Red Pottage Part 8

"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, d.i.c.k, 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 gra.s.s, 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 d.i.c.k. "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 d.i.c.k was partly prompted by an unconscious desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.

d.i.c.k, 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 a.s.sociates 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 cl.u.s.tering 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, embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed 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 repet.i.tions 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 succ.u.mb 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 a.s.surance 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.