Frances Peard (continued 2)

“This is simply absurd, Marion,” said Mr Miles with some anger.

But he had given her an advantage, which she was resolved to use even to ungenerosity.

“You said you had been unjust to Marmaduke—”

“Not to him, Marion.”

“He and I are one in such a matter, papa.”

Ah, there was the strangeness of it! His child’s life had seemed to him no more than an undeveloped bud, some day to expand, but as yet folded securely within its sheath, and suddenly it had shot apart from, was almost opposed to them all. It was a thing so strange that the father, looking at the woman, thought only of the child, and took to his own blindness greater blame than it deserved.

“Well,” he said, sighing, “it is possible, as you say, that I have not acted in the best way for Marmaduke, or indeed for any one.”

“And you will write?”

“To tell the man he is to make Marmaduke his heir!”

“O, he has said it already. Tell him that he must be kinder to him, poor fellow!—that he is thrown away in his present position—”

“I cannot say that,” said the Vicar, with a wavering smile at the childishness of the proposition. And as the idea struck him, he looked keenly at her again. “Child, is this really what you suppose it? Do you care so much for Marmaduke that you are prepared to be his wife? You have been thrown together, you have no experience to guide you, you have seen nothing of the world. I ought to take you about and show you other places,” he added in grave bewilderment.

Marion, who had been going to the door, turned round and laughed.

“It is too late now, papa.”

Too late! And he had been thinking of her life as a smooth, untrodden meadow!

Outside, in a spot of cool shade under the cedar, Mrs Miles was sitting and working placidly at some little white squares, which never seemed to grow nearer their completion. The Vicar, after looking at her for a moment from his window, went out into the hall, through the porch, and across the grass-plot to her side. It was very rarely that he carried any problems to his wife; but it now appeared to him that there were certain complications, such as the white intricacies lying upon her lap, which it might be given only to a feminine understanding to disentangle. He sat down gravely by her side, looking with abstraction at the sunshine falling pleasantly on the house and the fine old tower beyond, and listening, perhaps, to the hum of the bees, or the rough rhythm which came from a saw-pit in the lane. Mrs Miles only looked up and smiled, and went on with her knitting, believing the Vicar to be absorbed in the Sunday sermons which she held to be the great events of Thorpe life. These, although never weak, ran a risk of being considered by a critic as rather dry and lengthy, but loyal wifehood excited a most earnest admiration in Mrs Miles. She knitted softly, therefore, lest the click of her needles should interfere with the roll of his ideas, and in the hush of the sweet summer afternoon a pleasant drowsiness was creeping over her, when her husband startled her by asking abruptly,—

“Wife, how old is Marion?”

“Marion, my dear?” said Mrs Miles, with a perplexed conviction that the Vicar must have meant some other person more nearly connected with his sermon,—“Marion was twenty last month. Don’t you remember we had a junket on her birthday, and it was the first time Sarah quite succeeded in it?”

“Twenty!” repeated Mr Miles with a little groan. “I believed her to have been sixteen.”

“My dear! And dining out as she does, and so admired.”

“Well, well,” said the Vicar in a moment or two, “it is no fault of yours or hers. But tell me whether you understood that Marmaduke was serious in his attachment to her?”

“Why not?” asked Mrs Miles, a little motherly indignation making itself heard in her voice.

“Why not?” repeated her husband, standing up and looking down on her, impatiently. “They are both children.”

“I never could think of Marion as a child at all,” said the mother, with a little sigh. “She has always been so much older than her years. And as for Marmaduke, poor fellow, I am sure he can’t have proper food at his lodgings. I have told Sarah to make some jelly for him to take away with him. Of course it is natural that the separation should be a trial to him, but I dare say it will all come right by and by.”

“But—good heavens, what a marriage for Marion!” cried the Vicar, beginning to walk hastily up and down under, the cedar, and crushing the daisies that peeped up through the not too carefully trimmed grass.

“My dear,” said Mrs Miles, knitting calmly, “Marion is a girl who would be miserable unless she had her own way. With all his strong will, Anthony would be more likely to listen to reason.”

“Anthony!” exclaimed her husband, stopping before her. “There is nothing of the sort going on with Anthony?”

“It has not come to the same point, of course, but it is easy to see that he has a fancy for Winifred. I am sure I should be very glad if you could persuade him to make up his mind as to what he will be, and get him out of the place.”

“I don’t see why,” said the Vicar, amazed at his wife’s penetration. “I have never thought of what you have just put before me, but it appears to me that Anthony would be fortunate to secure so good a girl as Winifred Chester.”

“Fortunate, Mr Miles!” said his wife, laying down her work, and speaking with unusual irritation. “Why, Anthony, with his good looks, his cleverness, and his fortune, might marry any girl in the county. I have never seen any one good enough for him, that is the worst of it; and as for Winifred, what you can see in her that you should call him fortunate, I am sure I cannot conceive. She will be a very lucky girl that gets our Anthony.”

The Vicar said, “Pooh, pooh!” but he had a humiliating sense of being baffled by his women. He went away, without further words, across the lawn and past the mignonettes and sweet-peas into his study. There he pulled down the blind to shut out the sun, in a fit of absence tore up a carefully arranged table of parish accounts which he had just prepared for Mr Mannering to audit, flung it into the waste-paper basket, and sat down to write a letter to old Mr Tregennas.

Chapter Seven.

Sunday was rather a gay day at the Vicarage. The Hardlands party were in the habit of spending a good deal of time there, Winifred, indeed, remaining for the early dinner, so as to be in her place in the school before the afternoon service; and there were further elements of friendliness in the two Mr Mannerings, who would drop in for a chat with the Vicar when his work was over.

On this particular Sunday, the people of Thorpe had undergone one of those disturbances of routine which they were uncertain whether to resent as an injury or to hail as a welcome variety. One of the neighbouring clergy had been taken ill suddenly the day before, and Mr Miles had ridden over to supply his place, while Mr and Mrs Featherly were jolted from Underham by Job White to undertake the services at Thorpe. Lest it should be supposed that the plural number has been used unadvisedly, it must be explained that many persons who had fair means of forming an opinion held it to be no less than a moral impossibility that the rector of Underham should accomplish any act in his ministerial or private life without his wife’s support, and believed that if her head, crowned with marabouts, were withdrawn from the seat immediately below the pulpit, the sermon would collapse in some fatal and irretrievable manner. The influence, whatever it was, was in no way connected with criticism, since Mrs Featherly, as the rector’s wife, considered herself released from the necessity of seeking benefit from any preaching whatever, and it probably depended upon that subtile link of habit by which all persons are in some degree bound, and which, in her own case, led her almost mechanically to count the heads of the congregation, and to store in her memory, with unerring acuteness, the names of those offenders who should have been and were not present.

So powerful in her, indeed, was this almost instinct, that as they drove painfully between the high hedges of the lanes, Mrs Featherly, with her head out of the window, reckoned the members of the different families they passed, and kept up a running commentary upon their numbers.

“I am convinced I have seen that woman in the red shawl at Underham. I believe her to be the farmer’s wife who supplies Langford’s dairy, and if so, I should like to know where her husband is? And there are the Crockers, and the daughter who is home from service not with them. Really, Mr Featherly, you ought to make a point of giving Mr Miles a hint. When people once take to neglecting their parish church I have the worst possible opinion of them.”

The consciousness of so much wrong-doing imparted quite a judicial severity to Mrs Featherly’s countenance, as she descended heavily at the Vicarage porch, just as the bells were chiming merrily and the people clustering in knots outside the church. There had been rain in the early morning, and large clouds were still coming up, but the sun was shining after the shower, and the wet on grass and roof only gave a touch of additional brightness. The boys who were too big to go to school lounged up in little companies, too shamefaced to venture alone, and putting on an appearance of great boldness and explosive mirth, to cover their actual bashfulness. The girls generally tossed their heads, walking on demurely without taking any notice of their contemporaries, but a ruddy-cheeked young farmer or two, who had come from the outskirts of the village, received such smiling glances from the same damsels as to bring down an occasional sharp remark from one of the elder women.

“You’ll a lost yere eyes as well as yere bonnet before iver you gets into choorch, Emma,” said one of these matrons, with a satirical look at the red rose that crowned its wearer’s last effort at millinery.

Emma, who was blue-eyed and literal-minded, gave an anxious pull to assure herself of the safety of the structure, before she answered good-humouredly,—

“You see, Mrs Anders, Susan gits a new shape for me into Under’m now and then, and I’m sure, if Polly wanted wan—”

“My Polly!” began Mrs Andrews, in so high a staccato of indignation that her husband, who was standing nearer the porch, looked round and said, in a deprecating tone,—

“Stiddy, missus, stiddy. Hyur’s the new parson coming oop to t’ choorch.”

“Ees, fay, so it be,” said another man. “Hers so smarl us can sceerce see un.”

“I can find him a tex for his sermond,” retorted Mrs Andrews, lowering her voice a little, but looking at Emma with wrathful contempt, ”‘The pompses and vanities of this wicked wordel.’ That’s a tex as might agree with some as is not so far off at this minit, and doan’t know how to be’ave themselves afor their betters.”

“That bain’t no tex, though,” said old Araunah Stokes, slowly shaking his head. “That’s noa moor than watt godfaythers and godmoothers have got to doo in t’ catechiz. Noa, noa, thicky thyur bain’t noan of the Scripter texes.”

“And I’d be glad to know, Mr Stokes,” replied the irate Mrs Andrews, unfolding her prayer-book from its pocket-handkerchief as if with the intention of appealing to written authority, “I’d be glad to know whether Scripter and the catechiz bain’t wan? P’raps you’ll be holding next as the Ten Commandmints bain’t in the Bible, becos they’m put down in the catechiz?—nor the Blief, nor my dooty towaeds my nayber as I was bound to say wann I wor a little maaed, till it slipped aff my tongue so faest as pays owt of a barrel, nayther? If any wan have a right to spake abeowt the catechiz, it’s me, though you doo caest it up to me, Mr Stokes, as I doan’t know texes when I see ’em.”

“Cloack’s strook, fayther,” said Jeremiah Stokes, interposing feebly in the character of peacemaker. Old Araunah, however, only hobbled off to where two or three other old men were standing, looking apathetically into a little newly dug child’s grave.

“Cloack’s strook, as you say, lad, but a woman’s tongue ’ull diffen cloacks and bells, and arl t’ rest o’ um. Ees, yer moother gived me a bet o’ ’sperience that way. An’ so that’s fur little Rose Tucker’s little un? Whay, I minds her moother wann her warn’t noa begger, and us wor—”

But here an unexpected interruption occurred. Mr Featherly, unconscious of the ordinary arrangements by which the Vicar caused the ringers to accommodate themselves to his own erratic time, had, punctually as the clock struck, appeared in the reading-desk. The ringers, unprepared for such a movement, did not even cast a look in that direction, and, engaged in cheerful conversation, only became aware when the exhortation had been with some difficulty concluded, that the service had actually begun. The consequence was a sudden stoppage of the bells, instead of the ordinary change for three minutes to a single toll, which gave time for the loiterers in the churchyard to present themselves; and it was not until one of the ringers had come out and related what had happened, that the men were able to persuade themselves that the single bell was not yet to be rung. Mrs Featherly was terribly scandalised by the unseemly stamping and scuffling that followed, and the male part of the congregation, naturally incensed at being placed so unexpectedly in the wrong, looked a little hot and sulky throughout the remainder of the service.

A larger number than usual turned into the Vicarage garden afterwards. Frank Orde, the Squire’s nephew, had arrived the day before, and old Mr Wood, of the Grange, had walked over to the Red House, not, certainly, with the expectation of finding Mrs Featherly installed at Thorpe, nor with any satisfaction at the fact.

“Why on earth didn’t you get rid of the woman?” he growled sharply, under his breath. “She says as many disagreeable things as if she were a relation.”

“Charles manages her admirably,” said Mr Robert, laughing. “His excessive politeness is just what she cannot meet with her usual weapons. Not that I believe there’s harm in her, except when compassion for Featherly is too strong for one’s justice.”

“Compassion! If a man cuts his throat it’s his own doing,” said Mr Wood. “There! the very dogs have more sense.”

Sniff, indeed, showed a rooted dislike to Mrs Featherly, a feeling which was fully returned; on this occasion, however, she so far unbent as to call him in a gracious tone, “Dog, dog,” an indignity which Sniff as naturally resented, as we should resent being addressed in the abstract as “man,” and marked his displeasure by turning a deaf ear to her endearments.

“And there, the Squire is falling foul of Anthony again,” said Mr Robert, hurrying on with a good-humoured design to act as peacemaker.

“Red’s red, I suppose,” Mr Chester was loudly asserting, “without a chimney-sweep standing up beside it. Give me a good old-fashioned garden, with rose de Meaux and gilliflowers, and that sort. I hate that talk about contrasts and backgrounds and rubbish.”

“Never mind these young fellows, Squire,” said Mr Robert, interposing before Anthony had time to answer. “There are a certain set of theories they are bound to run through before they settle into good sound stuff like you and me.”

The Squire, who was easily propitiated, but unwilling to allow it, walked away with a grunt.

Since this last home-coming of Anthony’s, it seemed as if there were always some little contest springing up between the Squire and him; the things were almost too trivial to deserve notice, but there was a pervading spirit of antagonism Anthony probably enjoyed it, for he provoked it at least as much as Mr Chester, though there were times, as on this occasion, when his opponent’s bristles rubbed a sore spot, and when the sense of restraint was galling. He drew Winifred on one side, and she went willingly, for there had been a little shadow between them ever since the dinner at the Bennetts’, and she accused herself of having been in fault, and longed to hold out her little olive-branch. There was a sweet hush and serenity in the day itself. The homely garden, which vexed Mr Robert by its disorder, was fresh and fragrant, daisies held open their rosy-tipped cups, soft little wafts of air just rustled the lighter branches, and made tremulous shadows on the grass: she was glad to move away from the others, and to stroll along a broad path bordered with stiff hollyhocks, which led towards a mulberry-tree standing in its own square of turf.

It is one of the privileges of old friendship—at least to us taciturn island folk—that there may be silence between two people without any feeling of awkwardness marring its pleasantness. Under its influence Anthony’s wrath subsided quickly, but there was still a touch of irritation in the voice in which he said at last,—

“Your father finds fault with everything I do.”

“He doesn’t mean it,—or he doesn’t mean it seriously,” said Winifred, correcting herself. “He has been accustomed so long to us girls, that he can’t understand anything that seems like contradiction.”

“I never contradict him.”

“O no, you only disagree. Only the two things are so dreadfully alike, Anthony, that no wonder he is puzzled,” said Winifred, with a quick look of fun.

“Living with you ought to have broken him in to difference of opinion.”

“O, I can’t afford to waste my contradictions on papa. I keep them for my friends.”

They glanced at each other and laughed, and walked on again silently side by side. Both were too easy in their companionship to be thinking about love, but they were very happy and contented to be together. Her influence tightened its hold upon his heart all imperceptibly, like so many threads which did not let themselves be known for fetters. There is a peril in those little threads, woven by habit, by proximity, by opportunities,—not a peril of their breaking, but of their untried strength being all unguessed, of some blast of passion, some storm of resentment, even some petty gust of pique, seeming for the moment to sweep them off, and free the heart of them forever,—until, as the rush dies away and the calm comes back, too late, perhaps, we learn that not a thread has snapt, that the work has been a work of desolation, that the small cords bind us still, like unyielding links of iron, and that the freedom we fancied we had gained is no more than a double bondage. Winifred said presently, in a questioning tone,—

“Anthony, I cannot make out what is the matter with Marion.”

“She is uneasy about Marmaduke. She has persuaded my father to write to old Tregennas. It’s the last thing I would have done myself; however, it’s his business, not mine.”

“I should long so much more for everything to go smoothly with them, if I felt more sure about Marmaduke. I wish you would tell me if you really like him,” said Winifred eagerly, “or whether it is the having been old playfellows that prejudices you towards him.”

“Of course I like him,” said Anthony, a little indignantly. “He’s the best fellow in the world. Talk of prejudices, you women keep fresh relays which come in every week, and last about as long. Here’s a poor fellow eating his heart out over work which he detests, and just because he’s down in the world, you must all set your faces against him. I wish there were a better chance of things coming right than I see at present.”

The speech ended more mildly than it began, for Anthony was suddenly struck with the golden threads which the sunshine brought out in Winifred’s hair. They were standing at this moment close to the mulberry-tree. And then he rushed off to point out to her the spot which David Stephens had intended to appropriate for the chapel. But he returned presently to the subject.

“I wonder you do not feel more for him. It must be horribly hard to know so much is against one. I’m not sure that I could stand it myself.”

“I don’t know that you could,” said Winifred, composedly.

“What makes you say so? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Winifred, just come from church, and going to teach those wretched little victims, with uncharitableness written on every hair of your head. Poor Marmaduke! Well, he gets on with your father better than I do.”

“I don’t know that, really. Only you and papa have each your own hobby-horses, and instead of trotting comfortably along, you must go full tilt at each other. I am sure he was very proud when he heard you had won the Chancellor’s medal. How nice it was of you, Anthony!”

“You could not have cared much about it.”

“Why not?” asked Winifred, who knew what was coming.

“You do not care for any poetry but the very best, you know.”

“That need not stand in the way,” said Winifred, smiling, and holding out her olive-branch magnanimously, “and besides—”

“Well?”

“I was rather cross that night, Anthony.”

“At what?”

“O, I don’t know! How can one know what makes one cross? I think Mr Milman bored me. Were you bored, too?”

“I don’t believe I was. That Miss Lovell is pleasant enough.”

“Do you think so? She worries me by drawling the last word of every sentence, and it is all so very commonplace.”

“Well, perhaps it is commonplace, but one doesn’t expect to find anything else.”

“If you like it, there is nothing to be said against it,” said Winifred carelessly, still playing with the mulberry leaves. “Shall we go back? There is something I want to tell Bessie.”

“Wait a moment,” said Anthony, not thinking much of what had been said. “Tell me, why did you say just now that you did not think I could stand being down in the world?”

Winifred was silent.

“Tell me,” he urged, trying to look in her face. “I don’t mean to go down. My belief is that circumstances are much more under our own control than we allow. Still, I should like to know why you made the assertion.”

“I suppose it is owing to that very belief you have just stated, and to your having such terrible faith in your own powers,” said Winifred, speaking with a kind of sweet strength. “You think you are sure to get what you aim at because it is good and great. I have an idea that, the higher one aims, the less one will be satisfied with what is reached, and then it is called failure, and that seems to discourage some people utterly.”

“And you think I should be discouraged?” said Anthony. “It is better not to dream about failures. They generally belong to half-heartedness, so far as I can see.”

“Not all,” said Winifred softly.

They did not speak again, and she walked along the grass that bordered the path, smelling a dewy cabbage rose which he had given her, and humming under her breath one of the old version psalms. Sometimes, in the midst of all our familiar knowledge of another, there is a sudden impression cut deep into our memory. We can give no definite reason for it, but it is there, and there forever. Anthony and Winifred had walked a hundred times as they were walking then: no change had come over the old Vicarage, which stood up to their left with fluttering shadows on the grey stones, and house-martins flashing in and out under the eaves; no new charm belonged, to the bright freshness of the garden, the quiet of the day, nor indeed was he conscious of any peculiar force about the little picture which should so impress it on his mind, and yet—he never afterwards forgot it, it never faded into dull outline, or lost its delicacy of colour; there always, not to be cast out, grew into life the quaint trim hollyhocks, the busy martins, the daisies in the grass, and brown-haired Winifred walking along with a quiet grace, singing the old psalm tune, and laying the cool rose against her cheek.

Chapter Eight.

“O Life and Love! O happy throng Of thoughts, whose only speech is song! O heart of man! canst thou not be Blithe as the air is, and as free?” Longfellow.

Mr Tregennas’s answer to the Vicar’s letter was a little unsatisfactory and perplexing. Answer, indeed, it could hardly be called, since it touched upon no subject which Mr Miles had introduced, but it contained an unexpected invitation for himself and Anthony to start at once, and pass a few days at Trenance.

Probably at no other time within the last ten years would such an invitation have been treated by the Vicar with more consideration than a hasty reply in the negative, and a speedy forgetfulness that it had been given. A man who has all his life hated change, and that uprooting of habit which even the absence of a day will effect, becomes at last a positive slave to the feeling. Nothing could be more distasteful to Mr Miles than the prospect of leaving behind him his familiar every-day life, of having the trouble of accommodating himself to new forms, and of moving, in feet, out of a world in which instinct had grown to serve him almost as well as the deliberate exercise of will. When, added to this, arose a consideration of Mr Tregennas and his uncongenial society, it was perhaps natural that on ordinary occasions he should have thrown aside the letter without so much as giving its contents a second thought.

But now there was a change. Ever since Marion’s appeal in the study, a close observer might have traced an almost wistful uneasiness in her father, would have noticed that his eyes followed her, that his voice was modulated into unusual gentleness in addressing her, and that once or twice in a discussion with Anthony he had sided with her, taking her part, indeed, with a sharpness which seemed uncalled for. His heart smote him for the blindness which, after all, had caused little or no mischief. But we are all inclined to suppose that we might have averted evil had we only seen it coming. It seemed to him as if his girl’s determination were something against which he should have watched and prayed. Not that he had any cause of complaint to make him object to Marmaduke personally as her husband, but that his poverty and present position held out no prospect of marriage, and he keenly felt what the bitterness of a long waiting would be to her. It made him long to do something that should atone for his failure of care. He called Marion into the study, put the letter into her hand, and waited silently.

“Of course you will accept, papa,” Marion said, looking up. “To-morrow will be a very good day.”

“He says nothing of Marmaduke,” Mr Miles observed slowly.

“But it means that he will listen to you.”

“I suppose I must,” said the Vicar, looking round his room with a sigh. “But I don’t know about to-morrow. Anthony may not be able to start so soon.”

“Anthony! Why should he go?” said Marion, in a tone of dissatisfaction.

“We are asked together; I could not go without him.”

No more was said, and it may have been that the greatness of the sacrifice he was about to make in some measure appeared to the Vicar to compensate for his mistakes, for he did not attempt to disguise his misery at the prospect before him, and Marion breathed more freely when she saw him seated with Anthony in the little pony-carriage, of which James and a portmanteau shared the back seat. Even when they had started, her anxiety was not ended, for twice, to Sniffs extreme disgust, the fat pony came tugging round the corner again, once to leave a message for a farmer, and once to say that Tom Lear must wait to be married until the Vicar’s return. At last they were fairly off. The children ran out to courtesy; the women speculated as to the meaning of the portmanteau.

“Mr Anthony’s gwoin’ agaen,” said old Araunah, shaking his head. “Thyur’s a dale of comin’ and gwoin’ nowadays. Us used to think twice afore us car’d ower legs dree or fowter miles out o’ t’ pleace, us did, and ’twarn’t wi’out there wor a good rason for’t, a peg to sell, or a bet o’ sense like that. But thyur’s a dale of comin’ and gwoin’ nowadays.”

“I shall never believe they are gone until they are back again, I am sure,” said Mrs Miles, coming into the porch with tearful eyes. “It is three years since the Vicar slept out of the house, and that was to preach, and it does seem so unnatural he should have left his sermon book behind him. But there is really one good thing about it, and that is that we can have the kitchen chimney swept quite comfortably. Marion my dear, you’ll not mind cold—”

But Marion had escaped. She wanted some vent for the excitement which was apt to rise even to the verge of pain in its passionate impetuosity. The little shrubbery path was as oppressive to her as the four walls of the house, and almost mechanically she opened the gate and crossed the road towards the Hardlands meadows.

The Squire and Bessie were just starting for a ride when Marion reached the house, and Winifred was with them at the door, indulging the pony and the roan cob with lumps of sugar. Bessie was a pretty bright-eyed girl of sixteen, a good deal spoilt by her father, whose special pride it was that she displayed a keener talent for housekeeping than Winifred had ever developed, and who, in consequence, aided and abetted her attempts to gain the upper hand in that department. The Squire was in high good-humour over the result of his hay-making, and it was not lessened by the triumph with which he compared his own success with the less favourable crop secured on the Vicar’s glebe.

“Good morning, Marion, good morning,” he began in his loud hearty voice, “what does your father say now to my waiting a good fortnight after my neighbours? Tell him to come up and have a look at the ricks, if he’s not convinced yet. I suppose he was wanting to jump with Master Anthony’s theories, eh? He’ll lead you all a pretty dance yet, if you don’t look out.”

“That’s a shame, papa,” said Bessie, promptly, “for Anthony was not at home when they cut their hay at the Vicarage.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m sure. Anthony has a finger in every pie that I can see. Where’s he off now? Who’s this old Tregennas? Well, Bessie, you and I had better be jogging, or Winifred’s fine cook will be spoiling the luncheon, and swearing it’s our fault.”

With Marion’s feverish longing for the open air, she would not allow Winifred to go into the house, but insisted upon her walking to the end of the garden and crossing one of the newly mown fields, which led up to a crowning circle of firs commanding the widest view in the neighbourhood. There she poured out a torrent of hopes and fears, all Marmaduke’s wrongs, and all she had determined Mr Tregennas should do. It struck Winifred at times as a little strange that Marion could speak so readily of things which her own instinct, more delicate and more proud, would have guarded like a treasure in a casket, but she put the thought aside. Marion was lying on the grass, rolling the short blades into balls, while Winifred sat up and looked straight before her over the gently sloping fields, the apple orchards, Underham with its white houses and black wharves, the river winding and broadening between red wooded banks, until it lost itself in a distant dimly glimmering sea. All the colours blended into each other with a sweet fair freshness. There was just that subtile charm of warmth which brings life, not languor. Sounds reached them, softened, but vigorous. Vessels were discernible in the river, coming up with spread sails before the breeze, and timber or coal on board for those same black wharves. It might have been a blank to Marion, whose mind was too self-absorbed to be affected by the outer world, but Winifred was at all times open to these external influences, and they contrasted strangely with Marion’s impetuous complaints of misery.

“If I could be only at Trenance!” she ended.

“Dear Marion, Anthony will be there,—he will do his best. Old Mr Tregennas is sure to like him.”

“Anthony!” said Marion, with a hard little laugh. “Anthony will fell into one of his fevers. He will find the estate at sixes and sevens, and imagine it to be his mission to set it to rights. Besides, it is Marmaduke, not Anthony, whom it is of consequence that Mr Tregennas should like.”

Winifred hardly knew what to say. Her sympathies were so active that a strongly expressed idea such as Marion’s was apt to carry her away, even in spite of her better judgment, and yet her mind was healthfully constituted, and repelled by what was morbid or strained. Surely there was no such absence of hope in Marmaduke’s lot that it should be bewailed as unbearable. Surely Mr Miles had painfully uprooted himself, and Anthony agreed to a distasteful journey for his sake. And meanwhile the sun was shining, and the larks singing, and a sea-breeze sweeping along the water up to the fir-crowned height. She must have sung, too, if it had not been for the risk of hurting Marion’s feelings. As it was, her foot was beating on the short grass, and her eyes danced in spite of all her efforts to feel concerned.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Marion discontentedly.

“Of what we shall wear as your bridesmaids. If you don’t let me choose for myself, I will never forgive you.”

“How silly you are! If things go on as they are going now, I shall be too old to have any bridesmaids at all, by the time we are married.”

“Well, I don’t know how things could go much faster, but I believe you would like to be married in a whirlwind. Now, it seems to me it would have been quite dreadful if you had not had these little hitches and impediments. Why should you be different from other people?”

“I hope you will have them yourself, and then you will know they are not so agreeable.”

“But I did not say they were agreeable,” said Winifred, her voice taking a changed tone. “Only that they are such small things in comparison—”

“In comparison with what? I don’t understand,—I don’t think you understand yourself,” Marion exclaimed impatiently.

“O yes, I do,” Winifred said confidently, but without further explanation. Marion was not the person to whom she could have breathed a word of the little visions that trooped up softly as she spoke,—innocent womanly visions, coming and going with a tender grace. She only looked out towards the shining streak of sea and smiled.

Somebody opened the gate at the bottom of the field, waved his hat, and began to clamber lazily towards the two girls,—a big man, with long limbs and high shoulders. Winifred jumped up with a little relief when she saw him, and nodded and beckoned at once as if he needed to be shown where they were.

“How did you find us, Frank?” she called out.

“Parker told me you were somewhere about. Women always give themselves so much trouble before they can do anything comfortable, that I knew I should find you at the highest point of the place.”

He came straggling up, and stretched himself on the grass with an air of contentment. The lark had finished its song, and dropped silently into the grass; the wind was freshening, blowing back Winifred’s hair, and stirring her face into colour;—everything was full of delicious, strong beauty. Winifred looked down at her cousin and smiled, perhaps at the sight of his brown, good-tempered eyes.

“Now that you are come, you shall tell us what you have been doing,” she said, not sorry to lead Marion’s thoughts away from the road of unavailing regrets.

“Doing? I have been walking through the mud. That is what you all do here always, isn’t it? I met an old woman who told me a great deal more about cider than I ever knew before, and a man—O, by the way, Winifred, that is what I wanted to ask you—who is a short man, rather deformed, with a powerful face, and strong religious opinions?”

“It must have been David Stephens, Anthony’s bugbear,” said Winifred.

Other people’s bugbears often strike one curiously in an opposite light. Frank repeated the word a little wonderingly.

“He is a dissenter,” said Marion, beginning to listen. “He actually wanted to build a chapel in Thorpe, and had almost got that stupid old Maddox to let him have the field by the church. Luckily Anthony found it out, and stopped it. I dare say he hates him for it.”

“Poor fellow!” said Frank kindly, while Marion stared at him. “One can soon see he is a dissenter. There is nothing very original in his opinions, either, so far as they go: he has got hold of the usual distortion of facts. But it was the intensity of the man’s convictions which impressed me. In these days it is something even to be a fanatic.”

“Every one says he is a most mischievous agitator,” persisted Marion, eagerly. “We are quite unhappy because our maid—Faith Stokes—has allowed herself to be engaged to him. Her father is gardener at the Red House. All her family dislike it.”

“She will stick to him,” asserted Captain Orde. “He is the very man to get a hold over a woman. Unless he himself gives her up. If I don’t mistake him, he would neither let his own happiness nor another person’s stand in the way of what he imagined to be his work,—perhaps not even his own conscience.”

“How could you talk to him?” Marion said reproachfully. “He must be very unsafe.”

“Unsafe? Unsafe as a powder-train. But I don’t know that it is altogether his fault. He has been cramped and goaded and sat upon, and no one has taken the trouble to do anything but run counter to his opinions.”

“Because they are so wrong.”

“Not altogether wrong. They may get mixed up with no end of mistakes, but there are some which seem to me a little beyond our improving. He believes he may help some poor men and women up towards God,” said Captain Orde, speaking with tender reverence. “There is that, at all events.”

Winifred, who had been listening silently, turned round quickly and clasped her hands.

“O yes, we cannot judge him,” she said earnestly, “when we have never tried to do anything for him! I am so glad you have told us, Frank.”

All her feelings had been stirred and touched somehow that morning. We cannot explain how it is that very often this is so when there seems no particular reason for it, it may be a chance word that awakens a chain of ideas, or reaches springs which are sealed at other times when we take more trouble to get at them. The happy sunshine about her, the thoughts which had grown into life, quickened Winifreds sympathies into generous glow. Frank was looking at her, at the flush on her cheek, the eager kindness of her eyes, with a strange thrill in his heart that his words should have so moved her. He could have very easily forgotten David Stephens, if Marion had not said coldly,—

“Anthony will not be much obliged to you, Winifred.”

“O, Anthony will understand!” said Winifred, speaking with quick conviction. “It was natural that he should be annoyed about the chapel. That is another thing. But if Frank convinces him that the poor fellow is in earnest, Anthony will respect him, however much they may differ. I am sure he will try to help him.”

Frank Orde did not say any more. His eyes had an odd, wistful look in them, as if some discord had suddenly jarred; but Winifred was quite blind to the look. Perhaps this very want of self-consciousness, which dulled the perception of things that touched herself, was one secret of her power of influence. People who forget themselves seldom fail to impress others.

Chapter Nine.

The Vicar’s departure caused a few lively gleams of astonishment among the Thorpe people, especially as it was not a call to preach that had taken him away; but no one would have dreamed of finding fault with him if he had locked up the church, carried the keys with him, and condemned the village to virtual excommunication until his return. Tom Lear and his young woman meekly submitted to the postponement of their bridal. George Tucker, who had wanted a certificate signed, said the parson was away, and there was an end of it. There is often something pathetically touching in this mute acceptance by the poor of the little hardships for which we should impatiently seek remedies; but in this case it was Mr Miles’s true kindness of heart and courtesy of manner that made his people treat with a forbearance at least as refined the inconveniences to which his absent-mindedness and forgetfulness exposed them.

Then, as events strangely multiply themselves, the village awakened to another agitation, for an old woman declared that an attempt to rob her had been made in the night, and Mr Robert Mannering, summoned to the cottage in his magisterial character, was seen by attentive watchers to turn towards the Vicarage, and walk briskly up the drive towards the door. There also he was observed to knock, two little urchins having been sent to run down the Church Lane, and report whether or not he entered the house.

The knock outside was answered by Sniff within by a series of short sharp barks, which only increased in energy until the door being opened by Faith disclosed a friend. A dog of weaker character would at once have acknowledged his mistake by a sudden change of attitude, and a hospitable greeting to the new-comer. Sniff knew better. With infinite presence of mind, and without a moment’s hesitation, he rushed past Mr Mannering as if he had nothing in the world to do with the matter, and, planting himself in the middle of the drive, barked long and loudly at an imaginary enemy, after which he subsided into an amiable calm, returned leisurely to the house, went up stairs, scratched open the drawing-room, door, and advanced to Mr Mannering with the most friendly of brown eyes.

“Then there was nothing really amiss?” Mrs Miles was saying.

“Nothing whatever. When does the Vicar return to put an end to these panics?” said Mr Robert, patting Sniff.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mrs Miles, shaking her head. “I do hope he will write and tell us how he gets on with old Mr Tregennas. It makes me quite uncomfortable to think of their being there, when I remember how miserable William’s poor aunt was.”

Mr Mannering looked up quickly, checked himself, and said hesitatingly,—

“He once lived in Yorkshire, I believe?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs Miles, “Yorkshire was just where he did live. That was before he changed his name. Do you know about him? Do tell us what you know.”

“He had daughters, I think.”

“One daughter,—Margaret. But there is quite a sad story about her, for Mr Tregennas disapproved of her marriage, and never forgave her. He must be so terribly unforgiving,” concluded Mrs Miles, with a sigh.

“I heard,” said Mr Mannering, still slowly, “that her father objected to her choice, and that she and her husband went to Australia. But I heard also,—I hope it is so,”—he went on with a little agitation, “that Mrs Harford was a happy woman?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. Poor thing, she is dead now, and as for the child, of course it is for Marmaduke’s interests that Mr Tregennas should hold out, but still—it does seem hard, doesn’t it, Marion?”

“Mamma, what is the use of reviving that old story!” said Marion, impatiently. “Mr Tregennas is not likely to change his mind.”

“No, my dear, no, to be sure not; indeed, one could not wish it. Only it does seem a little hard, for there was nothing against him that we could ever hear, and it was only that she was too fond of him to give him up. Don’t you feel sorry for her, Mr Mannering?”

“Sorry! Good heavens, madam!” he said, jumping up with a sudden impetuosity which startled Mrs Miles, and made him beg her pardon hastily. “I knew Miss Hare in old days,” he explained, “and, as you say, it strikes one as something horrible that her father should never have softened towards her. There is a child, isn’t there?”

“Yes, a little girl; and how she may be brought up since the poor mother’s death, I am sure nobody knows. William’s poor aunt did all in her power to make Mr Tregennas think more kindly; but, dear me, she used to say one might as well talk to a stone-wall, and then Mr Harford was nearly as bad, so there was really no bringing them together.”

“Things can’t be forced,” Marion put in again. “I dare say Mr Harford is a great deal better off staying out there and keeping his daughter to himself. His position is not half so trying as Marmaduke’s, who is the last person considered.”

“My dear, don’t say so. I am sure I have been quite uncomfortable about him, poor boy, ever since he was here, and I do wish he had taken a hamper of vegetables with him. Still, one may be sorry for two people as well as one.”

“Sixteen—seventeen—the child must be seventeen by this time,” said Mr Robert meditatively.

“Only think of your remembering so well!”

“Yes, only think!” repeated Mr Mannering, with his old cheery voice returning as he rose to go. “Miss Marion, I give you warning that I shall not be able to come to the Vicarage much more if you allow my poor roses to fall into such a miserable condition. There’s a Devoniensis at the porch, which it goes to my heart to see. Good by, Mrs Miles; you need not trouble your head about the robber, but if you or Marion will go and sit with her for an hour, I can’t conceive any greater enjoyment to the poor old soul than to tell you the history from beginning to end.”

“I am glad he is gone,” said Marion, feverishly, as the door shut him out.

There were other little strings pulling to the same tune, and setting hearts throbbing at the Vicarage just then, while the sweet summer days blossomed and faded. David Stephens met Faith that very evening, as she came back from her father’s cottage. Perhaps there could not have been a more favourable moment for him, for old Araunah, who was the most inveterate of the family against the preacher, had been inveighing loudly and angrily upon his granddaughter’s infatuation, and her mother had joined in a weak, irritating sort of way, which had raised Faith’s indignation on behalf of her lover.

“A poor crooked feller like that there David! It do vex me so to think o’t, Faith, that I can’t give my mind to my meat, an’ if I doan’t kep abowt an’ do my niffles, I doan’t know watt iver’ll come to the house nor fayther. If he wor a fine, hearty young man, now, there’d be somethin’ to say for ’ee.”

“Handsome is as handsome does,” said Faith, flushing. She was not very much in love with David, but this disparagement created a natural desire to set him a little higher than she might otherwise have done. “There was crowds to hear him last Sunday, and the people so taken up with him, they’re ready to cut off their hands if he told them to.”

“Likely enough,” said old Araunah, with vast acorn. “You’ll find more fules than wise, my gal, wheriver you goes. For my peart, I doan’t see as this hyur ground grows much beside.”

Faith had come away in the very thick of the battle, and as she suddenly turned a corner upon David, the feeling of championship excited on his behalf had not had time to cool. She showed him more plainly than usual that she was glad to see him, and the perception of this brought an immediate change in his pale face.

“You’re looking tired, David,” she said tenderly. “You’ve been tramping about too much, as you’re always doing. Why can’t you take a little rest? Nobody works so hard as you, I do believe; there’s father at it all day, but when he comes home, there he sits comfortable, and you’re only off to something else.”

“Your father works for time, and I have to work against it, that’s the difference. If you saw those poor souls looking up at you with hungry eyes you wouldn’t know where to stop. Not but what the Devil is very keen in his temptations. He sets it before me again and again that there’s more thrust on my hands by the Lord than one man can do, and he’s not content with that, without raising up difficulties and hindrances on either side so as to make the work seem pretty nigh impossible at times. But in spite of all, there’s a great stirring of hearts in those that hear.”

“John Moore told me you’d more than ever last Sunday.”

“Yes, there were plenty that had never been before, and perhaps they were more moved than those that have had the Gospel put before them longer. And many told me they should bring more the next time. It’s the truth at work.”

“And your preaching, David,” said Faith, a little jealously. “They say they like to listen to you, because you never want for words, and that you are the finest preacher the Wesleyans have ever had here.”

“It isn’t that,” said David, with a grave earnestness in his voice. “It never can be the instruments that do the work. I couldn’t say ten words if I believed they were my own words that I was speaking. There’s nothing in it, but that I tell them what the Gospel says to them, without letting man’s devices come in between us.”

“I don’t know,” said Faith, shaking her head incredulously; “I think it’s the way you put it mostly that pleases them. There’s old Mary Potter wanting to hear you, but she can never get in all the way to Underham. And grandfather’s that angry when he hears them talk of a chapel in Thorpe!”

David sighed, but it was at the first part of the girls speech rather than the latter, which only acted upon him as a challenge to battle acts upon a brave man. He loved Faith with an intensity which often pained him, conscious as he was of a want of agreement between her nature and his own, conscious also that her theological views were rather adopted from an interest in himself, than from any firm persuasion on one side or the other. The truth lay before him in one narrow groove, out of which there was no turning a hair’s-breadth to the left hand or right. It followed necessarily that a conviction would force itself upon him,—when he had the courage to face it,—that Faith had as yet no part or share in the salvation which he preached as altogether a matter of faith, and the further conviction which lurked behind the other, but which he never yet had ventured boldly to drag into the light, would have forced him to cast away his love, as the eye or hand which needed to be destroyed. It does not require the same conclusions to be aware that what to David Stephens was actually a matter of conscience there was danger in temporising with. He told himself that the sin was at least all his own, and suffered expediency to suggest the hope that Faith would by and by become other than she was. The unacknowledged scourge of anxiety which he felt made him the more zealous for the building of a chapel in Thorpe: he had then the promise of becoming its minister, and he was aware that the position held out charms to Faith, who had some sort of idea that it would raise her almost to a level with Mrs Miles herself. David told himself fiercely that once he had Faith for his own, he should have removed her from the teaching which he held to be utterly antagonistic to the truth, and that his prayers and his love must win her to his side for eternity. He had fully believed himself to have succeeded with old Maddox,—who, having lived a life of indifference, was beginning to find it less easy now that death was in view, and caught at any teaching which held out a promise of security,—when Anthony Miles had overthrown his hopes. He did not, however, yet despair, nor must it be imagined that it was the thought of Faith which even chiefly incited him in his efforts. Had she been lost to him that very day, his convictions were so earnest, his yearning to save souls so strong, that he would have toiled as perseveringly as ever: but she was the human spur which, almost unconsciously, gave a feverish anxiety to his endeavours, and excited at all events a strong personal persuasion that Anthony, in opposing him, was siding with the great enemy of all good, against whom David daily wrestled and prayed.

“Your grandfather may think different one day, Faith, but if he doesn’t, we mustn’t let the words of those that are dearest to us keep us back from the plough.” David said this with a throb of anguish in his own heart, but he contrived to steady his voice, and it only gave it one of those singular thrills which added not a little to the influence it had upon his hearers. Faith was impressed with it just as her own thoughts had strayed off to picturing herself as minister’s wife, sitting in the chapel arrayed in a silk gown, and she looked hurriedly in his face with a sensation partly pride and partly discomfort. The plough was not in her thoughts, but she acknowledged it to be David’s duty to talk about it, and her little head had an idea that by becoming his wife she might both be good by proxy, and also share in the admiration which she heard largely expressed of his talents as a preacher. On the whole, she had seldom felt more kindly towards David than at this moment; while he, poor fellow, took it as a hopeful sign of grace, that she did not urge any of those arguments against his doctrines which she brought forward when she fancied they interfered with his advancement. He held her hand in his with a strong grasp as they parted, and the colour which rose in her cheek under his gaze gave him a glad thrill of exultation. It seemed to him as if he were borne on the top of an irresistible wave, which was sweeping triumphant spoil from the very grasp of the enemy. And now the soul dearer to him than his own was being drawn slowly but surely towards him, while to come to him must, as he believed, lead it onwards towards his God.

Chapter Ten.

These few days of waiting were intolerable to Marion, who hated all delays, and from her earliest childhood objected to hear reason, as the old nurse used to say. Whatever was hanging over her head, good, bad, or indifferent, she would have come down at once, and let the crash be over. Poor Mrs Miles had too little in common with her daughter to know what to say or do. Every morning she was sure that a letter would come by that post, and as sure when the hour had passed that it was more natural that it should not arrive until the next day. Such little securities win their triumphs at last. On Saturday morning a few lines from Anthony announced their intended return in the afternoon.

It struck Marion at once that her father was depressed, although there was evident gladness at getting back to his home. After he had kissed her, and before turning to his letters, he looked for a moment into her face with a touch of the wistfulness which his talk with her in the study seemed to have brought into his eyes. She determined to find Anthony, who had gone off to the stables to see the pony nibbed down, and whose whereabouts were easily discoverable through Sniffs bark of delight. Hearing his sister’s call, he crossed the yard.

“Hallo, Marion, what have you been doing with yourself? You look as if you wanted fresh air badly. Put on your hat, and come up to Hardlands with me.”

“Hardlands! Anthony, you and papa are as cruel as can be to keep me in this horrible suspense. O Anthony, dear, do tell me,—what did he say?—what is Marmaduke to do?”

“I think it’s pretty nearly right, or on the way to be right,” said Anthony, digging his hands into his pockets, “though I don’t exactly know what Marmaduke expects.”

“To be his heir,” said Marion quickly. “It was a promise.”

“I think Marmaduke must have made a mistake there,” began Anthony, but she interrupted him at once.

“He did not, indeed.”

Anthony was silenced, and began to whistle, not knowing in the least what to say. His father had begged him to tell Marion no more than was absolutely necessary, and there was an uncomfortable and unacknowledged impression upon the two that she would not be satisfied with their tidings. Mr Tregennas would not admit anything definite. “Sha’n’t forget the lad, I tell you. If you want to know for your daughter’s sake, he’ll have enough to live upon, and she, too, unless you’ve brought her up in these new-fangled fashions.” This was what he had said, and of course it was something, Mr Miles would have said it was a good deal, if there had not been that uneasy consciousness of Marmaduke’s expectations, and it was quite certain that it did not satisfy Marion. It was sufficient, however, to give her a further ground on which to urge her father to admit of their engagement. If the Vicar had felt himself as free as usual to follow his own judgment, he would, probably, for some time yet, have refused his consent; but he was in the position of a man who, having failed to see what all the time lay close at hand, feels a nervous distrust of himself, and, moreover, his life had fallen too completely into a matter of routine for him to meet an unexpected call for decision as firmly as he would have met it years ago. He would have willingly let the matter drift to the shore as the tide of circumstances carried it. But Marion was too well aware of the advantage she had gained not to push it farther; Mr Tregennas had rather encouraged than opposed the engagement, and Mrs Miles shook her head over Marion’s loss of colour and brightness. The Vicar was inclined to believe implicitly in his wife at this moment, Marion had one of those temperaments which in their many changes act rapidly upon people’s looks, and her father could not meet her heavy eyes and live his own life any more in peace.

So she had her way; the engagement was allowed, Marmaduke was to spend his approaching leave at Thorpe, and Anthony and he were to go for a week to Trenance.

Here again the poor Vicar was aware of perplexity. Mr Tregennas had shown an inconveniently strong liking for Anthony, whom nobody wanted him to like. His energy and brightness seemed to have such an attraction for him, that the old man, now with little more left of his old nigged self-will than a certain feeble captiousness, would sit and watch him by the hour from under his big eyebrows. The Vicar, who had become aware of this, was almost provoked at his son’s unconsciousness. Anthony was at all times disposed to take it for granted that things would be as he thought best, and it seemed to him that Marmaduke was really as sure of his inheritance as if it had all been plainly set down in black and white. Even if the idea of his becoming his friend’s rival had ever entered his head, the prospect of heirship would have had little fascination for him. He had some money of his own, which made him independent of his father. Trenance was but a dull country place, and he was too young and too sanguine to care much for money and possessions. He wanted power, but not of that sort, and how to gain it he had not yet resolved, but there was a swing of energy about the young fellow which made all things seem possible. If his self-confidence were too buoyant, too ready to rush blindfold, it was a danger which he would be the last to discover for himself; if, later in life, his character were likely to develop just a touch of arrogance, it was for the present concealed by his brightness and boyish gaiety of heart. At any rate he could never be covetous. Trenance was nothing to him, and thinking of Marmaduke it was with a little real compassion for a life which was to be bounded by so many acres, a mine or two, and the little church town. His own dreams reached far beyond those limits.

Already he had taken a step in one of the paths which lay before him, and seemed to invite him into smiling depths. He had written a pamphlet upon certain branches of reform, and it had been noticed with some commendation by an influential paper, to Mrs Miles’s great delight. The notice was a good deal more dear to her than the pamphlet, and she would go up to her son’s room and read out little bits, although with a sharp criticism of its shortcomings.

“There are only two quotations, and so much that people would have liked to read! And why should they say you are a young author? I am sure there is nothing your father might not have written so far as age is concerned.”

“They must criticise, you know.”

“Well,” said Mrs Miles, doubtfully, “if they did not find a little fault, I suppose others would be jealous. But they could not deny that it is excellent.”

She got up as she spoke, and went softly about the room, putting some tidying touches which Faith had neglected. The summer sun was shining in and discovering dust in little out-of-the-way corners where things were heaped. There was a faded sketch of Hardlands by Winifred stuck over the chimney-piece.

“It is a pity those people don’t know who you are,” Mrs Miles continued. “I wish you would write and tell them, Anthony; I am sure they would be pleased. My dear, you would find a better picture than this in the portfolio down stairs.”

“It does very well,” said Anthony sleepily.

Mrs Miles went on with her work, but presently began again.

“My dear, it is a long time since you called at Deanscourt, and Sir James Milman has always been so civil that it does not seem quite right. Suppose you were to ride over there this afternoon.”

“I don’t believe they’ve come down yet.”

“Lady and Miss Milman are at home, I know,” asserted Mrs Miles gravely, “for she wrote the other day to ask for Ellen Harding’s character. Miss Milman seems a very sweet girl.”

“Oh!”

“And very pretty, I’m sure.”

“She’s not my style,” said Anthony, with an air of having disposed of her.

“My dear, I think you would find her so, if only you knew her better,” interposed Mrs Miles earnestly, “and Mrs Featherly tells me—”

“What?”

“That all those girls have money.”

“Well, mother, I’m too shy to venture there by myself, but, if you like, I’ll drive you over in the pony-carriage.”

“Thank you, I’m sure, my dear, it would be very nice,” said Mrs Miles, whose pleasure in driving with her son was mixed with several pet perturbations of her own; “but are you sure the pony is not too fresh?”

“Fresh? He wants a little work, of course, but it’s nothing on earth but play that makes him caper. I’ll see he does no harm.”

“My dear, I can’t help wishing he would play in the stables, where he really has nothing else to do, but if you think he’s quite safe—”

“As safe as any old cart-horse. Come, mother, if he should upset us, I’ll give you leave to call me all the bad names you can think of.”

“O dear, but that will not make it any better,” said Mrs Miles, shaking her head. “I don’t see how you can help it if he takes it into his head to play, as you call it. However, my dear, you really ought to go to Deanscourt, so I will be quite ready by four o’clock, and now I must go and speak to Faith about the dust in this room.”

“You don’t mean to say, mother, that you’ve let Faith engage herself to that dissenting fellow, Stephens,” said Anthony, beginning to speak energetically.

“I could not prevent it,” said Mrs Miles, giving her head a mournful shake by way of protest. “I don’t know what the world is coming to, but servants are not at all what they were.”

“We ought to have stopped it, though. How was he ever allowed to hang about the house? Faith is too good a little thing for a humbugging rascal like that. You wouldn’t believe how he has worked upon that old idiot Maddox; if I hadn’t gone into it, my father would have had a meeting-house stuck under his very nose, ay, and he’ll have it still, unless I keep a sharp lookout. But, upon my word, it is a great deal too bad that he should get hold of Faith.”

Anthony was handling a tool as he spoke, and punching a hole in a bit of wood with as much force as if it had been Stephens’s head. Mrs Miles never liked to see her son “put out;” his face was quick to reflect his feelings, and he certainly did not look pleasantly upon what galled him. It was quite true that David was his present bugbear, and that he gave him credit for no motives except the lowest: his feelings had so much heat in them, that they deprived him in a great measure of the power of sympathy with that with which he had no agreement, and were always easily excited into prejudice.

Chapter Eleven.

“Like, but unlike, the sun that shone, The waves that beat the shore, The words we said, the songs we sung, Like, unlike, evermore.” A.F.C.K.

The summer was passing at Thorpe very much as other summers had passed, and yet with the difference that dogs our footsteps whether we will or no. The grass waves, the forget-me-nots look up from the brink of cool brown streams, the roses are as sweet as ever,—we wonder as we touch them how there can be a change and what it is, but we know in our hearts that it has come, and that things can never more be what they once have been.

As for Anthony, all things considered, he seemed to be leading a pleasant life enough. There was bright, settled weather, and the neighbourhood had taken one of those sudden freaks of gaiety with which such neighbourhoods are occasionally seized; dinners and picnics and cricket-matches succeeded one another rapidly, people came to stay with each other, glad to escape from the heat of London to these pretty country-places, where they could lie under the shadow of great elms, and pick dewy fruit in old-fashioned gardens. It was an easy, charming existence, with a busy idleness about it, which had an indescribable delight so long as the sun would shine. Anthony was wanted for all the little festivities, he was asked to stay here, to dine there; the Milmans, the Hunters, the Bennetts, the Davieses, had each some attraction to offer, and young ladies who were ready to encourage Mr Miles’s attentions. By and by little echoes of rumours began to be heard. At one picnic he had talked to no one but Miss Lovell, at another dinner-party he had devoted himself for the whole evening to Miss Milman. Winifred had been there, and had seen it for herself, and, indeed, Anthony, when he indulged in these flirtations, generally contrived to be near Winifred. Not that a spirit of mischief prompted him on such occasions, or anything beyond a light-hearted enjoyment of the present moment. He liked the pretty flatteries of manner, the little attentions, which the young girls were not unwilling to lavish upon him,—liked to feel himself courted and appealed to,—liked also, or something more than liked, that Winifred should be near him, that he might look at her, listen to her at the very moment he was turning away, touch something she had touched, unconsciously compare her with her companions. Unconsciously, I repeat, for, although many problems were puzzling him at this moment, he was thinking least of all about his own heart. He did very much what he liked, and if it pleased him to talk to Miss Milman and to sit near Winifred, he talked and he sat. That was all.

That was all, and no one could have said a word against it if it had been always so. He had no intention of neglecting Winifred; but to a girl who loves, unintentional neglect is more cruelly wounding than any other. Each day worked with a sort of slow torture upon her, the more so that her cheeks burnt with shame, when she even acknowledged it to herself. She was in high spirits,—or so it seemed. She fancied herself that all sweetness and gentleness had died out of her heart, leaving bitter ashes behind. When she spoke to Anthony it was laughingly and lightly, only every now and then there would descend a sharp cut, or one that she thought sharp, poor child, and would repeat over to herself with a dreary satisfaction, while she invented other sayings more terrible, which the time never came for uttering. After all, they were not so severe as she intended, for such weapons did not belong to her by nature, and she used them as tremblingly as a woman will fire off a gun that she expects to explode in her hands. As often as not, Anthony did not notice these little attacks; he noticed more what she did not say, the pleasant things which fell so trippingly from others’ lips, to Winifred’s disdain. Feeling as if Anthony were slipping away altogether from the pleasant, familiar intercourse which had been enough to satisfy her while it lasted, and which, therefore, she fancied would have satisfied her forever, these sweet summer days, in which all the world was making holiday, were to her full of restless misery, to which she dared neither give a name nor a cause, and over which she shed the bitterest tears that her life as yet had known.

No one saw the struggle. It would have added tenfold to her suffering if they had done so, for she had too much of her grandmothers undaunted spirit not to be at times fierce and impatient with herself, and her very prayers were not so often that she might be loved again, as that she might cease to love, and so have done with the pain. She had no mother. The Squire, when he was in his most jovial moods, would strike Anthony on the back and ask who was the last flame, but his own daughter’s name had never occurred to him. Mrs Miles was distracted between hopes and fears, represented by Miss Milman and Miss Davies. Marion was taken up with Marmaduke, who was at Thorpe, and who for his part was absorbed in thoughts of Mr Tregennas and Trenance. After this one step had been gained, he was greedy for a clearer declaration of the old man’s intentions, and waited restlessly for a repetition of the invitation to himself and Anthony. Yet when it arrived, he said jealously to Marion,—

“Why should Anthony go? What has he to do with it? Is he trying to come over the old man?”

Even she flamed a little. “You should know him better. There was never any one in the world who cared less for money,” she said angrily.

One wonders sometimes how many misjudgments will rise up and face us one day. Anthony was so far from thinking the thoughts that Marmaduke put into his head, that he was a good deal vexed at the summons which took him away from the pleasant little round into which he had fallen. But he consoled himself with grumbling, and the Milmans insisted upon putting off their picnic until his return.

“They’ll turn the boy’s head between them,” said Mr Robert Mannering wrathfully to himself. He was in his garden, alternately attending to some newly budded roses, and doing his utmost to discomfit the imperturbable Stokes. The little ugly red-faced man guessed better than other people what was going on, and perhaps saw more clearly. “Confound those women!” he said ungallantly. “They do their best to spoil any man they take a fancy to! Stokes, I presume you suppose these unhappy buds are to undo their own bandages? I should like to tie you up for a week, and see how you’d feel at the end of it. And those seedling carnations are in a disgraceful condition.”

“There bain’t wan o’ them worth the soil he grows in,” asserted Stokes with round emphasis.

“Not worth! Pray do you know where the seed came from, and how much I gave for it?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised but what you might ha’ given anything they asked of you. I can’t help that, Mr Robert. There’s a lot of impostors in gardining like as there is in anything else, unless you looks pretty sharp. And they thyur caernations is rubbish.”

“That’s your ignorance. I should like to know how much you knew about gardening until I taught you.”

“I knowed rubbish—always,” said Stokes, with an air of decision which fairly drove Mr Robert off the field. He walked towards the house across the short fine turf, all unlike the Vicarage lawn with its intruding daisies and dandelions, smiling a little to himself over his own discomfiture.

“They are worthless, I believe,” he said, “only I didn’t think the fellow would have the wit to find it out. Who are these coming in at the gate? The Chesters, if I’m not mistaken.” And away hurried Mr Robert to receive his visitors.

“The girls got hold of me, and would make me walk over with them,” said the Squire, pulling Bessie’s hair, and talking loudly. “What are you doing in the garden, eh? Your hobby, ain’t it, Mannering? I’ll lay sixpence, though, you don’t show me a finer dish of peas than we had for dinner yesterday. What were they called, Bessie? Bessie’s the one for remembering all the fine names.”

“Come and dine with us one day, and I’ll see what we can do. Will you say Thursday?—unless Miss Winifred has some engagement.”

“No,” said Winifred, with a little weariness in her voice, which Mr Mannering detected at once. “The Milmans were to have had a picnic on that day, but it is to wait.”

“Because Anthony is going away,” put in Bessie in an aggrieved tone.

“They want young Miles to marry the girl Milman, and so they can’t make enough of him,” said the Squire. “That’s the long and short of it.”

“Ah, I don’t believe he has any such notion in his head,” replied Mr Robert, manfully. “He’ll not be marrying just yet, though other people will marry him a dozen times over.”

“Perhaps not, perhaps not; I don’t know that I should expect to see him do anything so sensible. Old Milman isn’t over-troubled with brains, but they carry him along very fairly, and he’s as sound a Tory as any man in the county. It might be the making of the young fellow to marry into a good steady holdfast family like that, and get some of his harebrained notions knocked out of him,” said the Squire, who was becoming very sore with Anthony’s arguments.

“O, his notions will come all right by and by!” said Mr Robert pacifically. “People can’t all think and live in just the same grooves.”

“More’s the pity. I don’t see that the new grooves are any the better.”

“Well, perhaps sometimes they’re not so much worse as we think them. And how does Bessie get on without Miss Palmer?”

“Why, she plagues us all,” said the Squire, with great satisfaction. “She’s always running out into the fields after me, when she ought to be at her lessons, or her sampler, I tell her. Winifred’s got no end of trouble with her. And now she’s bothering my life out to go into Aunecester twice a week, to the School of Art I suppose she must go, but who’s to take her, I should like to know?”

“You, papa, of course,” said Bessie decidedly. “You are always as glad as you can be to go to Aunecester.”

“There, you hear. That’s how she serves her father,” said Mr Chester, chuckling, and pulling her hair again. “No, thank you, we’ll not come in, Henderson’s waiting to speak to me about his farm. Where’s Mannering?”

“He’s driven over to dine at the Hunters’.”

“What a man he is for society.”

“Yes, he likes it, and it does him good,” said Mr Robert quietly.

“That’s what people always say about things that please them. I tried it for a good bit upon salmon, but it didn’t do. Had to give it up. Well, girls, now you’ve had your say, I hope you’re satisfied, and will let me go home in peace. You’re a lucky man, Mannering, to have your own way without being plagued for it. Here’s Bessie, now: a fellow will have a pretty handful that gets her,—bless you, she’ll not let him say his soul’s his own,” added the Squire, in high good-humour, making signs behind his youngest daughter’s back.

“How is the Farleyense, Mr Mannering?” asked Winifred, lingering.

“I really think that, if possible, it is in more perfect condition than when you did it the honour to come to look at it.”

“And Stokes has not tried any experiments?”

“He knows that if he did it would cost him his place. No, Miss Winifred, there is a point behind which even the easiest master must intrench himself.”

The girl sighed a little. Her father and sister were strolling along the lane outside the gates, and the Squire’s loud laugh came to them scarcely softened by the short distance. The rich fulness of August seemed to weigh somewhat heavily in the air; the hedge-row elms stood in thick unenlightened masses against the sky; the garden was a little parched and exhausted by its very profusion of flowers, the scent of the jessamine was almost oppressive in its richness; it was one of those days in which, without any perceptible change, the knowledge forces itself upon us that the change is there, and that something is gone from us.

“And do you still carry the key in your pocket?” said Winifred, with a faint smile.

“No, no, the house is open. Will you come and see it again?”

“Winifred!” called the Squire from the other side of the wall.

“Not now, thank you. I mustn’t keep my father.”

She spoke hurriedly, but walked lingeringly towards the gate, and Mr Mannering remained stationary for some moments after she had disappeared. “I wonder what is making her take such an interest in the Farleyense,” he said to himself. “The plant is a picture, to be sure, but still—when I think of it—and why should I keep the key in my pocket?—Why—what an old fool I am!—I had forgotten all about Anthony, and no doubt the poor girl wanted to hear a word or two more about him. He’s off somewhere to-day, I dare say, and going into Cornwall to-morrow,—the best place for him, too, if he doesn’t know what’s good for him; and there she is fretting over all these confounded reports, and thinking I could have said a word or two to comfort her. I’ve a great mind not to look at the Farleyense for a week. However, perhaps I’d better just go and give it a glance, to make sure that Stokes hasn’t been meddling.”

Chapter Twelve.

“Brave spirits are a balsam to themselves: There is a nobleness of mind, that heals Wounds beyond salves.” Cartwright.

The two young men found time hang on their hands at Trenance somewhat heavily. The old shadowy house stood at the foot of a hill, by the river’s side; the river was there, making silvery gleams between the trees; it was all cool, green, and dull for these energetic lives, but Marmaduke looked forward to the sweets of ownership, and found it more endurable than his companion. And yet Anthony was the most kind to the old man.

“Poor old fellow!” he said one day, as they locked the door of the boat-house, where the water was lapping drearily among the piles, and climbed the bank towards the house. “There must be a queer sort of feeling in looking at the man who is waiting to step into one’s shoes. I am not sure we should stand it so well as he does.”

“He has had his day.”

“Well, I don’t know that having had dinner one day makes one wish to go without it the next, if that’s what you mean.”

“You wouldn’t care for dinner if you had lost your appetite,” said Marmaduke.

“You mightn’t care, though, much to see other people eat.”

“Pray do you suggest my starving myself for company?”

“I wasn’t thinking of you, I was thinking of him,” said Anthony, stopping to cut down an ungainly bramble. “Everybody knows it’s the course of nature, and all that. Still, I say it can’t be altogether easy to be pleasant under those circumstances,—particularly when it’s not your own son that’s to follow.”

“That’s not my fault,” said Marmaduke, who seemed to put himself upon the defensive.

“No, it’s your luck, old fellow,” said Anthony kindly. “Don’t be crusty. Do you suppose I’m not glad from the bottom of my heart there don’t happen to be a Mrs Tregennas and half a dozen young Tregennases to keep you out of Trenance? Though, by all the much-abused laws of justice and equity, I don’t know that you ought to be here now.”

“Why not?” said Marmaduke, turning hastily.

“Because there’s nearer blood.”

“Mrs Harford is dead.”

“Of course she is. But her daughter isn’t, so far as we know,” said Anthony, finishing his bramble.

“She’s well out of the way in Australia, at any rate.”

“O, she’s far enough off. And her grandfather seems to care little enough what becomes of her. If I were you, Marmaduke, I’d say a good word for her. My father tried, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Thank you,” said Marmaduke, curtly. They were near the house, and he turned abruptly into one of the side paths and walked off by himself. Anthony, whose temper was none of the sweetest, felt a little indignant at his manner. Marmaduke was not like the boy he remembered, a change seemed to have come over him; Anthony, perhaps, had not yet learned how many-sided we all may be, how as one front and then another comes forward, it needs a golden cord to draw us into the beauty of harmony, or a false mask to make pretence of it. Marmaduke had not either at this time. There were things surging up in him which were all at war; he was torn and distracted between them. He knew Anthony well, and yet he had lost faith in his own knowledge. The idea that had once taken root grew hatefully into form and haunting prominence, and there was not a look of old Mr Tregennas, or a word from the young man, but he caught at greedily, and with it fed the lurking fear. He was forever watching, and, as he called it to himself, countermining. Anthony’s natural ease and brightness of manner became, in his sight, deliberate pitfalls spread to entrap the old man; so that although he did contrive to disguise his feelings with a facility which was becoming dangerous, he was restless and uneasy when Anthony was out of his sight, especially when he suspected him of being by Mr Tregennas’s side. His disquiet was the more unaccountable that Mr Tregennas rather fell foul of the world in a peevishly discontented fashion, which had taken the place of his former ungracious doggedness, than showed any especial marks of favour on that side or on this. He snubbed Anthony quite as much as he snubbed Marmaduke, on the whole perhaps rather more, Anthony being less careful not to disagree with him, and having taken up a crusade about some labourers’ cottages on the estate, a suggestion to improve which was popularly considered to have the same effect upon the master as the shaking of a red rag has upon a bull. Anthony used to talk to the men, and invite them to complain to the steward, and then come back and tell Mr Tregennas what he had done.

“What d’ye mean by that, sir?” the old man would growl in a rage. “What d’ye mean by stirring these rascals up?”

“They’re in the right, sir, indeed they are. You can’t get down to see the place, and White doesn’t choose to tell you what the people say, but it’s a shame that any one should have to live in such holes.”

“You’ll live in them yourself one of these days, if you go on in this confounded fashion of yours.”

“Then I hope you’ll have them set in order at once, sir,” said Anthony, with a promptitude over which old Tregennas chuckled.

In about a fortnight he let them go. Anthony was so conscious of the sacrifice he had made upon the altar of friendship, that he was the more irritated at the change which had become perceptible in Marmaduke. It seemed at times as if he scarcely cared to conceal his repulsion, and at other moments as though he were studiously forcing himself to wear the old dress of pleasant companionship. Anthony’s nature was one which very quickly took the tone which others exhibited towards him; he was apt to fall aloof at the first symptom of drawing back, and to feel more anger than sorrow at the loss of good-will. In this case, however, the thought of Marion prevented the alteration in their relations to one another becoming so marked as it might otherwise have been, and, indeed, Marmaduke was kept closely at his distasteful duties during the following autumn and winter months.

Anthony himself was not uninterruptedly at the Vicarage. He had a feeling as if this choice of a profession which lay before him were a crisis in his life; perhaps a little pleasant sense of self-importance gave it even undue gravity in his eyes. It was possible to debate upon it without that goad of necessity behind him by which men are often driven into the decisions of life, and his mind travelled after many projects in the paths which stretched to this and that summit in the horizon of the future. At one time he would be a barrister,—until he went to London and was talked out of it by one of the profession; at another he would travel with a pupil, an idea unconsciously crushed by Sir James Milman’s energy in offering him the charge of a shock-headed lad whose irreproachable heaviness would have driven Anthony out of his senses by the end of a week; finally, his longest and favourite dream was that of literature, the gates of which were to fly open as all gates are to open before these young knights. Meanwhile his life was much what it had been in the summer, energetic in everything, whether shooting or flirting or dancing or writing, splendidly young, as Mr Robert once said. As to his relations with Winifred Chester, the barrier between them, doubtless, still existed, and caused a fret on either side, he telling himself that Winifred was changeable and unsympathetic, and she accusing him of giving up old friendships for new, yet neither the one nor the other so entirely believing in their own reproaches as to have lost the idea that some day things would go back to what once had been. Meanwhile, if the old familiar life did not flow on with the pleasant smoothness of former days,—and, indeed, the Squire’s manner with Anthony must be allowed in some measure to have prevented this,—Winifred was less tired in the winter than in the gay brightness of the summer days, and it was less sharp to dream of his sitting by Miss Milman’s side than to be actually there to feel herself neglected. Moreover, she was struggling with all her might to prove herself—even to herself—indifferent. It was balm to her sore heart, ashamed of its own weakness and attempting to ignore it, to keep away from the Vicarage when Anthony was there, to avoid the roads in which she was likely to meet him, to turn the conversation when it drew near the subject which was dearest, to remain in her own room when he came to Hardlands. Every such act was a triumph, but what a triumph! For Anthony was not likely to bear his treatment with good-humoured indifference. It galled him. He was inclined to retaliate, and he laid all the blame of their altered relations at Winifred’s door. Now and then there came a faint return of what once had been, but there was no doubt that the last few months had developed a certain easiness to take offence, which had never before seemed to belong to the girl’s nature, so that often even after a momentary relaxation she pulled herself up with a sharp and uncomfortable check. It is indeed a little difficult for a woman in her position to strike the just balance between self-respect and pride.

If she could not altogether deceive herself, she unconsciously contrived to mystify others: the men said she had refused young Miles, the women that she had tried in vain to marry him, even shrewd Mr Robert was puzzled. There was no one so loving, so tender, so observant, that they weighed the trifles which might have betrayed her, no swiftness of motherhood to read what was passing. So far as human sympathy was concerned, she bore her burden, without a finger being stretched to help her; but there is a Hand from whose loving touch the sorest heart never shrinks, and from out of the very depths it draws us gently.

Her self-containing puzzled even herself. There comes a time in most strong lives when the mysterious power of repression becomes an experience to them and grows into a wonder. It fills the world with a keener interest than when all things seemed open in the page of the great book. Face, heart, nature,—what is hidden beyond our sight?—what does the mask cover?—of what tremendous powers are we unconscious that lie beside us and round our very hearth? Now and then the crust heaves, and we see a flash, but the very working of our own hearts is often hidden from us, and it is only by slow degrees that we learn those forces in ourselves which teach us to reverence our brother’s soul.

Chapter Thirteen.

“He that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast.” Tennyson.

Marmaduke came down in April, and it was evident enough to any one that he wanted change, or rest, or some other means of renewing health. His face was thin, his eyes unquiet; there was a sort of suspicious watchfulness in his manner unlike his old languor, which nobody could make out, but which they all noticed, except the Vicar and Marion. It made Winifred so uncomfortable that she could not help asking Marion whether anything were the matter.

“Everything is the matter,” said the girl in her eager way. She could not get out of her head that each day that passed was defrauding them of that perfect bliss for which she waited impatiently. She looked with a little contempt at Winifred, who seemed not to understand this impetuous demand for happiness. Poor Winifred! It was impossible for her not to contrast Marion’s position with her own, and to wonder that it should bring so little contentment. Once when Marion was pouring forth her complaints and longings, she said gravely,—“You don’t know what worse than nonsense you are talking;” and yet, as she said it, her eyes were full of tender depth. Her moods were not very settled at this time, sometimes she was resentful, abrupt; but she said these words so strangely that they startled Marion, who was accustomed on the strength of her engagement to look down upon her friend as from a height of experience. She did not know that there were other springs of experience of which she could not fathom the depths, nay, that there is something far more divine and profound than experience itself, out of the strength of which came Winifred’s quiet words. Yet something in them made her wonder. It was a spring afternoon, one of those days in which sudden surprises of shade and brightness alternate with each other. Now and then an intensity of light flashed out from a break in the grey hurrying clouds, and the young green of the larches and the tender pink blossoms of the elms grew vivid and sparkling under its touch; now and then it all faded into sober tints. A line of heavy blue marked the distant moorland; between a thinly clothed network of branches might be traced a crowd of small fields, patches of red soil crossed by sombre lines of hedges, brown nests in the rookery swaying in the wind, a pear-tree standing up in ghostly whiteness before the rent clouds. Winifred was leaning against a window of the Vicarage drawing-room, and looking out, her steadfast eyes grave with a sweet seriousness. Marion, who was watching her, said suddenly,—