Faith And Unfaith Part 12

"Must wait. I insist on it. Dying! nonsense! she has been dying every week for three years, and you believe her every time. Come as far as the gate with me."

"You command, I obey," says the vicar, with a sigh of resignation, walking on beside his pet parishioner. "But if you could only understand the trouble I am in with those Batesons you would know some pity for me."

"What! again?" says Clarissa, showing, and feeling, deep compa.s.sion.

"Even so. This time about the bread. You know what unpleasant bread they bake, and how Mrs. Redmond objects to it; and really it _is_ bad for the children."

"It is poison," says Clarissa, who never does anything by halves, and who is nothing if not sympathetic.

"Well so I said; and when I had expostulated with them, mildly but firmly, and suggested that better flour might make better dough, and they had declined to take any notice of my protest,--why, I just ordered my bread from the Burtons opposite, and----"

The vicar pauses.

"And you have been happy ever since?"

"Well, yes, my dear. I suppose in a way I have; that is, I have ceased to miss the inevitable breakfast-lecture on the darkness and coa.r.s.eness of the bread; but I have hardly gained on other points, and the Batesons are a perpetual scourge. They have decided on never again 'darkening the church door' (their own words, my dear Clarissa), because I have taken the vicarage custom from them. They prefer imperilling their souls to giving up the chance of punishing me. And now the question is, whether I should not consent to the slow poisoning of my children, rather than drive my parishioners into the arms of the Methodists, who keep open house for all comers below the hill."

"I don't think I should poison the children," says Clarissa.

"But what is to become of my choir? Charlotte Bateson has the sweetest voice in it, and now she will not come to church. I am at my wits' end when I think of it all."

"I am going to supply Charlotte's place for you," says Clarissa, slyly.

"Thank you, my dear. But, you see, you would never be in time. And, unfortunately, the services must begin always at a regular hour.

Punctuality was the one thing I never could teach you,--that, and the Catechism."

"What a libel!" says Clarissa. "I shouldn't malign my own teaching if I were you. I am perfectly certain I could say it all now, this very moment, from start to finish, questions and all, without a mistake.

Shall I?"

"No, no. I'll take your word for it," says the vicar, hastily. "The fact is, I have just been listening to it at the morning school in the village, and when one has heard a thing repeated fourteen times with variations, one naturally is not ambitious of hearing it again, no matter how profitable it may be."

"When I spoke of filling Charlotte's place," says Clarissa, "I did not allude in any way to myself, but to----And now I am coming to my news."

"So glad!" says the vicar; "I may overtake old Betty yet."

"I have secured a governess for Mrs. Redmond. Such a dear little governess! And I want you to promise me to be more than usually kind to her, because she is young and friendless and it is her first effort at teaching."

"So that question is settled at last," says the vicar, with a deep--if carefully suppressed--sigh of relief. "I am rejoiced, if only for my wife's sake, who has been worrying herself for weeks past, trying to replace the inestimable--if somewhat depressing--Miss Prood."

"Has she?" says Clarissa, kindly. "Worry is a bad thing. But to-day Mrs. Redmond seems much better than she has been for a long time.

Indeed, she said so."

"Did she?" says the vicar, with a comical, transient smile, Mrs.

Redmond's maladies being of the purely imaginary order.

"What are you laughing at now?" asks Clarissa, who has marked this pa.s.sing gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"At you, my dear, you are so quaintly humorous," replies he. "But go on: tell me of this new acquisition to our household. Is she a friend of yours?"

"Yes, a great friend."

"Then of course we shall like her."

"Thank you," says Clarissa. "She is very pretty, and very charming.

Perhaps, after all, I am doing a foolish thing for myself. How shall I feel when she has cut me out at the vicarage?"

"Not much fear of that, were she Aphrodite herself. You are much too good a child to be liked lightly or by halves. Well, good-by: you won't forget about the flannel for the Batley twins?"

"I have it ready,--at least, half of it. How could I tell she was going to have twins," says Clarissa, apologetically.

"It certainly was very inconsiderate of her," says the vicar, with a sigh, as he thinks of the poverty that clings to the Batley _menage_ from year's end to year's end.

"Well, never mind; she shall have it all next week," promises Clarissa, soothingly, marking his regretful tone; and then she bids him farewell, and goes up the road again in the direction of her home.

She is glad to be alone at last. Her mission successfully accomplished, she has now time to let her heart rest contentedly upon her own happiness. All the events of the morning--the smallest word, the lightest intonation, the most pa.s.sing smile, that claimed Horace as their father--are remembered by her. She dwells fondly on each separate remembrance, and repeats to herself how he looked and spoke at such-and-such moments.

She is happy, quite happy. A sort of wonder, too, mixes with her delight. Only a few short hours ago she had left her home, free, unbetrothed, with only hope to sustain her, and now she is returning to it with her hope a certainty,--bound, heart and soul, to the dearest, truest man on earth, as she believes.

How well he loves her! She had noticed his sudden paling when she had begged for some delay before actually naming her "brydale day." She had hardly believed his love for her was so strong, so earnest: even she (how _could_ she? with tender self-reproach) had misjudged him, had deemed him somewhat cold, indifferent; unknowing of the deep stratum of feeling that lay beneath the outward calm of his demeanor.

Dear, dearest Horace! She will never disbelieve in him again; he is her own now, her very own, and she loves him with all her heart, and he loves just the same, and----Oh, if every woman in the world could only be as happy as she is to-day, what a glorious place it would be!

Not that it is such a bad place, by any means, as some people would lead one to imagine. Surely these are disagreeable people, misanthropists, misogamists, and such like heretics; or else, poor souls! they are in a bad strait, without present hope and without any one to love them! This last seems, indeed, a misfortune.

Yet why abuse a lovely world? How bright the day is, how sweet and fresh the air, though evening is nigh at hand! She hardly ever remembers a September so fine, So free from damp; the very birds----

Had he thought her unloving or capricious when she pleaded for a longer engagement? (Here the tears rise unbidden in her eyes.) Oh, surely not; he understood her thoroughly; for had he not smiled upon her afterwards?

So he will always smile. There shall never be any cross words or angry frowns to chill their perfect love! Their lives will be a summer dream, a golden legend, a pure, fond idyl.

Thus beguiling time with beliefs too sweet for earthly power to grant, she hastens home, with each step building up another story in her airy house, until at length she carries a castle, tall and stately, into her father's house.

CHAPTER X.

"I have no other but a woman's reason: I think him so, because I think him so."--SHAKESPEARE.

"Where is papa?" she asks, meeting one of the servants in the hall.

Hearing he is out, and will not be back for some time, she, too, turns again to the open door, and, as though the house is too small to contain all the thoughts that throng her breast, she walks out into the air again, and pa.s.ses into the garden, where autumn, though kindly and slow in its advances, is touching everything with the hand of death.

"Heavily hangs the broad sunflower Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; Heavily hangs the hollyhock, Heavily hangs the tiger lily."

With a sigh she quits her beloved garden, and wanders still! farther abroad into the deep woods that "have put their glory on," and are dressed in tender russets, and sad greens, and fading tints, that meet and melt into each other.

The dry leaves are falling, and lie crackling under foot. The daylight is fading, softly, imperceptibly, but surely. There is yet a glow from the departing sunlight, that, sinking lazily beyond the distant hills, tinges with gold the browning earth that in her shroud of leaves is lying.