latest meal dinner or supper did not matter much; but his companion gave it a broader sense. With a jar of laughter in his mind that broke up the reverential respect of the previous moment, he followed his simple host into the house, which by-and-by was to be his own house. Poor Mrs. St. John, who was not the mother of the girls; whose grave could be shown to-morrow; for whose sake these paths had not been worn across the grass; the stranger gave her her little meed of human notice in that smothered laugh. Poor Miss Brown!
The supper was homely enough—cold meat and salad, and bread and cheese and jam—and would have been cheerful and pleasant, Mr. Mildmay thought, but for the absorbed looks of that elder daughter, who was still somewhat unfriendly to him. He went upstairs to his room, where a large mahogany four-post bed, with heavy moreen hangings, awaitedhim, before the night was very far advanced. When he had been there for a short time, he saw that his door was not shut, and went to close it. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of Cicely going downstairs. She had retired some time before he did, so that her reappearance struck him all the more; and she was quite unconscious that he saw her. She carried a candle in one hand, and a pile of tradesmen’s books in the other. She was pale, her look fixed, her nostrils a little dilated, like some one going to a painful task, he thought. As she moved down the dark staircase, a speck of light, with her candle shining on the whiteness of her face and dress, the walls, by which she flitted, looked more and more like the scenery of a drama to the young man. If they only would have opened, as in therealtheatre, and shown him where she was going, what she was about to do! But this was very mean curiosity on Mr. Mildmay’s part. He shut his door humbly, that she might not be disturbed by the sound, and after a while went meekly to bed, trying to say to himself that he had no right to pry into the business of these good people, who had been so kind to him; though, indeed,she had not been kind to him, he reflected, by way of lessening his own sense of guilt. He heard subdued voices below for some time after, and wished more than ever that the scenery would open, and reveal this scene to him; but the substantial walls stood fast, and the moreen curtains hung grimly about him, shutting out everything. There was no compromise about the furniture at the rectory; the pillared bedposts stood square, and stern, and strong, till poor Mildmay, dozing within them in the warm August night, thought them Samson’s pillars in the house of Dagon, or the pillars of the earth.
Cicely went down to her father very resolute with her books. She had intended to say very little to him, but he had exasperated her, and she felt that she could not let him off. But her courage sank a little when she got into the study, and saw his white head in the light of the solitary candle. There were two candles on the table, but faithful to an old frugal habit, Mr. St. John had put out one of them when his guest left him. The room was good-sized, and full of huge mahogany bookcases; and as the table was at one end ofit, there is no telling how full of gloom it was. One of the windows was open, and a great solid piece of darkness seemed to have taken its place, and to be pouring in. Mr. St. John was looking over some old sermons, bending his head over the papers, with spectacles upon his nose, which he took off when Cicely came in. He did not usually sit up so long, and he was rather aggrieved at the late interview she had asked for. He did not like to be disturbed out of his usual way, and he felt that she was going to speak to him about Wilkins, the most painful subject which could be suggested. Cicely, too, when he raised his head, and took off his spectacles, found the interview a great deal more difficult than in her excited feelings she had supposed.
“Well, my dear,” he said gently; “you wanted to speak to me.” He gave a little shiver when he saw the books in her hand.
“Yes, papa,” she said, laying them down on the table; and then there was a pause. The soft night air came in, and crept wistfully about the room, moving the curtains. When it approaches midnight, even in August, there is always something chill and mournful in the night wind.
“I wanted to speak to you,” said Cicely, catching her breath a little; “it was about the books. I don’t know if you have looked at them lately. Oh, papa! do you know that we are—in debt? I don’t know how to say it—a great deal in debt!”
“Not a great deal, my dear,” he said faintly; “something, I know. Wilkins spoke to me to-day—almost before Mr. Mildmay.”
“It is not Wilkins alone,” said Cicely solemnly; “it is everybody. The butcher, too; and, oh! so many little people. How are they ever to be paid? When I looked over the books to-day, not knowing—Oh! do you know how it has happened? Can they be cheating? It is my only hope.”
“My dear,” said the curate, faltering, “better that one should have done wrong than that a great many should have done wrong. Poor Mrs. St. John—nay, I should say both of us, Cicely; for I was also to blame. We were not like your mother, my dear; it all came natural to your mother; but she, or rather we——” Mr. St. John’s voice sank into an indistinct confusion. He was too good to blame the poor woman whowas dead, and he did not know how to meet the eyes thus shining upon him, youthful, inexorable, of Hester’s child. But even Cicely was moved by her father’s wistful looks, and the humility of his tone.
“If only one could see any way of paying them,” she said; “if even we had been staying here! I had a plan, and we might have done it. And it brings it all so near, and makes it so certain, to see this man.”
“My love,” said the curate remonstrating, “we knew that some one must come. It is not his fault. Why should we be unkind to him?”
“Unkind! Oh papa!” cried Cicely in her exasperation, “what had we to do with him? It was not our business to feast him and pet him. But that is nothing,” she said, trembling with excitement; “I will not blame you, papa, for that or anything, if only you will say now what you are going to do, or where you think we can go, or what I must say to these poor people. We cannot stay here and starve, or till they put us in prison—only tell me what we must do.”
“How can I tell you, Cicely,” saidthe curate, “when I do not know myself? I must advertise or something,” he said helplessly. “I am old, my dear. Few people want a curate of my age; I suppose it almost looks like a stigma on a man to be a curate at my age.”
“Papa!” Cicely stopped short in what she was going to say, and looked at him with strained and anxious eyes. She had meant to assail him for still being a curate, but his self-condemnation closed the girl’s lips, or rather roused her in defence.
“Yes,” said Mr. St. John, “you may say I ought to have thought of that sooner; but when things go on for a long time one asks one’s self why should not they go on for ever? ‘He said, There will be peace in my time.’ That was selfish of Hezekiah, my dear, very selfish, when you come to think of it. But I dare say it never seemed so to him, and neither did it to me.”
Cicely was utterly overpowered by this; her anger and impatience died out of her, and compunction and remorse rose in her heart. “That is not the right way to look at it,” she said. “It is a shame that a man like you should only be a curate—oh, a shame to theChurch and every one! Mr. Chester, who never was here, never did anything, what right had he to be the rector?—and this other person——” It was so necessary for poor Cicely in the disturbance of her mind to be angry with some one that naturally her wrath grew wild and bitter when she was free to pour it out upon strangers.
“Hush! hush! my dear,” said the curate, with a half smile at her vehemence; for indeed he was deeply relieved to have the tide of indignation turned away from himself.
“Why should I hush, papa? It is your own college, you say; but they never take the trouble to ask who is at Brentburn, who has been taking the duty, who has looked after the people when the rector has been so long away. When people have the patronage of a parish in their hands, ought they not to know about it? And how did they dare, how did they venture, to give it to anybody but you?”
“You don’t understand,” said Mr. St. John. “The livings are given to the Fellows, Cicely, to people who have distinguished themselves. The dons have no right to alienate a living, as it were, to put it away from those who havea right to it, and give it to one like me.”
“What have they distinguished themselves in, papa? In Latin and Greek—which will do a great deal in the parish, don’t you think? whereas you have distinguished yourself in Brentburn——”
“I have not done very much, my dear,” said the curate, shaking his head.
“You have done all that has been done, papa; what are those college people worth? This fine gentleman!” cried Cicely, with scorn. (I wonder poor Mildmay did not feel himself shrink even within his four pillars and moreen curtains.) “He knows about art if you please, and shudders at the sight of Mr. Chester’s mahogany. Poor old things,” the girl cried, turning round to look at the old bookcases with her eyes streaming, “I only know how fond I am of them now!”
I cannot tell how thankful her father was that the conversation had taken this turn.Hetoo felt tenderly towards the old unlovely walls which had sheltered him so long, and in the circumstances he felt it no harm to speak a little more strongly than he felt. He looked round upon the ghostly room so dark in all itscorners. “A great many things have happened to us here,” he said; “this was the first room we sat in, your mother and I. What changes it has seen! I don’t know how to make up my mind to leave it.”
This brought back the girl to the original question. “But now,” she said, drying her eyes, “there is no choice—we must leave it. I suppose that is what this Mr. Mildmay has really come about? He will give you some little time, I suppose. But papa, papa!” said Cicely, with a stamp of her foot to emphasize her words, “don’t you see youmustdecide something—make up your mind to something? Hoping on till the last day will do no good to any one. And to think we should be so deep in debt! Oh, papa, what are we to do?”