Johnny Ludlow Fourth Series Part 95

"It contains the patterns of some sewing silks that I want to get," she added to me, as we stood waiting on the door-steps. "If----"

At that moment, out burst the ting-tang. Miss Deveen suddenly broke off what she was saying, and turned to look at the church.

"Do they have service at this hour?" I asked.

"Hush, Johnny! That bell is not going for service. Some one must be dead."

In truth, I heard that, even as she spoke. Three times three it struck out, followed by the sharp, quick strokes.

"That's the pa.s.sing-bell!" exclaimed Cattledon, coming quickly from the hall with the little packet in her hand. "Who _can_ be dead? It hardly rings out once in a year."

For, it appeared, the bell at St. Matthew's did not in general toll for the dead: was not expected to do so. Our bell at Church d.y.k.ely rang for any one who could pay for it.

Waiting there on the steps, we saw Mr. Lake coming from the direction of the church. Miss Deveen walked down the broad path of her small front-garden, and stood at the gate to wait for him.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Oh, it is a grievous thing!" he cried, in answer, his gentle face pale, his blue eyes suppressing their tears. "It is no other than my dear Rector; my many years' friend!"

"The Rector!" gasped Miss Deveen.

"Indeed it is. The complaint he suffered from has increased its symptoms lately, but no one thought of attaching to them the slightest danger. At two o'clock to-day he sent for me, saying he felt very ill. I found him so when I got there; ill, and troubled. He had taken a turn for the worse; and death--death," added Mr. Lake, pausing to command his voice, "was coming on rapidly."

Miss Deveen had turned as white as her point-lace collar.

"He was troubled, you say?" she asked.

"In such a case as this--meeting death face to face unexpectedly--it is hardly possible not to be troubled, however truly we may have lived in preparation for it," answered the sad, soft voice of the curate. "Mr.

Selwyn's chief perplexity lay in the fact that he had not settled his worldly affairs."

"Do you mean, not made his will?"

"Just so," nodded Mr. Lake; "he had meant to do so, he said to me, but had put it off from time to time. We got a lawyer in, and it was soon done; and--and--I stayed on with him afterwards to the end."

"Oh dear, it is a piteous tale," sighed Miss Deveen. "And his wife and daughters are away!"

"They went to Oxford last Sat.u.r.day for a week; and the two sons are there, as you know. No one thought seriously of his illness. Even this morning, when I called upon him after breakfast, though he said he was not feeling well, and did not look well, such a thing as danger never occurred to me. And now he is dead!"

Never did a parson's death cause such a stir in a parish as poor Mr.

Selwyn's did in this. A lively commotion set in. People flew about to one another's houses like chips in a gale of wind. Not only was the sorrow to himself to be discussed, but the uncertainty as to what would happen now. Some six months previously a church not far off, St.

Peter's, which had rejoiced in three energetic curates, and as many daily services, suddenly changed its inc.u.mbent; the new one proved to be an elderly man with wife and children, who did all the duty himself, and cut off the curates and the week-day prayers. What if the like calamity should happen to St. Matthew's!

I was away most of the following day with Mr. Brandon, so was not in the thick of it, but the loss was made up for in the evening.

"Of course it is impossible to say who will get the living," cried Mrs.

Jonas, one of the two widows already mentioned, who had been dining with Miss Deveen. "I know who ought to--and that is our dear Mr. Lake."

"'Oughts' don't go for much in this world," growled Dr. Galliard, a sterling man, in spite of his gruffness. He had recently brought Cattledon out of a bilious attack, and ran in this evening to see whether the cure lasted. "They go for nothing in the matter of Church patronage," continued he. "If Lake had his deserts, he'd be made inc.u.mbent of this living to-morrow: but he is as likely to get it as I am to get the Lord Chancellor's seals."

"Who would have done as Mr. Lake has done--given himself up solely and wholly to the duties of the church and the poor, for more years than I can count?" contended Mrs. Jonas, who was rich and positive, and wore this evening a black gauze dress, set off with purple grapes, and a spray of purple grapes in her black hair. "I say the living is due to him, and the Lord Chancellor ought to present him with it."

Dr. Galliard gave a short laugh. He was a widower, and immensely popular, nearly as much so as Mr. Lake. "Did you ever know a curate succeed to a living under the circ.u.mstances?" he demanded. "The Lord Chancellor has enough friends of his own, waiting to snap up anything that falls; be sure of that, Mrs. Jonas."

"Some dean will get it, I shouldn't wonder," cried Cattledon. For at this time we were in the prime old days when a Church dignitary might hold half-a-dozen snug things, if he could drop into them.

"Just so; a dean or some other luminary," nodded the doctor. "It is the province of great divines to shine like lights in the world, and of curates to toil on in obscurity. Well--G.o.d sees all things: and what is wrong in this world may be set right in the next."

"You speak of the Lord Chancellor," quietly put in Miss Deveen: "the living is not in his gift."

"Never said it was--was speaking generally," returned the doctor. "The patron of the living is some other great man, n.o.bleman, or what not, living down in the country."

"In Staffordshire, I think," said Miss Deveen, with hesitation, not being sure of her memory. "He is a baronet, I believe; but I forget his name."

"All the same, ma'am: there's no more chance for poor Lake with him than with the Lord Chancellor," returned Dr. Galliard. "Private patrons are worse beset, when a piece of preferment falls in, than even public ones."

"Suppose the parish were to get up a pet.i.tion, setting forth Mr. Lake's merits and claims, and present it to the patron?" suggested Mrs. Jonas.

"Not, I dare say, that it would be of much use."

"Not the slightest use; you may rely upon that," spoke the doctor, in his decisive way. "Lake's best chance is to get taken on by the new man, and stand out for a higher salary."

Certainly it seemed to be his best and only chance of getting any good out of the matter. But it was just as likely he would be turned adrift.

The next day we met Mrs. Jonas in the King's Road. She had rather a down look as she accosted Miss Deveen.

"No one seems willing to bestir themselves about a pet.i.tion; they say it is so very hopeless. And there's a rumour abroad that the living is already given away."

"To whom is it given?" asked Miss Deveen.

"Well, not to a Very Reverend Dean, as Miss Cattledon suggested last night, but to some one as bad--or good: one of the Canons of St. Paul's.

I dare say it's true. How hard it is on Mr. Lake! How hard it must seem to him!"

"He may stay here as curate, then."

"Never you expect that," contended Mrs. Jonas, her face reddening with her zeal. "These cathedral luminaries have invariably lots of their own circle to provide for."

"Do you not think it will seem hard on Mr. Lake?" I said to Miss Deveen, as we left the little widow, and walked on.

"I do, Johnny Ludlow. I do think he ought to have it; that in right and justice no one has so great a claim to it as he," she impressively answered. "But, as Dr. Galliard says, 'oughts' go for nothing in Church patronage. William Lake is a good, earnest, intellectual man; he has grown grey in the service of the parish, and yet, now that the living is vacant, he has no more chance of it than that silly young Chisholm has--not half as much, I dare say, if the young fellow were only in priest's orders. It is but a common case: scores of curates who have to work on, neglected, to their lives' end could testify to it. Here we are, Johnny. This is Mrs. Topcroft's."

Knocking at the house-door--a small house standing ever so far back from the road--we were shown by a young servant into a pleasant parlour. Emma Topcroft, a merry, bright, laughing girl, of eighteen or nineteen, sat there at work with silks and black velvet. If I had the choice given me between her and Miss Cattledon, thought I, as Mr. Lake seems to have, I know which of the two I should choose.

"Mamma is making a rice-pudding in the kitchen," she said, spreading her work out on the table for Miss Deveen to see.

"You are doing it very nicely, Emma. And I have brought you the fresh silks. I could not get them before: they had to send the patterns into town. Is the other screen begun?"

"Oh yes; and half done," answered Emma, briskly, as she opened the drawer of a-work-table, and began unfolding another square of velvet from its tissue paper. "I do the sober colours in both screens first, and leave the bright ones till last. Here's the mother."