"And you enjoyed it?"

"Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of child's play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."

"And what are you going to do now?"

"Go down to the city and see what Darneil's cellars are like before I store my wine in them. It won't take long. Er!—I say, Cack—Newhaven?"

"Well?"

"Ought I to—how about my calling on Miss—? I never caught her name."

"Miss West, the heiress?"

"Yes. Little attention on my part."

"Did she ask you to call?"

"No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like it."

"Well, then, go and be—snubbed."

"I don't want snubbing. A little thing like me wants encouragement."

"A good many other people are on the lookout for encouragement in that quarter."

"That settles it," said Dick; "I'll go at once. I've got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I'll take Miss—"

"West. West. West."

"Miss West on the way."

"My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking. Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."

"Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester? She is a kind of cousin of mine."

"Miss Gresley has gone to live in the country a few miles from us, with her clergyman brother."

"James Gresley. I remember him. He's a bad egg."

"Now, Dick, are you in earnest, or are you talking nonsense about Miss West?"

"I'm in earnest." He looked it.

"Then, for heaven's sake, don't put your foot in it by calling. My wife has taken a violent fancy to Miss West. I don't think it is returned, but that is a detail. If you want to give her a chance, leave it to me."

"I know what that means. You married men are mere sieves. You'll run straight home with your tongue out and tell Lady Newhaven that I want to marry Miss—I can't clinch her name—and then she'll tell her when they are combing their back hair. And then if I find, later on, I don't like her and step off the grass, I shall have behaved like a perfect brute, and all that sort of thing. A man I knew out in Melbourne told me that by the time he'd taken a little notice of a likely girl, he'd gone too far to go back, and he had to marry her."

"You need not be so coy. I don't intend to mention the subject to my wife. Besides, I don't suppose Miss West will look at you. You're a wretched match for her. With her money she might marry a brewery or a peerage."

"I'll put myself in focus anyhow," said Dick. "Hang it all! if you could get a woman to marry you, there is hope for everybody. I don't expect it will be as easy as falling off a log. But if she is what I take her to be I shall go for all I'm worth."

Some one else was going for all he was worth. Lord Newhaven rode early, and he had frequently seen Rachel and Hugh riding together at foot's pace. Possibly his offer to help Dick was partly prompted by an unconscious desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.

Dick, whose worst enemy could not accuse him of diffidence, proved a solid spoke but for a few days only. Rachel suddenly broke all her engagements and left London.



CHAPTER IX

"Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'eglise."

There is a little stream which flows through Middleshire which seems to reflect the spirit of that quiet county, so slow is its course, so narrow is its width. Even the roads don't take the trouble to bridge it. They merely hump themselves slightly when they feel it tickling underneath them, and go on, vouchsafing no further notice of its existence. Yet the Drone is a local celebrity in Middleshire, and, like most local celebrities, is unknown elsewhere. The squire's sons have lost immense trout in the Drone as it saunters through their lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the best trout-rod in England. Middleshire bristles with the "best shots in England" and the "best preachers in England" and the cleverest men in England. The apathetic mother-country knows, according to Middleshire, "but little of her greatest men." At present she associates her loyal county with a breed of small black pigs.

Through this favored locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns again, as if loath to leave the rich, low meadow-lands and clustering villages upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the grave-stones of the little church-yard. On one occasion, after repeated prayers for rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar's garden, and vindictively carried away his bee-hives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.

Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms, the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on saints' days and G.F.S. gatherings.

About eight o'clock on this particular morning in July the Drone could hear, if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high, unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley and to a young thrush, which was hurling its person, like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his grave-clothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river's edge and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other Scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.

The service ended at last, and, after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it, beak agape, into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the church-yard—with its one melancholy Scotch fir, embarrassed by its trouser of ivy—to the little gate which led into their garden.

They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He, at least, evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long, thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set-up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses—the maltreated, the travestied name of "gentleman."

None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value—the right outside.

To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good-breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley's suspicious eye and thin, compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it as a hunted hare against a stone-wall. He was unmistakably of those who only see side issues.

Mrs. Gresley took her husband's arm as he closed the gate. She was still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a clergyman's wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always wearing out old finery. Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr. Gresley.

The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden, looking fondly at their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small, slight figure appeared on the terrace.

"James," said Mrs. Gresley, with decision, "it is your duty to speak to Hester about attending early service. If she can go out in the garden she can come to church."

"I have spoken to her once," said Mr. Gresley, frowning, "and though I put it before her very plainly she showed great obstinacy. Fond as I am of Hester, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that she has an arrogant and callous nature. But we must remember, my love, that Aunt Susan was most lax in all her views, and we must make allowance for Hester, who lived with her till last year. It is only natural that Hester, bred up from childhood in that worldly circle—dinner-parties all through Lent, and Sunday luncheons—should have fallen through want of solid church teaching into freethinking and ideas of her own upon religion."

Mr. Gresley's voice was of that peculiar metallic note which carries farther than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices. Hester's little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley's study on the ground floor, but, nevertheless, she often heard confused, anxious parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note which knew no cessation until objection or opposition ceased. As she came towards them, she heard with perfect distinctness what he was saying, but it did not trouble her. Hester was gifted with imagination, and imagination does not find it difficult to read by the shorthand of the expressions and habitual opinions and repressions of others what they occasionally say at full length, and to which they fondly believe they are giving utterance for the first time. Mr. Gresley had said all this many times already by his manner, and it had by its vain repetitions lost its novelty. Mr. Gresley was fortunately not aware of this, for unimaginative persons believe themselves to be sealed books, as hermetically sealed as the characters of others are to themselves.

Hester was very like her brother. She had the same nose, slightly too long for her small face, the same short upper lip and light hair, only her brother's was straight and hers was crimped, as wet sand is crimped by a placid outgoing sea. That she had an equally strong will was obvious. But there the likeness ended. Hester's figure was slight, and she stooped a little. Hester's eyes were very gentle, very appealing under their long, curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley's never were, gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of them sometimes, that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its very soul and all its best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester showed her age in her eyes. She was seven-and-twenty, and appeared many years younger until she looked at you.

Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon, adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.

Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dress-maker informed her had "to be kept down," made a mental note for the hundredth time that Hester "laced in."

Hester gave that impression of "finish" and sharpness of edge so rarely found among the blurred, vague outlines of English women. There was nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her delicate, pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender feet as she walked, her quick, alert movements—everything about her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than the succes fou in black and white of the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.

"Good-morning," she said, turning back with them to the house. "Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet. And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it. Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to temptation."

Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in the afternoon.

"My dear Hester," Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalized, "I am sure you won't mind my saying so, but James has not seen his paper yet."

"I have noticed he never by any chance looks at it till the evening, and you always say you never read it," said Hester, deep in a political crisis.

"That is his rule, and a very good rule it is; but he naturally likes to be the first to look at it," said Mrs. Gresley, with a great exercise of patience. She had heard Hester was clever, but she found her very stupid. Everything had to be explained to her.

Her tone recalled Hester from the Indian tribal rising and the speech of the Prime Minister to the realities of life. It was fortunate for her that she was quick-witted. These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for her. She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters. She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her entire intercourse with the Gresleys and never offended in that manner again.

On this particular morning she waited decorously beside her brother as he opened the bag and dealt out the contents into three heaps. Hester pounced on hers and subsided into her chair at the breakfast-table.

"I wonder," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at Hester's pile of letters over the top of her share of the morning's correspondence—namely, a list of Pryce Jones—"that you care to write so many letters, Hester. I am sure I never did such a thing when I was a girl. I should have regarded it as a waste of time."

"Ha!" said Mr. Gresley, in a gratified tone, opening a little roll. "What have we here? Proofs! My paper upon 'Modern Dissent.' I told Edwards I would not allow him to put it in his next number of the Southminster Advertiser until I had glanced at it in print. I don't know when I shall find time to correct it. I shall be out all the afternoon at the chapter meeting."

He looked at Hester. She had laid down her letters and was taking a cup of coffee from Mrs. Gresley. She evidently had not heard her brother's remark.

"You and I must lay our heads together over this, Hester," he said, holding up with some pride a long slip of proof. "It will be just in your line. You might run it over after breakfast," he continued, in high good-humor, "and put in the stops and grammar and spelling—you're more up in that sort of thing than I am—and then we will go through it together."

Hester was quite accustomed, when her help was asked as to a composition, to receive as a reason for the request the extremely gratifying assurance that she was "good" at punctuation and spelling. It gave the would-be author a comfortable feeling that, after all, he was only asking advice on the crudest technical matters on which Hester's superiority could be admitted without a loss of masculine self-respect.

"I would rather not tamper with punctuation and spelling," said Hester, dryly. "I am so shaky on both myself. You had better ask the school-master. He knows all that sort of ABC better than I do."

Mr. Gresley frowned, and looked suspiciously at her. He wanted Hester's opinion, of which she was perfectly aware. But she intended that he should ask for it.

Mrs. Gresley, behind the coffee-pot, felt that she was overlooked. She had helped Mr. Gresley with his numerous literary efforts until Hester came.

"I saw you correcting some one's manuscript last week," he said. "You were at it all day in the hay-field."

"That was different. I was asked to criticise the style and composition."

"Oh, well," said Mr. Gresley, "don't let us split hairs. I don't want an argument about it. If you'll come into my study at ten o'clock I'll get it off my hands at once."

"With pleasure," said Hester, looking at him with rueful admiration. She had tried a hundred times to get the better of him in conversation, but she had not yet succeeded.

"I have a message for you," continued Mr. Gresley, in restored good-humor. "Mrs. Loftus writes that she is returning to Wilderleigh at the end of the week, and that the sale of work may take place in the Wilderleigh gardens at the end of August. And—let me see, I will read what she says:

"'I am not unmindful of our conversation on the duty of those who go annually to London to bring a spiritual influence to bear on society'—("I impressed that upon her before she went up.")—'We had a most interesting dinner-party last week, nearly all celebrated and gifted persons, and the conversation was really beyond anything I can describe to you. I thought my poor brain would turn. I was quite afraid to join in. But Mr. Harvey—the great Mr. Harvey—told me afterwards I was at my best. One lady, Miss Barker, who has done so much for the East End, is coming down to Wilderleigh shortly for a rest. I am anxious you should talk to her. She says she has doubts, and she is tired of the Bible. By the way, please tell Hester, with my love, that she and Mr. Harvey attacked The Idyll of East London, and showed it up entirely, and poor little me had to stand up for her against them all."

"She would never do that," said Hester, tranquilly. "She might perhaps have said, 'The writer is a friend of mine. I must stand up for her.' But she would never have gone beyond saying it to doing it."

"Hester," exclaimed Mrs. Gresley, feeling that she might just as well have remained a spinster if she was to be thus ignored in her own house, "I can't think how you can allow your jealousy of Sybell Loftus, for I can attribute it to nothing else, to carry you so far."

"Perhaps it had better carry me into the garden," said Hester, rising with the others. "You must forgive me if I spoke irritably. I have a racking headache."

"She looks ill," said her brother, following Hester's figure with affectionate solicitude, as she passed the window a moment later.

"And yet she does next to nothing," said the hard-worked little wife, intercepting the glance. "I always thought she wrote her stories in the morning. I know she is never about if the Pratt girls call to see her before luncheon. Yet when I ran up to her room yesterday morning to ask her to take Mary's music, as Fraeulein had the headache"—(Mrs. Gresley always spoke of "the headache" and "the toothache")—"she was lying on her bed doing nothing at all."

"She is very unaccountable," said Mr. Gresley. "Still, I can make allowance for the artistic temperament. I share it to a certain degree. Poor Hester. She is a spoiled child."

"Indeed, James, she is. And she has an enormous opinion of herself. For my part, I think the Bishop is to blame for making so much of her. Have you never noticed how different she is when he is here, so gay and talkative, and when we are alone she hardly says a word for days together, except to the children?"

"She talked more when she first came," said Mr. Gresley. "But when she found I made it a rule to discourage argument"—(by argument Mr. Gresley meant difference of opinion)—"she seemed gradually to lose interest in conversation. Yet I have heard the Bishop speak of her as a brilliant talker. And Lord Newhaven asked me last spring how I liked having a celebrity for a sister. A celebrity! Why, half the people in Middleshire don't even know of Hester's existence." And the author of "Modern Dissent" frowned.

"That was a hit at you, my dear," said Mrs. Gresley. "It was just after your pamphlet on 'Schism' appeared. Lord Newhaven always says something disagreeable. Don't you remember, when you were thinking of exchanging Warpington for that Scotch living, he said he knew you would not do it because with your feeling towards Dissent you would never go to a country where you would be a Dissenter yourself?"

"How about the proofs?" said Hester, through the open window. "I am ready when you are, James."



CHAPTER X

Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother. —EMERSON.

"Of course, Hester," said Mr. Gresley, leading the way to his study and speaking in his lesson-for-the-day voice, "I don't pretend to write"—("They always say that," thought Hester)—"I have not sufficient leisure to devote to the subject to insure becoming a successful author. And even if I had I am afraid I should not be willing to sell my soul to obtain popularity, for that is what it comes to in these days. The public must be pandered to. It must be amused. The public likes smooth things, and the great truths—the only things I should care to write about—are not smooth, far from it."

"No, indeed."

"This little paper on 'Dissent,' which I propose to publish in pamphlet form after its appearance as a serial—it will run to two numbers in the Southminster Advertiser—was merely thrown off in a few days when I had influenza, and could not attend to my usual work."

"It must be very difficult to work in illness," said Hester, who had evidently made a vow during her brief sojourn in the garden, and was now obviously going through that process which the society of some of our fellow-creatures makes as necessary as it is fatiguing—namely, that of thinking beforehand what we are going to say.

Mr. Gresley liked Hester immensely when she had freshly ironed herself flat under one of these resolutions. He was wont to say that no one was pleasanter than Hester when she was reasonable, or made more suitable remarks. He perceived with joy that she was reasonable now, and the brother and sister sat down close together at the writing-table with the printed sheets between them.

"I will read aloud," said Mr. Gresley, "and you can follow me, and stop me if you think—er—the sense is not quite clear."

"I see."

The two long noses, the larger freckled one surmounted by a pince-nez, the other slightly pink, as if it had absorbed the tint of the blotting-paper over which it was so continually poised, both bent over the sheets.

Through the thin wall which separated the school-room from the study came the sound of Mary's scales. Mary was by nature a child of wrath, as far as music was concerned, and Fraeulein—anxious, musical Fraeulein—was strenuously endeavoring to impart to her pupil the rudiments of what was her chief joy in life.

"'Modern Dissent,'" read aloud Mr. Gresley, "by Veritas."

"Veritas!" repeated Hester. Astonishment jerked the word out of her before she was aware. She pulled herself hastily together.

"Certainly," said the author, looking at his sister through his glasses, which made the pupils of his eyes look as large as the striped marbles on which Mary and Regie spent their pennies. "Veritas," he continued, "is a Latin word signifying Truth."

"So I fancied. But is not Truth rather a large name to adopt as a nom de guerre? Might it not seem rather—er—in a layman it would appear arrogant."

"I am not a layman, and I do not pretend to write on subjects of which I am ignorant," said Mr. Gresley, with dignity. "This is not a work of fiction. I don't imagine this, or fancy that, or invent the other. I merely place before the public, forcibly, and in a novel manner, a few great truths."

Mary was doing her finger exercises. C, C, C, with the thumb; D, D, D, with the first finger, Fraeulein was repeating. "Won! two! free! Won! two! free!" with a new intonation of cheerful patience at each repetition.

"Ah!" said Hester. "A few great truths. Then the name must be 'Veritas.' You would not reconsider it?"

"Certainly not," said Mr. Gresley, his eye challenging hers. "It is the name I am known by as the author of 'Schism.'"

"I had momentarily forgotten 'Schism,'" said Hester, dropping her glance.

"I went through a good deal of obloquy about 'Schism,'" said Mr. Gresley with pride, "and I should not wonder if 'Modern Dissent' caused quite a ferment in Middleshire. If it does, I am willing to bear a little spite and ill-will. All history shows that truth is met at first by opposition. Half the country clergy round here are asleep. Good men, but lax. They want waking up. I said as much to the Bishop the other day, and he agreed with me; for he said that if some of his younger clergy could be waked up to a sense of their own arrogance and narrowness he would hold a public thanksgiving in the cathedral. But he added that he thought nothing short of the last trump would do it."

"I agree with him," said Hester, having first said the sentence to herself, and having decided it was innocuous.

The climax of the music lesson had arrived. "The Blue Bells of Scotland"—the sole Clavier Stueck which Mary's rigidly extended little starfishes of hands could wrench out of the school-room piano—was at its third bar.

"Well," said Mr. Gresley, refreshed by a cheering retrospect. "Now for 'Modern Dissent.'"

A strenuous hour ensued.

Hester was torn in different directions, at one moment tempted to allow the most flagrant passages to pass unchallenged rather than attempt the physical impossibility of interrupting the reader only to be drawn into a dispute with him, at another burning to save her brother from the consequences which wait on certain utterances.

Presently Mr. Gresley's eloquence, after various tortuous and unnatural windings, swept in the direction of a pun, as a carriage after following the artificial curves of a deceptive approach nears a villa. Hester had seen the pun coming for half a page, as we see the villa through the trees long before we are allowed to approach it, and she longed to save her brother from what was in her eyes as much a degradation as a tu quoque. But she remembered in time that the Gresleys considered she had no sense of humor, and she decided to let it pass. Mr. Gresley enjoyed it so much himself that he hardly noticed her fixed countenance.

Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humor and those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they possess it more abundantly? The crevasse seems to extend far inland to the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humor will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that large class of our fellow-creatures who, conscious of a genius for adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible piquancy in putting a woman's hat on a man's head, and in that "verbal romping" which playfully designates a whiskey-and-soda as a gargle, and says "au reservoir" instead of "au revoir."

At last, however, Hester nervously put her hand over the next sheet, as he read the final words of the last.

"Wait a moment," she said, hurriedly. "This last page, James. Might it not be well to reconsider it? Is it politic to assume such great ignorance on the part of Nonconformists? Many I know are better educated than I am."

"My dear," said Mr. Gresley, "ignorance is at the root of any difference of opinion on such a subject as this. I do not say wilful ignorance, but the want of sound Church teaching. I must cut at the roots of this ignorance."

"Dear James, it is thrice killing the slain. No one believes these fallacies which you are exposing—the Nonconformists least of all. Those I have talked with don't hold these absurd opinions that you put down to them. You don't even touch their real position. You are elaborately knocking down ninepins that have never stood up, because they have nothing to stand on."

"I am not proposing to play a game of mental skittles," said the clerical author. "It is enough for me, as I said before, to cut at the roots of ignorance wherever I see it flourishing, not to pull off the leaves one by one as you would have me do by dissecting their opinions. This may not be novel, it may not even be amusing, but, nevertheless, Hester, a clergyman's duty is to wage unceasing war against spiritual ignorance. And what," read on Mr. Gresley, after a triumphant moment in which Hester remained silent, "is the best means of coping against ignorance, against darkness"—("It was a root a moment ago," thought Hester)—"but by the infusion of light? The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Half a page more and the darkness was 'Modern Dissent.' Hester put her hand over her mouth and kept it there.

The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example of the majority of laymen and crept up a tree to be out of the way.

When it was all over she came down trembling.

"Well! what do you think of it?" said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up and down the room.

"You hit very hard," said Hester, after a moment's consideration. She did not say, "You strike home."

"I have no opinion of being mealy-mouthed," said Mr. Gresley, who was always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement. "If you have anything worth saying, say it plainly. That is my motto. Don't hint this or that, but take your stand upon a truth and strike out."

"Why not hold out our hands to our fellow-creatures instead of striking at them?" said Hester, moving towards the door.

"I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies of Christ," Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity through the convex glasses of his own mental pince-nez. "In these days we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church, who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary—"

But Hester had vanished.

There was a dangerous glint in her gray eyes, as she ran up to her little attic.

"According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist," she said to herself. "If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so. For once I got out of the room in time."

Hester's attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering, of which the preparation of food—and, still worse, the preparation of chicken food—is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled out of the house.

She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the old gardener, Abel, was planting something large in the way of "runners" or "suckers," making a separate hole for each with his thumb.

Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as "curly kebbidge" or "salary" or "sparrow-grass."

Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to straighten himself, and—holding himself strongly at the hinge with earth-ingrained hands—to discourse on polities and religion, and to opine that our policy in China was "neither my eye nor my elber." "The little lady," as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and, crossing the church-yard, sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath, under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his flock by their young pastor.

"How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God," was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.[A] Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it. She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called it, by "interfering in church matters," when he nailed it up. After a few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.

[Footnote A: A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.]

Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small, neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.

"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough."

She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been opened.

"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she settled herself comfortably.

Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.

"And so she is leaving London—isn't this rather sudden?—and coming down at once—to-day—no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace. And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."

Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!

The miller's old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.

A little bunch of red and white cows, knee-deep in the water, were swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of the water, proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.

"How like James and the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic."

Hester had been up since five o'clock, utilizing the quiet hours before the house was astir. She was tired out. A bumblebee was droning sleepily near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was going to do when he was a river. "How tired the banks must be of listening to him!" thought Hester, with closed eyes.

And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being, from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly awakened by Mr. Gresley's voice near at hand.

"Hester! Hester! HESTER!"

"Here! here!" gasped Hester, with a start, upsetting her lapful of letters as she scrambled hastily to her feet.

The young vicar drew near, and looked over the church-yard wall. A large crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his countenance.

"We have nearly finished luncheon," he observed. "The servants could not find you anywhere. I don't want to be always finding fault, Hester, but I wish, for your own sake as well as ours, you would be more punctual at meals."

Hester had never been late before, but she felt that this was not the moment to remind her brother of that fact.

"I beg pardon," she said, humbly. "I fell asleep."

"You fell asleep!" said Mr. Gresley, who had been wrestling all the morning with platitudes on "Thy will be done." "All I can say, Hester, is that it is unfortunate you have no occupation. I cannot believe it is for the good of any of us to lead so absolutely idle a life that we fall asleep in the morning."

Hester made no reply.



CHAPTER XI

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.—GEORGE ELIOT.

The children, who had reached the pear stage, looked with round, awed eyes at "Auntie Hester" as she sat down at the luncheon-table beside the black bottle which marked her place. The Gresleys were ardent total abstainers, and were of opinion that Hester's health would be greatly benefited by following their example. But Hester's doctor differed from them—he was extremely obstinate—with the result that the Gresleys were obliged to tolerate the obnoxious bottle on their very table. It was what Mrs. Gresley called a "cross," and Mr. Gresley was always afraid that the fact of its presence might become known and hopelessly misconstrued in Warpington and the world at large.

The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to eat the congealed slice of roast mutton, with blue slides in it, which had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent out for the servants' dinner. The children liked "Auntie Hester," but without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself. She could tell them stories, and make butterflies and horses and dogs out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large, good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did not play fair, so much so that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to interfere, and to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually finding fault with them.

Perhaps nothing in her life at the Vicarage was a greater trial to Hester than to see the rules of fair play broken by the children with the connivance of their parents. Mr. Gresley had never been to a public school, and had thus missed the ABC of what in its later stages is called "honor." He was an admirable hockey-player, but he was not in request at the frequent Slumberleigh matches, for he never hit off fair, or minded being told so.

"Auntie Hester is leaving all her fat," said Mary, suddenly, in a shrill voice, her portion of pear held in her left cheek as she spoke. She had no idea that she ought not to draw attention to the weakness of others. She was only anxious to be the first to offer interesting information.

"Never mind," said Mrs. Gresley, admiring her own moderation. "Finish your pear."

If there was one thing more than another in Hester's behavior that annoyed Mrs. Gresley—and there were several others—it was Hester's manner of turning her food over on her plate and leaving half of it.

Hester did it again now, and Mrs. Gresley, already irritated by her unpunctuality, tried to look away so as not to see her, and prayed for patience. The hundred a year which Hester contributed to the little establishment had eased the struggling household in many ways; but Mrs. Gresley sometimes wondered if the money, greatly needed as it was, counterbalanced the perpetual friction of her sister-in-law's presence.

"Father!"

"Yes, my son."

"Isn't it wrong to drink wine?"

Yes, my son."

"Then why does Auntie Hester drink it?"

Hester fixed her eyes intently on her brother. Would he uphold her before the children?

"Because she thinks it does her good," said Mr. Gresley.

She withdrew her eyes. Her hand, holding a spoonful of cold rice pudding, shook. A delicate color flooded her face, and finally settled in the tip of her nose. In her own way she loved the children.

"Ach, mein Herr," almost screamed Fraeulein, who adored Hester, and saw the gravity of the occasion, "aber Sie vergessen that the Herr Doctor Br-r-r-r-r-own has so strong—so very strong command—"

"I cannot allow a discussion as to the merits or demerits of alcohol at my table," said Mr. Gresley. "I hold one opinion, Dr. Brown holds another. I must beg to be allowed to differ from him. Children, say grace."

* * * * *

It was Wednesday and a half-holiday, and Mrs. Gresley had arranged to take the children in the pony-carriage to be measured for new boots. These expeditions to Westhope were a great event. At two o'clock exactly the three children rushed down-stairs, Regie bearing in his hand his tin money-box, in which a single coin could be heard to leap. Hester produced a bright threepenny-piece for each child, one of which was irretrievably buried in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear their tails high.

Hester saw them drive off, and a few minutes later Mr. Gresley started on his bicycle for a ruridecanal chapter meeting in the opposite direction. She heard the Vicarage gate "clink" behind him as she crossed the little hall, and then she suddenly stopped short and wrung her hands. She had forgotten to tell either of them that the Bishop of Southminster was going to call that afternoon. She knew he was coming on purpose to see her, but this would have been incredible to the Gresleys. She had not read Rachel's letter announcing his coming till she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the subject till this moment.

She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each side of the back wheel.

Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and leaned her head against the banisters.

To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fraeulein, who had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit-lamp, and now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two thin slices of bread-and-butter.

"You are all goodness, Fraeulein," said Hester, raising her small, haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fraeulein could express her silent sympathy. So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fraeulein watching every mouthful.

Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished. There were breaks in the clouds, after all. Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fraeulein often said, "easy cast down and easy cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up" once more. She kissed Fraeulein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await her friend in the drawing-room.

Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law's only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.

The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in "their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up."

Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger brothers—with whom they were not acquainted—as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.

When, after her aunt's death, she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any rate, she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus's time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother's sister.

Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but he had evidently, though involuntarily, adopted it for better for worse; perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice and a tendency to monologue checkered by prehistoric jokes and tortured puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.

She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for Hester's thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain.

So far, during the eight years since she had left the school-room, she had always been "Miss Gresley," a little personage treated with consideration wherever she went, and choyee for her delicate humor and talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation, as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and then indignant at hearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the latter—without being acquainted with them except officially—as "fine," as caring only for "London people," and as being "tuft-hunters," because they frequently entertained at their houses persons of rank, to half of whom they were related. All this was new to Hester. She discovered that, though she might pay visits at these houses, she must never mention them, as it was considered the height of vulgarity to speak of people of rank.

Mrs. Gresley, who had been quite taken aback when the first of these invitations came, felt it her duty to warn Hester against a love of rank, reminding her that it was a very bad thing to get a name for running after titled people.

"James and I have always kept clear of that," she remarked, with dignity. "For my part, I dare say you will think me very old-fashioned, but I must own I never can see that people with titles or wealth are one bit nicer or pleasanter than those without them."

Hester agreed.

"And," continued Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them as I do now."

If Lady Susan Gresley had passed her acquaintance through a less exclusive sieve, Hester might have had the advantage of hearing all these well-worn sentiments, and of realizing the point of view of a large number of her fellow-creatures before she became an inconspicuous unit in their midst.

But if Mrs. Gresley was pained by Hester's predilection for the society of what she called "swells" (the word, though quite extinct in civilized parts, can occasionally be found in country districts), she was still more pained by the friendships Hester formed with persons whom her sister-in-law considered "not quite."

Mrs. Gresley was always perfectly civil, and the Pratts imperfectly so, to Miss Brown, the doctor's invalid sister. But Hester made friends with her, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Gresley that kindness was one thing and intimacy another.

"The truth is," Mrs. Gresley would say, "Hester loves adulation, and as she can't get it from the Pratts and us, she has to go to those below her in the social scale, like Miss Brown, who will give it to her. Miss Brown may be very cultivated. I dare say she is, but she makes up to Hester."

Sybell Loftus, who lived close at hand at Wilderleigh, across the Prone, was one of the very few besides Miss Brown among her new acquaintances who hailed Hester at once as a kindred spirit, to the unconcealed surprise of the Pratts and the Gresleys. Sybell adored Hester's book, which the Gresleys and Pratts considered rather peculiar "as emanating from the pen of a clergyman's sister." She enthusiastically suggested to Hester several improvements which might easily be made in it, which would have changed its character altogether. She even intrenched on the sacred precinct of a married woman's time to write out the openings of several romances, which she was sure Hester, with her wonderful talent, could build up into magnificent works of art. She was always running over to the Vicarage to confide to Hester the unique thoughts which had been vouchsafed to her while contemplating a rose, or her child, or her husband, or all three together.

Hester was half amused, half fascinated, and ruefully lost many of the mornings still left her by the Pratts and Gresleys in listening to the outpourings of this butterfly soul, which imagined every flower it involuntarily alighted on and drew honey from to be its own special production.

But Hester's greatest friend in Middleshire was the Bishop of Southminster, with whom Rachel was staying, and whom she was expecting this afternoon.



CHAPTER XII

The depth and dream of my desire, The bitter paths wherein I stray, Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire, Thou knowest Who hast made the clay! —RUDYARD KIPLING.

The unbalanced joys and sorrows of emotional natures are apt to arouse the pity of the narrow-hearted and the mild contempt of the obtuse of their fellow-creatures.

But perhaps it is a mistake to feel compassion for persons like Hester, for if they have many evil days and weeks in their usually short lives, they have also moments of sheer bliss, hours of awed contemplation and of exquisite rapture which, possibly, in the long run, equal the more solid joys of a good income and a good digestion, nay, even the perennial glow of that happiest of happy temperaments which limits the nature of others by its own, which sees no uncomfortable difference between a moral and a legal right, and believes it can measure life with the same admirable accuracy with which it measures its drawing-room curtains.

As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel's faithful, doglike eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester's dancing, mischievous ones. They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the Vicarage on his way back.

Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself, and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she described "not wisely but too well." But she was faithful to her salt. She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have objected had they been present. Indeed, she spoke of them in what they would have termed "a very proper manner," of their kindness to her when she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her breakfast-tray every morning, and how, in the spring, he had taught her to bicycle.

"But, oh! Rachel," added Hester, "during the last nine months my self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill the poor creature. My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself of which I never dreamed. I feel as if I had been ironed all over since I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out clear in the process."

"I am quite alarmed," said Rachel, tranquilly.

"You ought to be. First of all I did think I cared nothing about food. I don't remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan. But here I—I am difficult about it. I do try to eat it, but often I really can't. And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting habit, which always offends me in other people. Now I am as bad as any of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very rich."

"I suppose the cooking is vile?"

"I don't know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can't judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must."

Rachel looked critically at Hester's innocent, childlike face. When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint color in her cheek had a violet tinge.

She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw plainly enough that Hester's weak health was slipping further down the hill.

"And all this time you have been working?"

"If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now. Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant discovery about myself—that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted."

"But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?"

"I did. I did. But, of course—it is very natural—they think that rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel. And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings."

"Who on earth are the Pratts?"

"They are what they call 'county people.' Their father made a fortune in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I never would dance with him. He used to come to our 'At Homes,' but he was never asked to dinner. He is a great 'parti' among a certain set down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and called 'Hessie,' which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James's and Minna's greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they came up to my room to what they called 'rout me out,' though I had told them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people in the book were real just then. And then when I recognized them, and the scene in my mind which I had been waiting for for weeks was shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly. And then—I was so ashamed afterwards—I burst into tears of rage and despair."

Even the remembrance was too much. Hester wiped away two large tears onto a dear little handkerchief just large enough to receive them, and went on with a quaver in her voice.

"I was so shocked at myself that I found it quite easy to tell them next day that I was sorry I had lost my temper; but they have not been the same since. Not that I wanted them to be the same. I would rather they were different. But I was anxious to keep on cordial terms with Minna's friends. She quarrels with them herself, but that is different. I suppose it is inevitable if you are on terms of great intimacy with people you don't really care for."

"At any rate, they have not interrupted you again?"

"N—no. But still, I was often interrupted. Minna has too much to do, and she is not strong just now, and she often sends up one of the children, and I was so nearly fierce with one of them—poor little things!—that I felt the risk was becoming too great, so I have left off writing between breakfast and luncheon, and I get up directly it is light instead. It is light very early now. Only the worst part of it is that I am so tired for the rest of the day that I can hardly drag myself about."

Rachel said nothing. She seldom commented on the confidences that were made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes are holden.

"And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?"

Hester's face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically she talked to her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover. Everything else was forgotten. Hester's eyes burned. Her color came and went. She was transfigured.

The protecting, anxious affection died out of Rachel's face as she looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half-envious admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself, years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation while they lasted; and afterwards, as a steep step—a very steep step—upon the stair of life. But she realized now that such as Hester live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed to level their ridicule and contempt.

Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it complete, beautiful—an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.

"I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labor day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And gradually I understand and know. And I listen, and Nature speaks, really speaks—not a facon de parler, as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean—and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or, if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And, oh! Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written. It is that that breaks my heart."

The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealized Nature, as she idealized her fellow-creatures, as she idealized everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of Life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought, with bewilderment, that that was just what she could do.

At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling "Hemma" to a sense of duty from the back yard, "Hemma" breathlessly ushered in the Bishop of Southminster.



CHAPTER XIII

Originality irritates the religious classes, who will not be taken out of their indolent ways of thinking; who have a standing grievance against it, and "heresy" and "heterodoxy" are bad words ready for it.—W.W. PEYTON.

The Bishop was an undersized, spare man, with a rugged, weather-beaten face and sinewy frame. If you had seen him working a crane in a stone-mason's yard, or leading a cut-and-thrust forlorn-hope, or sailing paper boats with a child, you would have felt he was the right man in the right place. That he was also in his right place as a bishop had never been doubted by any one. Mr. Gresley was the only person who had occasionally had misgivings as to the Bishop's vocation as a true priest, but he had put them aside as disloyal.

Jowett is believed to have said, "A bishop without a sense of humor is lost." Perhaps that may have been one of the reasons why, by Jowett's advice, the See of Southminster was offered to its present occupant. The Bishop's mouth, though it spoke of an indomitable will, had a certain twist of the lip, his deep-set, benevolent eyes had a certain twinkle which made persons like Lord Newhaven and Hester hail him at once as an ally, but which ought to have been a danger-signal to some of his clerical brethren—to Mr. Gresley in particular.

The Bishop respected and upheld Mr. Gresley as a clergyman, but as a conversationalist the young vicar wearied him. If the truth were known (which it never was), he had arranged to visit Hester when he knew Mr. Gresley would be engaging the reluctant attention of a ruridecanal meeting.

He gave a sigh of relief as he became aware that Hester and Rachel were the only occupants of the cool, darkened room. Mrs. Gresley, it seemed, was also out.

Hester made tea, and presently the Bishop, who looked much exhausted, roused himself. He had that afternoon attended two death-beds—one the death-bed of a friend, and the other that of the last vestige of peace, expiring amid the clamor of a distracted Low Church parish and High Church parson, who could only meet each other after the fashion of cymbals. For the moment even his courageous spirit had been disheartened.

"I met a son of Anak the other night at the Newhavens'," he said to Hester, "who claimed you as a cousin—a Mr. Richard Vernon. He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected."

"How like Dick!" said Hester.

"I remembered him at last. His father was the squire of Farlow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster. Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents. As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father's absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments. I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton. I remember while he was there he won a bet from another boy who could not pay, and he foreclosed on the loser's cricketing trousers. His parents were distressed about it when he brought them home, and I tried to make him see that he ought not to have taken them. But Dick held firm. He said it was like tithe, and if he could not get his own in money, as I did, he must collect it in trousers. I must own he had me there. I noticed that he wore the garment daily as long as any question remained in his parents' minds as to whether they ought to be returned. After that I felt sure he would succeed in life."

"I believe he is succeeding in Australia."

"I advised his father to send him abroad. There really was not room for him in England, and, unfortunately for the army, the examiners jibbed at his strictly phonetic spelling. He tells me he has given up being an A.D.C. and has taken to vine-growing, because if people are up in the world they always drink freely, and if they are 'down on their luck' they drink all the more to drown care. The reasoning appeared to me sound."

"He and James used to quarrel frightfully in the holidays," said Hester. "It was always the same reason, about playing fair. Poor James did not know that games were matters of deadly importance, and that a rule was a sacred thing. I wonder why it is that clergymen so often have the same code of honor as women; quite a different code from that of the average man."

"I think," said the Bishop, "it is owing to that difference of code that women clash so hopelessly with men when they attempt to compete or work with them. Women have not to begin with the esprit de corps which the most ordinary men possess. With what difficulty can one squeeze out of a man any fact that is detrimental to his friend, or even to his acquaintance, however obviously necessary it may be that the information should be asked for and given. Yet I have known many good and earnest and affectionate women, who lead unselfish lives, who will 'give away' their best woman friend at the smallest provocation, or without any provocation at all; will inform you, a propos of nothing, that she was jilted years ago, or that her husband married her for her money. The causes of humiliation and disaster in a woman's life seem to have no sacredness for her women friends. Yet if that same friend whom she has run down is ill, the runner down will nurse her day and night with absolutely selfless devotion."

"I have often been puzzled by that," said Rachel. "I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason. They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to."

Hester's eyes fixed on her friend.

"Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves," she asked, "or do you leave them?"

"I do neither," said Rachel. "I treat them just the same as before."

"Then aren't you a hypocrite, too?"

Hester's small face was set like a flint.

"I think not," said Rachel, tranquilly, "any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil, which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently, while the good will remain?"

"I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.

"I don't think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then—"

"Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.

"Then leave them in silence."

"I only know of a woman's silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"

"I do not. It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation—and—I withdraw."

"You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."

"Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should—"

"Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.

"No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."

"Thrice miserable man!"

"You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"

"Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."

At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy," and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.

"Mother got out at Mrs. Brown's," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."

"Oh, Regie!" expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."

Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.

Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.

"I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."

"She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."

"I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighborhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen's sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work. She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be. Originality is out of place in a clergyman's family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonentity, who have no sense of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her Idyll she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it and an outer one of amiable country neighbors, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them, and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervor and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of gratitude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so."

"She says her temper has become that of a fiend."

"She is passionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives, she will outgrow her passionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become passive, contemplative. Then, instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learned to receive impressions calmly and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far."



CHAPTER XIV

Only those who know the supremacy of the Intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.—GEORGE ELIOT.

Hester in the meanwhile was expressing wonder and astonishment at the purchases of the children, who, with the exception of Mary, had spent their little all on presents for Fraeulein, whose birthday was on the morrow. After Mary's tiny white bone umbrella had been discovered to be a needle-case, and most of the needles had been recovered from the floor, Regie extracted from its paper a little china cow. But, alas! the cow's ears and horns remained in the bag, owing possibly to the incessant passage of the parcel from one pocket to another on the way home. Regie looked at the remnants in the bag, and his lip quivered, while Mary, her own umbrella safely warehoused, exclaimed, "Oh, Regie!" in tones of piercing reproach.

But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fraeulein would like it just as much. Still, it was a blow. Regie leaned his head against Hester's shoulder.

Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child's touch till she was a mother; that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor substitute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.

"The tail is still on," she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.

The cow's tail was painted in blue upon its side.

"When I bought it," said Regie, in a strangled voice, "and it was a great-deal-of-money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that."

"All the best cows have their tails on the side," said Hester. "And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before." And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.

"And now what has Stella got?"

Stella produced a bag of "bull's-eyes," which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.

"Fraeulein never eats bull's-eyes," said Mary, who was what her parents called "a very truthful child."

"I eats them," said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upward, were visible.

Stella always turned upsidedown if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.

Hester had hardly set Stella right side upward when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.

"Run up-stairs, my pets," she said. "Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time."

"We came ourselves, mother," said Regie. "Fruaelein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets."

"Well, never mind; run away now," said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, "and take Boulou."

"You are tired out," said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law's brown boots.

Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained boot-laces. But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and, being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.

As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.

"I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper."

Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life. We never get so far as the drawing-room. Our conquests, our self-denials, are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton. We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones—not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen—to higher things.

The sole was a direct answer to prayer. Mrs. Gresley had been enabled to stifle her irritation against this delicate, whimsical, fine lady of a sister-in-law—laced in, too, we must not forget that—who, in Mrs. Gresley's ideas, knew none of the real difficulties of life, its butcher's bills, its monthly nurses, its constant watchfulness over delicate children, its long, long strain at two ends which won't meet. We must know but little of our fellow-creatures if the damp sole in the bag appears to us other than the outward and homely sign of an inward and spiritual conquest.

As such Hester saw it, and she kissed Mrs. Gresley and thanked her, and then ran, herself, to the kitchen with the peace offering, and came back with her sister-in-law's down-at-heel in-door shoes.

Mr. Gresley was stabling his bicycle in the hall as she crossed it. He was generally excessively jocose with his bicycle. He frequently said, "Whoa, Emma!" to it. But to-day he, too, was tired, and put Emma away in silence.

When Hester returned to the drawing-room Mrs. Gresley had recovered sufficiently to notice her surroundings. She was sitting with her tan-stockinged feet firmly planted on the carpet instead of listlessly outstretched, her eyes ominously fixed on the tea-table and seed-cake.

Hester's silly heart nudged her side like an accomplice.

"Who has been here to tea?" said Mrs. Gresley. "I met the Pratts and the Thursbys in Westhope."

Hester was frightened. We need to be in the presence of those who judge others by themselves.

"The Bishop was here and Rachel West," she said, coloring. "They left a few minutes ago."

"Well, of all unlucky things, that James and I should have been out. James, do you hear that? The Bishop's been while we were away. And I do declare, Hester," looking again at the table, "you never so much as asked for the silver teapot."

"I never thought of it," said Hester, ruefully. It was almost impossible to her to alter the habit of a lifetime, and to remember to dash out and hurriedly change the daily routine if visitors were present. Lady Susan had always used her battered old silver teapot every day, and for the life of her Hester could not understand why there should be one kind one day and one kind another. She glanced resentfully at the little brown earthen-ware vessel which she had wielded so carefully half an hour ago. Why did she never remember the Gresleys' wishes?

"Hester," said Mrs. Gresley, suddenly, taking new note of Hester's immaculate brown holland gown, which contrasted painfully with her own dilapidated pink shirt with hard collars and cuffs and imitation tie, tied for life in the shop where it was born. "You are so smart; I do believe you knew they were coming."

If there was one thing more than another which offended Hester, it was being told that she was smart.

"I trust I am never smart," she replied, not with any touch of the haughtiness that some ignorant persons believe to be the grand manner, but with a subtle change of tone and carriage which seemed instantly to remove her to an enormous distance from the other woman with her insinuation and tan stockings. Mrs. Gresley unconsciously drew in her feet. "I did not know when I dressed this morning that the Bishop was coming to-day."

"Then you did know later that he was coming?"

"Yes, Rachel West wrote to tell me so this morning, but I did not open her letter at breakfast, and I was so vexed at being late for luncheon that I forgot to mention it then. I remembered as soon as James had started, and ran after him, but he was too far off to hear me call to him."

It cost Hester a good deal to give this explanation, as she was aware that the Bishop's visit had been to her and to her alone.

"Come, come," said Mr. Gresley, judicially, with the natural masculine abhorrence of a feminine skirmish.

"Don't go on making foolish excuses, Hester, which deceive no one; and you, Minna, don't criticise Hester's clothes. It is the Bishop's own fault for not writing his notes himself. He might have known that Miss West would have written to Hester instead of to me. I can't say I think Hester behaved kindly towards us in acting as she did, but I won't hear any more argument about it. I desire the subject should now drop."

The last words were uttered in the same tone in which Mr. Gresley closed morning service, and were felt to be final. He was not in reality greatly chagrined at missing the Bishop, whom he regarded with some of the suspicious distrust with which a certain class of mind ever regards that which is superior to it. Hester left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

"James," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at her priest with tears of admiration in her eyes, "I shall never be good like you, so you need not expect it. How you can be so generous and patient with her I don't know. It passes me."

"We must learn to make allowances for each other," said Mr. Gresley, in his most affectionate cornet, drawing his tired, tearful little wife down beside him on the sofa. And he made some fresh tea for her, and waited on her, and she told him about the children's boots and the sole, and he told her about a remarkable speech he had made at the chapter meeting, and a feeling that had been borne in on him on the way home that he should shortly write something striking about Apostolic Succession. And they were happy together; for though he sometimes reproved her as a priest if she allowed herself to dwell on the probability of his being made a Bishop, he was very kind to her as a husband.



CHAPTER XV

"Beware of a silent dog and still water."

If you are travelling across Middleshire on the local line between Southminster and Westhope, after you have passed Wilderleigh with its gray gables and park wall, close at hand you will perceive to nestle (at least, Mr. Gresley said it nestled) Warpington Vicarage; and perhaps, if you know where to look, you will catch a glimpse of Hester's narrow bedroom window under the roof. Half a mile farther on Warpington Towers, the gorgeous residence of the Pratts, bursts into view, with flag on turret flying, and two tightly bitted rustic bridges leaping high over the Drone. You cannot see all the lodges of Warpington Towers from the line, which is a source of some regret to Mr. Pratt; but if he happens to be travelling with you he will point out two of them, chaste stucco Gothic erections with church windows, and inform you that the three others are on the northern and eastern sides, vaguely indicating the directions of Scotland and Ireland.

And the Drone, kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills, will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope. You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man; for Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any farther—at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.

Westhope Abbey stands in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.

Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky. God's stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out. Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.

The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft, contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer. A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all corners. The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago. The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.

The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling-house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months. Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks' dormitories, abbots' cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair and slept under down quilts till noon.

It was this long passage, with its interminable row of low latticed windows, that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting. He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.

It was not a yell of anguish, and Lord Newhaven remained at the window leaning on his elbows and watching at his ease the little scene which was taking place below him.

On his bicycle on the smooth-shaven lawn was Dick, wheeling slowly in and out among the stone-edged flower-beds, an apricot in each broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. "Take your time, my son," said Dick, just eluding by a hair's-breadth a charge through a geranium-bed on the part of the eldest boy. "If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial, I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you've only got to take them. I can't keep on offering them all day long. My time"—(Dick ran his bicycle up a terrace, and, as soon as the boys were up, glided down again)—"my time is valuable. You don't want them?" A shrill disclaimer and a fresh onslaught. "Miss Turner, they thank you very much, but they don't care for apricots."

Half a second more and Dick skilfully parted from his bicycle and was charged by his two admirers and severely pummelled as high as they could reach. When they had been led away by Miss Turner, each biting an apricot and casting longing backward looks at their friend, Rachel and Dick wandered to the north side of the abbey and sat down there in the shade.