XIII…

XIII

The next day Maryllia was up betimes, and directly after breakfast she sent for Mrs. Spruce. That good lady, moved by the summons into sudden trepidation, lest some duty had been forgotten, or some clause of the household 'rules and regulations' left unfulfilled, hastened to the inner library, a small octagonal room communicating with the larger apartment, and there found her mistress sitting on a low stool, with her lap full of visiting-cards which she was busily sorting.

"Spruce!" and she looked up from her occupation with a mock tragic air--"I'm dull! Positively D U double L! DULL!"

Mrs. Spruce stared,--but merely said:

"Lor, Miss!" and folded her hands on her apron, awaiting the next word.

"I'm dull, dull, dull!" repeated Maryllia, springing up and tossing all the cards into a wide wicker basket near at hand--"I don't know what to do with myself, Spruce! I've got nobody to talk to, nobody to play with, nobody to sing to, nobody to amuse me at all, at all! I've seen everything inside and outside the Manor,--I've visited the church,--I know the village--I've talked to dear old Josey Letherbarrow till he must be just tired of me,--he's certainly the cleverest man in the place,--and yesterday the Pippitts came and finished me. I'm done! I throw up the sponge!--that's slang, Spruce! There's nobody to see, nowhere to go, nothing to do. It's awful! 'The time is out of joint, O cursed spite!' That's Hamlet. Something must HAPPEN, Spruce!"--and here she executed a playful pas-seul around the old housekeeper--"There! Isn't that pretty? Don't look so astonished!--you'll see ever so much worse than that by and bye! I am going to have company. I am, really! I shall fill the house! Get all the beds aired, and all the bedrooms swept out! I shall ask heaps of people,--all the baddest, maddest folks I can find! I want to be bad and mad myself! There's nobody bad or mad enough to keep me going down here. Look at these!" And she raked among the visiting-cards and selected a few. "Listen!--'Miss Ittlethwaite, Miss Agnes Ittlethwaite, Miss Barbara Ittlethwaite, Miss Christina Ittlethwaite, Ittlethwaite Park.' It makes my tongue all rough and funny to read their names! They've called,--and I suppose I shall have to call back, but I don't want to. What's the good? I'm sure I never shall get on with the Ittlethwaites,--we shall never, never agree! Do you know them, Spruce? Who are they?"

Mrs. Spruce drew a long breath, rolled up her eyes, and began:

"Which the Misses Ittlethwaite is a county fam'ly, Miss, livin' some seven or eight miles from here as proud as proud, owin' to their forebears 'avin' sworn death on Magnum Chartus for servin' of King John--an' Miss Ittlethwaite proper, she be gettin' on in years, but she's a great huntin' lady, an' come November is allus to be seen follerin' the 'ounds, stickin' to the saddle wonderful for 'er size an' time o' life, an' Miss Barbara, she doos a lot o' sick visitin', an' Bible readin', not 'ere, for our people won't stand it, an' Passon Walden ain't great on breakin' into private 'ouses without owners' consents for Bible readin', but she, she's 'Igh, an' tramps into Riversford near every day which the carrier's cart brings 'er 'ome to 'er own place they 'avin' given up a kerridge owin' to spekylation in railways, an' Miss Hagnes she works lovely with 'er needle, an' makes altar cloths an' vestis for Mr. Francis Anthony, the 'Igh Church clergyman at Riversford, he not bein' married, though myself I should say there worn't no chance for 'er, bein' frightful skinny an' a bit off in 'er looks--an' Miss Christina she do still play at bein' a baby like, she's the youngest, an' over forty, yet quite a giddy in 'er way, wearin' ribbins round her waist, an' if 'twarn't for 'er cheeks droppin' in long like, she wouldn't look so bad, but they're all that proud--"

"That'll do, Spruce, that'll do!" cried Maryllia, putting her hands to her ears--"No more Ittlethwaites, please, for the present! Sufficient for the day is the Magnum Chartus thereof! Who comes here?" and she read from another card,--"'Mrs. Mordaunt Appleby.' Also a smaller label which says, 'Mr. Mordaunt Appleby'! More county family pride or what?"

"Oh lor' no, Miss, Mordaunt Appleby's only the brewer of Riversford," said Mrs. Spruce, casually. "He's got the biggest 'ouse in the town, but people remembers 'im when he was a very shabby lot indeed,-an awful shabby lot. HE ain't nobody, Miss-he's just got a bit o' money which makes the commoner sort wag tails for 'im, but it's like his cheek to call 'ere at all. Sir Morton Pippitt, bein' in. the bone-meltin' line, as 'im up to dine now an' agin, just to keep in with 'im like, for he's a nasty temper, an' his wife's got the longest and spitefullest tongue in all the neighbourhood. But you needn't take up wi' them, Miss-they ain't in your line,-which some brewers is gentlemen, an' Appleby ain't--YOUR Pa wouldn't never know HIS Pa."

"Then that's settled!" said Maryllia, with a sigh of relief. "Depart, Mordaunt Applebys into the limbo of forgotten callers!"-and she tossed the cards aside-"Here are the Pippitt names,-I small remember them all right-Pip-pitt and Ittlethwaite have a tendency to raise blisters of memory on the brain. What is this neat looking little bit of pasteboard-' The Rev. John Walden.' Yes!-he called two or three days ago when I was out."

Mrs. Spruce sniffed a sniff of meaning, but said nothing.

"I've not been to church yet"-went on Maryllia medi-tatively. "I dare say he thinks me quite a dreadful person. But I hate going to church,-it's so stupid-so boresome-and oh!-such a waste of time!"

Mrs. Spruce still held her peace. Maryllia gave her a little side- glance and noted a certain wistfulness and wonder in the rosy, wrinkled face which was not without its own pathos.

"I suppose everybody about here goes to church at least Once on Sundays," pursued Maryllia-"Don't they?"

"Them as likes Mr. Walden goes," answered Mrs. Spruce promptly-"Then as don't stops away. Sir Morton Pippitt used allus to attend 'ere reg'ler when the buildin' was nowt but ruin, an' 'e 'ad a tin roof put over it,-'e was that proud o' the tin roof you'd a' thought 'twas made o' pure gold, an' he was just wild when Mr. Walden pulled it all off an' built up the walls an' roof again as they should be all at 'is own expense, an' he went away from the place for sheer spite like, an' stayed abroad a whole year, an' when 'e come back again 'e never wouldn't go nigh it, an' now 'e attends service at Badsworth Church,-Badsworth Barn we calls it,-for'tain't nowt but a barn which Mr. Leveson keeps 'Igh as 'Igh with a bit o' tinsel an' six candles, though it's the mis'ablest place ye ever set eyes on, an' 'e do look a caution 'isself with what 'e calls a vestiment 'angin' down over 'is back, which is a baek as fat as porpuses, the Lord forgive me for sayin.' it, but Sir Morton 'e be that set against Mr. Walden he'll rather say 'is prayers in a pig-stye with a pig for the minister than in our church, since it's been all restored an' conskrated--then, as I told you just now, Miss, the Ittlethwaites goes to Riversford where they gits opratick music with the 'Lord be merciful to us mis'able sinners'--an' percessions with candles,--so our church is mostly filled wi' the village folks, farmer bodies an' sich-like,--there ain't no grand people what comes, though we don't miss 'em, for Passon 'e don't let us want for nothin' an' when there's a man out o' work, or a woman sick, or a child what's pulin' a bit, an' ricketty, he's alhis ready to 'elp, with all 'e 'as an' welcome, payin' doctor's fees often,--an' takin' all the medicine bills on 'isself besides. Ah, 'e's a rare good sort is Passon Walden, an' so you'd say yerself, Miss, if ever you took on your mind to go and hear 'im preach, an' studied 'is ways for a bit as 'twere an' asked 'bout 'im in the village, for 'e's fair an' open as the day an' ain't got no sly, sneaky tricks in 'im,--he's just a man, an' a good one--an' that's as rare a thing to find in this world as a di'mond in a wash-tub, an' makin' so bold, Miss, if you'd onny go to church next Sunday---"

Maryllia interrupted her by a little gesture.

"I can't, Spruce!" she said, but with great gentleness--"I know it's the right and proper thing for me to do in the country if I wish to stand well with my neighbours,-but I can't! I don't believe in it,-- and I won't pretend that I believe!"

Poor Mrs. Spruce felt a sudden choking in her throat, and her motherly face grew red and pale by turns. Miss Maryllia, the old squire's daughter, was--what? A heathen?--an unbeliever--an atheist? Oh, surely it was not possible--it could not be!--she would not accept the idea that a creature so dainty and pretty, so fair and winsome, could be cast adrift on the darkness of life without any trust in the saving grace of the Christian Faith! Limited as were Mrs. Spruce's powers of intelligence, she was conscious enough that there would be something sweet and strong lost out of the world, which nothing could replace, were the message of Christ withdrawn from it. The perplexity of her thoughts was reflected on her countenance and Maryllia, watching her, smiled a little sadly.

"You mustn't think I don't believe in God, Spruce,"--she said slowly--"I do! But I can't agree with all the churches teach about Him. They make Him out to be a cruel, jealous and revengeful Being-- -"

"Mr. Walden don't---," put in Mrs. Spruce, quickly.

"And I like to think of Him as all love and pity and goodness," went on Maryllia, not heeding her--"and I don't say prayers, because I think He knows what is best for me without my asking. Do you understand? So it's really no use my going to church, unless just out of curiosity--and perhaps I will some day do that,--I'll see about it! But I must know Mr. Walden a little better first,--I must find out for myself what kind of a man he is, before I make up my mind to endure such a martyrdom as listening to a sermon! I simply loathe sermons! I suppose I must have had too many of them when I was a child. Surely you remember, Spruce, that I used to be taken into Riversford to church?" Mrs. Spruce nodded emphatically in the affirmative. "Yes!--because when father was alive the church here was only a ruin. And I used to go to sleep over the sermons always-- and once I fell off my seat and had to be carried out. It was dreadful! Now Uncle Fred never went to church,--nor Aunt Emily. So I've quite got out of the way of going--nobody is very particular about it in Paris or London, you see. But perhaps I'll try and hear Mr. Walden preach--just once--and I'll tell you then what I think about it. I'll put his card on the mantelpiece to remind me!"

And she suited the action to the word, Mrs. Spruce gazing at her in a kind of mild stupefaction. It seemed such a very odd thing to stick up a clergyman's card as a reminder to go to church 'just once' some Sunday.

Meanwhile Maryllia continued, "Now, Spruce, you must begin to be busy! You must prepare the Manor for the reception of all sorts of people, small and great. I feel that the time has come for 'company, company!' And in the first place I'm going to send for Cicely Bourne,--she's my pet 'genius'--and I'm paying the cost of her musical education in Paris. She's an orphan--like me--she's all alone in the world--like me;--and we're devoted to each other. She's only a child--just over fourteen--but she's simply a wonder!--the most wonderful musical wonder in the world!--and she has a perfectly marvellous voice. Her master Gigue says that when she is sixteen she will have emperors at her feet! Emperors! There are only a few,--but they'll all be grovelling in the dust before her! You must prepare some pretty rooms for her, Spruce, those two at the top of the house that look right over the lawn and woods--and make everything as cosy as you can. I'll put the finishing touches. And I must send to London for a grand piano. There's only the dear old spinet in the drawing-room,--it's sweet to sing to, and Cicely will love it,--but she must have a glorious 'grand' as well. I shall wire to her to- day,--I know she'll come at once. She will arrive direct from Paris,--let me see!"--and she paused meditatively--"when can she arrive? This is Friday,--yes!--probably she will arrive here Sunday or Monday morning. So you can get everything ready."

"Very well, Miss," and Mrs. Spruce, with the usual regulation 'dip' of respectful submission to her mistress was about to withdraw, when Maryllia called her back and handed over to her care the wicker basket full of visiting-cards.

"Put them all by,"--she said--"When Cicely comes we'll go through them carefully together, and discuss what to eat, drink and avoid. Till then, I shall blush unseen, wasting my sweetness on the desert air! Time enough and to spare for making the acquaintance of the 'county.' Who was it that said: Never know your neighbours'? I forget,--but he was a wise man, anyway!"

Mrs. Spruce 'dipped' a second time in silence, and was then allowed to depart on her various household duties. The good woman's thoughts were somewhat chaotically jumbled, and most fervently did she long to send for 'Passon,' her trusted adviser and chief consoler, or else go to him herself and ask him what he thought concerning the non-church-going tendencies of her mistress. Was she altogether a lost sheep? Was there no hope for her entrance into the heavenly fold?

"Which I can't and won't believe she's wicked,"--said Mrs. Spruce to herself--"With that sweet childie face an' eyes she couldn't be! M'appen 'tis bad example,--'er 'Merican aunt 'avin' no religion as 'twere, an' 'er uncle, Mr. Frederick, was never no great shakes in 'is young days if all the truth was told. Well, well! The Lord 'e knows 'is own, an' my 'pinion is He ain't a-goin' to do without Miss Maryllia, for it's allus 'turn again, turn again, why will 'ee die' sort of thing with Him, an' He don't give out in 'is patience. I'm glad she's goin' to 'ave a friend to stay with 'er,--that'll do 'er good and 'earten her up--an' mebbe the friend'll want to go to church, an' Miss Maryllia 'ull go with her, an' once they listens to Passon 'twill be all right, for 'is voice do draw you up into a little bit o' heaven somehow, whether ye likes it or not, an' if Miss Maryllia once 'ears 'im, she'll be wanting to 'ear 'im again-- so it's best to leave it all in the Lord's 'ands which makes the hill straight an' the valleys crooked, an' knows what's good for both man and beast. Miss Maryllia ain't goin' to miss the Way, the Truth an' the Life--I'm sartin sure o' that!"

Thus Mrs. Spruce gravely cogitated, while Maryllia herself, unaware of the manner in which her immortal destinies were being debated by the old housekeeper, put on her hat, and ran gaily across the lawn, her great dog bounding at her side, making for the usual short-cut across the fields to the village. Arrived there she went straight to the post-office, a curious little lop-sided half-timbered cottage with a projecting window, wherein, through the dusty close-latticed panes could be spied various strange edibles, such as jars of acidulated drops, toffee, peppermint balls, and barley-sugar-- likewise one or two stray oranges, some musty-looking cakes, a handful or so of old nuts, and slabs of chocolate protruding from shining wrappers of tin-foil,--while a flagrant label of somebody's 'Choice Tea' was suspended over the whole collection, like a flag of triumph. The owner of this interesting stock-in-trade and the postmistress of St. Rest, was a quaint-looking little woman, very rosy, very round, very important in her manner, very brisk and bright with her eyes, but very slow with her fingers.

"Which I gets the rheumatiz so bad in my joints," she was wont to say--"that I often wonders 'ow I knows postage-stamps from telegram- forms an' register papers from money-orders, an' if you doos them things wrong Gove'nment never forgives you!"

"Ah, you'll never get into no trouble with Gove'nment, Missis Tapple!" her gossips were wont to assure her, "For you be as ezack as ezack!"

A compliment which Mrs. Tapple accepted without demur, feeling it to be no more than her just due. She was, however, in spite of her 'ezack' methods, always a little worried when anything out of the ordinary occurred, and she began to feel slightly flustered directly she saw Maryllia swing open her garden gate. She had already, during the last few days, been at some trouble to decipher various telegrams which the lady of the Manor had sent down by Primmins for immediate despatch, such as one to a certain Lord Roxmouth which had run as follows:--"No time to reply to your letter. In love with pigs and poultry."

"It IS 'pigs and poultry,' ain't it?" she had asked anxiously of Primmins, after studying the message for a considerable time through, her spectacles. And Primmins, gravely studying it, too, had replied:--

"It is undoubtedly 'pigs and poultry.'"

"And it IS 'in love' you think?" pursued Mrs. Tapple, with perplexity furrowing her brow.

"It is certainly 'in love,'" rejoined Primmins, and the faintest suggestion of a wink affected his left eyelid.

Thereupon the telegram was 'sent through' to Riversford on its way to London, though not without serious misgivings in Mrs. Tapple's mind as to whether it might not be returned with a 'Gove'nment' query as to its correctness. And now, when Maryllia herself entered the office, and said smilingly, "Good-morning! Some foreign telegram-forms, please!" Mrs. Tapple felt that the hour was come when her powers of intelligence were about to be tried to the utmost; and she accordingly began to experience vague qualms of uneasiness.

"Foreign telegram-forms, Miss? Is it for Ameriky?"

"Oh, no!--only for Paris,"--and while the old lady fumbled nervously in her 'official' drawer, Maryllia glanced around the little business establishment with amused interest. She had a keen eye for small details, and she noticed with humorous appreciation Mrs. Tapple's pink sun-bonnet hanging beside the placarded 'Post Office Savings Bank' regulations, and a half side of bacon suspended from the ceiling, apparently for 'curing' purposes, immediately above the telegraphic apparatus. After a little delay, the required pale yellow 'Foreign and Colonial' forms were found, and Mrs. Tapple carefully flattened them out, and set them on her narrow office counter.

"Will you have a pencil, or pen and ink, Miss?" she enquired.

"Pen and ink, please," replied Maryllia; whereat the old postmistress breathed a sigh of relief. It would be easier to make out anything at all 'strange and uncommon' in pen and ink than in pencil-marks which had a trick of 'rubbing.' Leaning lightly against the counter Maryllia wrote in a clear bold round hand:

"Miss CICELY BOURNE,

"17 RUE CROISIE, PARIS.

"Come to me at once. Shall want you all summer. Have wired Gigue. Start to-morrow.

"MARYLLIA VANCOURT."

She pushed this over to Mrs. Tapple, who thankfully noting that she was writing another, took time to carefully read and spell over every word, and mastered it all without difficulty. Meanwhile Maryllia prepared her second message thus:

"Louis GIGUE,

"CONSERVATOIRE, PARIS.

"Je desire que Cicely passe l'ete avec moi et qu'elle arrive immediatement. Elle peut tres-bien continuer ses etudes ici. Vous pouvez suivre, cher maitre, a votre plaisir.

"MARYLLIA VANCOURT."

"It's rather long,"--she said thoughtfully, as she finished it. "But for Gigue it is necessary to explain fully. I hope you can make it out?"

Poor Mrs. Tapple quivered with inward agitation as she took the terrible telegram in hand, and made a brave effort to rise to the occasion.

"Yes, Miss," she stammered, "Louis Gigue--G.i.g.u.e., that's right-- yes--at the Conservatory, Paris."

"'No, no!" said Maryllia, with a little laugh--"Not Conservatory-- Conservatoire--TOIRE, t.o.i.r.e., the place where they study music."

"Oh, yes--I see!" and Mrs. Tapple tried to smile knowingly, as she fixed her spectacles more firmly on her nose, and began to murmur slowly--"Je desire, d.e.sire--oh, yes--desire!--que--q.u.e.--Cicely- -yes that's all right!--passe, an e to pass--yes--now let me wait a minute; one minute, Miss, if you please!--l'ete--l apostrophe e, stroke across the e,--t, and e, stroke across the e---"

Maryllia's eyebrows went up in pretty perplexity.

"Oh dear, I'm afraid you won't be able to get it right that way!" she said--"I had better write it in English,--why, here's Mr. Walden!" This, as she saw the clergyman's tall athletic figure entering Mrs. Tapple's tiny garden,--"Good-morning, Mr. Walden!" and as he raised his hat, she smiled graciously--"I want to send off a French telegram, and I'm afraid it's rather difficult---"

A glance at Mrs. Tapple explained the rest, and Walden's eyes twinkled mirthfully.

"Perhaps I can be of some use, Miss Vancourt," he said. "Shall I try?"

Maryllia nodded, and he walked into the little office.

"Let me send off those telegrams for you, Mrs. Tapple," he said. "You know you often allow me to amuse myself in that way! I haven't touched the instrument for a month at least, and am getting quite out of practice. May I come in?"

Mrs. Tapple's face shone with relief and gladness.

"Well now, Mr. Walden, if it isn't a real blessin' that you happened to look in this mornin'!" she exclaimed--"For now there won't be no delay,--not but what I knew a bit o' French as a gel, an' I'd 'ave made my way to spell it out somehow, no matter how slow,--but there! you're that handy that 'twon't take no time, an' Miss Vancourt will be sure of her message 'avin' gone straight off from here correct,-- an' if they makes mistakes at Riversford, 'twon't be my fault!"

While she thus ran on, Walden was handling the telegraphic apparatus. His back was turned to Maryllia, but he felt her eyes upon him,--as indeed they were,--and there was a slight flush of colour in his bronzed cheeks as he presenty looked round and said:

"May I have the telegram?"

"There are two--both for Paris," replied Maryllia, handing him the filled-up forms--"One is quite easy--in English." "And the other quite difficult--in French!"--he laughed. "Let me see if I can make it out correctly." Thereupon he read aloud: "'Louis Gigue, Conservatoire, Paris. Je desire que Cicely passe l'ete avec moi et qu'elle arrive immediatement. Elle peut tres-bien continuer ses etudes ici. Vous pouvez suivre, cher maitre, a votre plaisir.' Is that right?"

Maryllia's eyes opened a little more widely,--like blue flowers wakening to the sun. This country clergyman's pronunciation of French was perfect,--more perfect than her own trained Parisian accent. Mrs. Tapple clasped her dumpy red hands in a silent ecstasy of admiration. 'Passon' knew everything!

"Is it right?" Walden repeated.

Maryllia gave a little start.

"Oh I beg your pardon! Yes--quite right!--thank you ever so much!"

Click-click-click-click! The telegraphic apparatus was at work, and the unofficial operator was entirely engrossed in his business. Mrs. Tapple stood respectfully dumb and motionless, watching him. Maryllia, leaning against the ledge of the office counter, watched him, too. She took quiet observation of the well-poised head, covered with its rich brown-grey waving locks of hair,--the broad shoulders, the white firm muscular hands that worked the telegraphic instrument, and she was conscious of the impression of authority, order, knowledge, and self-possession, which seemed to have come into the little office with him, and to have created quite a new atmosphere. Outside, in the small garden, among mignonette and early flowering sweetpeas, Plato sat on his huge haunches in lion-like dignity, blinking at the sun,--while Walden's terrier Nebbie executed absurd but entirely friendly gambols in front of him, now pouncing down on two forepaws with nose to ground and eyes leering sideways,--now wagging an excited tail with excessive violence to demonstrate goodwill and a desire for amity.--and anon giving a short yelp of suppressed feeling,--to all of which conciliatory approaches Plato gave no other response than a vast yawn and meditative stare.

The monotonous click-click-click continued,--now stopping for a second, then going on more rapidly again, till Maryllia began to feel quite unreasonably impatient. She found something irritating at last in the contemplation of the back of Walden's cranium,--it was too well-shaped, she decided,--she could discover no fault in it. Humming a tune carelessly under her breath, she turned towards Mrs. Tapple's small grocery department, and feigned to be absorbed in an admiring survey of peppermint balls and toffee. Certain glistening squares of sticky white substance on a corner shelf commended themselves to her notice as specimens of stale 'nougat,' wherein the almonds represented a remote antiquity,--and a mass of stringy yellow matter laid out in lumps on blue paper and marked 'One Penny per ounce' claimed attention as a certain 'hardbake' peculiar to St. Rest, which was best eaten in a highly glutinous condition. A dozen or so of wrinkled apples which, to judge by their damaged and worn exteriors, must have been several autumns old, kept melancholy companionship with assorted packages of the 'Choice Tea' whereof the label was displayed in the window, and Maryllia was just about wondering whether she would, or could buy anything out of the musty- fusty collection, when the click-click-click stopped abruptly, and Walden stepped forth from the interior 'den' of the post-office.

"That's all right, Miss Vancourt," he said. "Your telegrams are sent correctly as far as Riversford anyhow, and there is one operator there who is acquainted with the French language. Whether they will transmit correctly from London I shouldn't like to say!--we are a singular nation, and one of our singularities is that we scorn to know the language of our nearest neighbours!"

She smiled up at him,--and as his glance met hers he was taken aback, as it were, by the pellucid beauty and frank innocence of the grave dark-blue eyes that shone so serenely into his own.

"Thank you so very, very much! You have been most kind!" and with a swift droop of her white eyelids she veiled those seductive 'mirrors of the soul' beneath a concealing fringe of long golden-brown lashes--"It's quite a new experience to find a clergyman able and willing to be a telegraph clerk as well! So useful, isn't it?"

"In a village like this it is," rejoined Walden, gaily--"And after all, there's not much use in being a minister unless one can practically succeed in the art of 'ministering' to every sort of demand made upon one's capabilities! Even to Miss Vancourt's needs, should she require anything, from the preservation of trees to the sending of telegrams, that St. Rest can provide!"

Again Maryllia glanced at him, and again a little smile lifted the corners of her mouth.

"I must pay for the telegrams," she said abruptly--"Mrs. Tapple---"

"Yes, Miss--I've written it all down," murmured Mrs. Tapple nervously--"It's right, Mr. Walden, isn't it? If you would be so good as to look at it, bein' tuppence a word, it do make it different like, an' m'appen there might be a mistake---"

Walden glanced over the scrap of paper on which she had scrawled her rough figures.

"Fivepence out, I declare, Mrs. Tapple!" he said, merrily. "Dear, dear! Whatever is going to become of you, eh? To cheat yourself wouldn't matter--nobody minds THAT--but to do the British Government out of fivepence would be a dreadful thing! Now if I had not seen this you would have been what is called 'short' this evening in making up accounts." Here he handed the corrected paper to Maryllia. "I think you will find that right."

Maryllia opened her purse and paid the amount,--and Mrs. Tapple, in giving her change for a sovereign, included among the coins a bright new threepenny piece with a hole in it. Spying this little bit of silver, Maryllia held it up in front of Walden's eyes triumphantly.

"Luck!" she exclaimed--"That's for you! It's a reward for your telegraphic operations! Will you be grateful if I give it to you?"

He laughed.

"Profoundly! It shall be my D.S.O.!"

"Then there you are!" and she placed the tiny coin in the palm of the hand he held out to receive it. "The labourer is worthy of his hire! Now you can never go about like some clergymen, grumbling and saying you work for no pay!" Her eyes sparkled mischievously. "What shall we do next? Oh, I know! Let's buy some acid drops!"

Mrs. Tapple stared and smiled.

"Or pear-drops," continued Maryllia, glancing critically at the various jars of 'sweeties,'--"I see the real old-fashioned pink ones up there,--lumpy at one end and tapering at the other. Do you like them? Or brandy balls? I think the pear-drops carry one back to the age of ten most quickly! But which do you prefer?"

Walden tried to look serious, but could not succeed. Laughter twinkled all over his face, and he began to feel extremely young.

"Well,--really, Miss Vancourt,---" he began.

"There, I know what you are going to say!" exclaimed Maryllia--"You are going to tell me that it would never do for a clergyman to be seen munching pear-drops in his own parish. I understand! But clergymen do ever so much. worse than that sometimes. They do, really! Two ounces of pear-drops for me, Mrs. Tapple, please!--and one of brandy balls!"

Mrs. Tapple bustled out of her 'Gove'nment' office, and came to the grocery counter to dispense these dainties.

"They stick to the jar so," said Maryllia, watching her thoughtfully; "They always did. I remember, as a child, seeing a man put his finger in to detach them. Don't put your finger in, Mrs. Tapple!--take a bit of wood--an old skewer or something. Oh, they're coming out all right! That's it!" And she popped one of the pear- drops into her mouth. "They are really very good--better than French fondants--so much more innocent and refreshing!" Here she took possession of the little paper-bags which Mrs. Tapple had filled with the sweets. "Thank you, Mrs. Tapple! If any answers to my telegrams come from Paris, please send them up to the Manor at once. Good-morning!"

"Good-morning, Miss!" And Mrs. Tapple, curtseying, pulled the door of her double establishment wider open to let the young lady pass out, which she did, with a smile and nod, Walden following her. Plato rose and paced majestically after his mistress, Nebbie trotting meekly at the rear, and so they all went forth from the postmistress's garden into the road, where Walden, pausing, raised his hat in farewell.

"Oh, are you going?" queried Maryllia. "Won't you walk with me as far as your own rectory?"

"Certainly, if you wish it,"--he answered with a slight touch of embarrassment; "I thought perhaps---"

"You thought perhaps,--what?" laughed Maryllia, glancing up at him archly--"That I was going to make you eat pear-drops against your will? Not I! I wouldn't be so rude. But I really thought I ought to buy something from Mrs. Tapple,--she was so worried, poor old dear!- -till you came in. Then she looked as happy as though she saw a vision of angels. She's a perfect picture, with her funny old shawl and spectacles and knobbly red fingers--and do you know, all the time you were working the telegraph you were under the fragrant shadow of a big piece of bacon which was 'curing,'--positively 'curing' over your head! Couldn't you smell it?"

Walden's eyes twinkled.

"There was certainly a fine aroma in the air," he said--"But it seemed to me no more than the customary perfume common to Mrs. Tapple's surroundings. I daresay it was new to you! A country clergyman is perhaps the only human being who has to inure himself to bacon odours as the prevailing sweetness of cottage interiors."

Maryllia laughed. She had a pretty laugh, silver-clear and joyous without loudness.

"Fancy your being so clever as to be able to send off telegrams!" she exclaimed--"What an accomplishment for a Churchman! Don't you want to know all about the messages you sent?--who the persons are, and what I have to do with them?"

"Not in the least!" answered John, smiling.

"Are you not of a curious disposition?"

"I never care about other people's business," he said, meeting her upturned eyes with friendly frankness--"I have enough to do to attend to my own."

"Then you are positively inhuman!" declared Maryllia--"And absolutely unnatural! You are, really! Every two-legged creature on earth wants to find out all the ins and cuts of every other two- legged creature,--for if this were not the case wars would be at an end, and the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest. So just because you don't want to know about my two friends in Paris, I'm going to tell you. Louis Gigue is the greatest teacher of singing there is,--and Cicely Bourne is his pupil, a perfectly wonderful little girl with a marvellous compass of voice, whose training and education I am paying for. I want her with me here--and I have sent for her;--Gigue can come on if he thinks it necessary to give her a few lessons during the summer, but of course she is not to sing in public until she is sixteen. She is only fourteen now."

Walden listened in silence. He was looking at his companion sideways, and noting the delicate ebb and flow of the rose tint in her cheeks, the bright flecks of gold in the otherwise brown hair, and the light poise of her dainty rounded figure as she stepped along beside him with an almost aerial grace and swiftness.

"She was the child of a Cornish labourer,"--went on Maryllia. "Her mother sold her for ten pounds. Yes!--wasn't it dreadful!" This, as John's face expressed surprise. "But it is true! You shall hear all the story some day,--it is quite a little romance. And she is so clever!--you would think her ever so much older than she is, to hear her talk. Sometimes she is rather blunt, and people get offended with her-but she is true--oh, so true!--she wouldn't do a mean action for the world! She is just devoted to me,--and that is perhaps why I am devoted to her,--because after all, it's a great thing to be loved, isn't it?"

"It is indeed!" replied John, mechanically, beginning to feel a little dazed under the influence of the bright eyes, animated face, smiling lips and clear, sweet voice--"It ought to be the best of all things."

"It ought to be, and it is!" declared Maryllia emphatically. "Oh, what a lovely bush of lilac!" And she hastened on a few steps in order to look more closely at the admired blossoms, which were swaying in the light breeze over the top of a thick green hedge-- "Why, it must be growing in your garden! Yes, it is!--of course it is!--this is your gate. May I come in?"

She paused, her hand on the latch,--and for a moment Walden hesitated. A wave of colour swept up to his brows,--he was conscious of a struggling desire to refuse her request, united to a still more earnest craving to grant it. She looked at him, wistfully smiling.

"May I come in?" she repeated.

He advanced, and opened the gate, standing aside for her to pass.

"Of course you may!"--he said gently,--"And welcome!"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIV

Now it happened that Bainton was at that moment engaged in training some long branches of honey-suckle across the rectory walls, and being half-way up a ladder for the purpose, the surprise he experienced at seeing 'Passon' and Miss Vancourt enter the garden together and walk slowly side by side across the lawn, was so excessive, that in jerking his head round to convince himself that it was not a vision but a reality, he nearly lost his balance.

"Woa, steady!" he muttered, addressing the ladder which for a second swayed beneath him--"Woa, I sez! This ain't no billowy ocean with wot they calls an underground swell! So the ice 'ave broke, 'ave it! She, wot don't like clergymen, an' he, wot don't like ladies, 'as both come to saunterin' peaceful like with one another over the blessed green grass all on a fine May mornin'! Which it's gettin' nigh on June now an' no sign o' the weather losin' temper. Well, well! Wonders won't never cease it's true, but I'd as soon a' thought o' my old 'ooman dancin' a 'ornpipe among her cream cheeses as that Passon Walden would a' let Miss Vancourt inside this 'ere gate so easy like, an' he a bacheldor. But there!--arter all, he's gettin' on in years, an' she's ever so much younger than he is, an' I dessay he's made up his mind to treat 'er kind like, as 'twere her father, which he should do, bein' spiritooal 'ead o' the village, an' as for the pretty face of 'er, he's not the man to look at it more'n once, an' then he couldn't tell you wot it's like. He favours his water-lilies mor'n females,--ah, an' I bet he'd give ten pound for a new specimen of a flower when he wouldn't lay out a 'apenny on a new specimen of a woman." Here, pausing in his reflections, he again looked cautiously round from his high vantage point of view on the ladder, and saw Walden break off a spray of white lilac from one bush of a very special kind near the edge of the lawn, and give it to Miss Vancourt. "Well, now that do beat me altogether!" he ejaculated under his breath. "If he's told me once, he's told me a 'undred times that he won't 'ave no blossoms broke off that bush on no account An' there he is a-pickin' of it hisself! That's a kind of thing which do make me feel that men is a poor feeble-minded lot,-- it do reely now!"

But feeble-minded or not, John had nevertheless gathered the choice flower, and moreover, had found a certain pleasure in giving it to his fair companion, who inhaled its delicious odour with an appreciative smile.

"What a dear old house you have!" she said, glancing up at the crossed timbers, projecting gables, and quaint dormer windows set like eyes in the roof--"I had no idea that it was so pretty! And the garden is perfectly lovely. It is so very artistic!--it looks like a woman's dream of a garden rather than a man's."

John smiled.

"You think women more artistic than men?" he queried.

"In the decorative line--yes," she replied--"Especially where flowers are concerned. If one leaves the planning of a garden entirely to a man, he is sure to make it too stiff and mathematical,--he will not allow Nature to have her own way in the least little bit,--in fact"--and she laughed--"I don't think men as a rule like to let anything or anybody have their own way except themselves!"

The smile still lingered kindly round the corners of Walden's mouth.

"Possibly you may be right,"--he said--"I almost believe you are. Men are selfish,--much more selfish than women. Nature made them so in the first instance,--and our methods of education and training all tend to intensify our natural bent. But"--here he paused and looked at her thoughtfully; "I am not sure that absolute unselfishness would be a wise or strong trait in the character of a man. You see the first thing he has to do in this world is to earn the right to live,--and if he were always backing politely out of everybody else's way, and allowing himself to be hustled to one side in an unselfish desire to let others get to the front, he would scarcely be able to hold his own in any profession. And all those dependent upon his efforts would also suffer,--so that his 'unselfishness' might become the very worst kind of selfishness in the end--don't you think so?" "Well--yes--perhaps in that way it might!" hesitated Maryllia, with a faint blush--"I ought not to judge anyone I know--but--oh dear!--the men one meets in town--the society men with their insufferable airs of conceit and condescension,--their dullness of intellect,--their preference for cigars, whiskey, and Bridge to anything else under the sun,--their intensely absorbed love of personal ease, and their perfectly absurd confidence in their own supreme wisdom!--these are the hybrid creatures that make one doubt the worth of the rest of their sex altogether."

"But there are hybrid creatures on both sides,"--said Walden quietly--"Just as there are the men you speak of, so there are women of the same useless and insufferable character. Is it not so?"

She looked up at him and laughed.

"Why, yes, of course!" she frankly admitted--"I guess I won't argue with you on the six of one and half-dozen of the other! But it's just as natural for women to criticise men as for men to criticise nowadays. Long ago, in the lovely 'once upon a time' fairy period, the habit of criticism doesn't appear to have developed strongly in either sex. The men were chivalrous and tender,--the women adoring and devoted--I think it must have been perfectly charming to have lived then! It is all so different now!"

"Fortunately, it is," said John, with a mirthful sparkle in his eyes--"I am sure you would not have liked that 'once upon a time fairy period' as you call it, at all, Miss Vancourt! Poets and romancists may tell us that the men were 'chivalrous and tender,' but plain fact convinces us that they were very rough unwashen tyrants who used to shut up their ladies in gloomy castles where very little light and air could penetrate,--and the adoring and devoted ladies, in their turn, made very short work of the whole business by either dying of their own grief and ill-treatment, or else getting killed in cold blood by order of their lords and masters. Why, one of the finest proofs of an improvement in our civilisation is the freedom of thought and action given to women in the present day. Personally speaking, I admit to a great fondness for old-fashioned ways, and particularly for old-fashioned manners,- -but I cannot shut my mind to the fact that for centuries women have been unfairly hindered by men in every possible way from all chance of developing the great powers of intelligence they possess,--and it is certainly time the opposition to their advancement should cease. Of course, being a man myself,"--and he smiled--"I daresay that in my heart of hearts I like the type of woman I first learned to know and love best,--my mother. She had the early Victorian, ways,--they were very simple, but also very sweet."

He broke off, and for a moment or two they paced the lawn in silence.

"I suppose you live all alone here?" asked Maryllia, suddenly.

"Yes. Quite alone."

"And are you happy?"

"I am content."

"I understand!" and she looked at him somewhat earnestly:--"'Happy' is a word that should seldom be used I think. It is only at the rarest possible moments that one can feel real true happiness."

"You are too young to say that,"--he rejoined gently--"All your life is before you. The greater part of mine lies behind me." Again she glanced at him somewhat timidly.

"Mr. Walden"--she began--"I'm afraid--I suppose--I daresay you think---"

John caught the appealing flash of the blue eyes, and wondering what she was going to say. She played with the spray of lilac he had given her, and for a moment seemed to have lost her self-possession.

"I am quite sure,"--she went on, hurriedly--"that you--I mean, I'm afraid you haven't a very good opinion of me because I don't go to church---"

He looked at her, smiling a little.

"Dor't you go to church?" he asked--"I didn't know it!"

Here was a surprise for the lady of the Manor. The clergyman of her own parish,--a man, who by all accepted rule and precedent ought to have been after her at once, asking for subscriptions to this fund and that fund, toadying her for her position, and begging for her name and support, had not even noticed her absence from divine service on Sundays! She did not know whether to be relieved or dissatisfied. Such indifference to her actions piqued her feminine pride, and yet, his tone was very kind and courteous. Noting the colour coming and going on her face, he spoke again---

"I never interfere personally with my parishioners, Miss Vancourt"-- he said--"To attend church or stay away from church is a matter of conscience with each individual, and must be left to individual choice. I should be the last person in the world to entertain a bad opinion of anyone simply because he or she never went to church. That would be foolish indeed! Some of the noblest and best men in Christendom to-day never go to church,--but they are none the less noble and good! They have their reasons of conscience for non- committing themselves to accepted forms of faith, and it often turns out that they are more truly Christian and more purely religious than the most constant church-goer that ever lived."

Maryllia gave a little sigh of sudden relief.

"Ah, you are a broad-minded Churchman!" she said. "I am glad! Very glad! Because you have no doubt followed the trend of modern thought,--and you must have read all the discussions in the magazines and in the books that are written on such subjects,--and you can understand how difficult it is to a person like myself to decide what is right when so many of the wisest and most educated men agree to differ."

Walden stopped abruptly in his walk.

"Please do not mistake me, Miss Vancourt," he said gravely, and with emphasis--"I should be sorry if you gathered a wrong opinion of me at the outset of our acquaintance. As your minister I feel that I ought to make my position clear to you. You say that I have probably followed the trend of modern thought--and I presume that you mean the trend of modern thought in religious matters. Now I have not 'followed' it, but I have patiently studied it, and find it in all respects deplorable and disastrous. At the same time I would not force the high truths of religion on any person, nor would I step out of my way to ask anyone to attend church if he or she did not feel inclined to do so. And why? Because I fully admit the laxity and coldness of the Church in the present day--and I know that there are many ministers of the Gospel who do not attract so much as they repel. I am not so self-opinionated as to dream that I, a mere country parson, can succeed in drawing souls to Christ when so many men of my order, more gifted than I, have failed, and continue to fail. But I wish you quite frankly to understand that the trend of modern thought does not affect the vows I took at my ordination,-- that I do not preach one thing, and think another,--and that whatever my faults and shortcomings may be, I most earnestly endeavour to impress the minds of all those men and women who are committed to my care with the beauty, truth and saving grace of the Christian Faith."

Maryllia was silent. She appeared to be looking at the daisies in the grass.

"I hope," he continued quietly, "you will forgive this rather serious talk of mine. But when you spoke of 'the trend of modern thought,' it seemed necessary to me to let you know at once and straightly that I am not with it,--that I do not belong to the modern school. Professing to be a Christian minister, I try to be one,--very poorly and unsuccessfully I know,--but still, I try!"

Maryllia raised her eyes. There was a glisten on her long lashes as of tears.

"Please forgive ME!" she said simply--"And thank you for speaking as you have done! I shall always remember it, and honour you for it. I hope we shall be friends?"

She put the words as a query, and half timidly held out her little ungloved hand. He took it at once and pressed it cordially.

"Indeed, I am sure we shall!" he said heartily, and the smile that made his face more than ordinarily handsome lit up his eyes and showed a depth of sincerity and kindly feeling reflected straight from his honest soul. A sudden blush swept over Maryllia's cheeks, and she gently withdrew her hand from his clasp. A silence fell between them, and when they broke the spell it was by a casual comment respecting the wealth of apple-blossoms that were making the trees around them white with their floral snow.

"St. Rest is a veritable orchard, when the season favours it," said Walden--"It is one of the best fruit-growing corners in England. At Abbot's Manor, for instance, the cherry crop is finer than can be gathered on the same acreage of ground in Kent. Did you know that?"

Maryllia laughed.

"No! I know absolutely nothing about my own home, Mr. Walden,--and I am perfectly aware that I ought to be ashamed of my ignorance. I AM ashamed of it! I'm going to try and amend the error of my ways as fast as I can. When Cicely Bourne comes to stay with me, she will help me. She's ever so much more sensible than I am. She's a genius."

"Geniuses do not always get the credit of being sensible, do they?" queried John, smiling--"Are they not supposed to be creatures of impulse, dwellers in the air, and wholly irresponsible?"

"Exactly so,"--she replied--"That is the commonplace opinion commonplace people entertain of them. Yet the commonplace people owe everything they enjoy in art, literature and science to the conceptions of genius, and of genius alone. As for Cicely, she is the most practical little person possible. She began to earn her living at the age of eleven, and has 'roughed' it in the world more severely than many a man. But she keeps her dreams,"

"And those who wish her well will pray that she may always keep them,"--said Walden--"For to lose one's illusions is to lose the world."

"The world itself may be an illusion!" said Maryllia, drawing near the garden gate and leaning upon it for a moment, as she glanced up at him with a vague sadness in her eyes,--"We never know. I have often felt that it is only a pretty little pageant, with a very dark background behind it!"

He was silent, looking at her. For the first time he caught himself noticing her dress. It was of simple pale blue linen, relieved with white embroidered lawn, and in its cool, fresh, clean appearance was in keeping with the clear bright day. A plain straw garden hat tied across the crown and under the chin with a strip of soft blue ribbon to match the linen gown, was the finish to this 'fashionable' young woman's toilette,--and though it was infinitely becoming to the fair skin, azure eyes, and gold-brown hair of its wearer, it did not suggest undue extravagance, or a Paris 'mode.' And while he yet almost unconsciously studied the picture she made, resting one arm lightly across his garden gate, she lifted the latch suddenly and swung it open.

"Good-bye!" and she nodded smilingly--"Thank you so much for letting me see your lovely garden! As soon as Cicely arrives, you must come and see her--you will, won't you?"

"I shall be most happy---" he murmured.

"She will be so interested to hear how you sent her my telegram,"-- continued Maryllia--"And Gigue too--poor old Gigue!--he is sure to come over here some time during the summer. He is such a quaint person! I think you will like him. Good-bye!"

"Good-bye--for the present!" said John with a slight note of appeal in his voice, which was not lost wholly upon the air alone, for Maryllia turned her head back towards him with a laugh.

"Oh, of course!--only for the present! We are really next-door neighbours, and I'm afraid we can't escape each other unless we each play hermit in separate caves! But I promise not to bore you with my presence very often!"

She waved the spray of white lilac he had given her in farewell, and calling her dog to her side, passed down the village road lightly, like a blue flower drifting with the May breeze, and was soon out of sight.

Walden closed the gate after her with careful slowness, and returned across the lawn to his favourite seat under his favourite apple- tree. Nebbie followed him, disconsolately snuffing the ground in the trail of the departed Plato, who doubtless, to the smaller animal's mind, represented a sort of canine monarch who ruthlessly disdained the well-meaning attentions of his inferiors. Bainton, having finished his task of training the vines across the walls of the rectory, descended his ladder, making as much noise as he could about it and adding thereto a sudden troublesome cough which would he considered, probably excite his master's sympathy and instant attention. But Walden paid no heed. He was apparently busy fumbling with his watch-chain. Bainton waited a moment, and then, unable any longer to control his curiosity, seized his ladder and deliberately carried it across the lawn, though he knew that that was not the proper way to the tool-shed where it was kept. Halting close to the seat under the apple-tree, he said:--

"Yon red honeysuckle's comin' on fine, Passon,--it be as full o' bud as a pod o' peas."

"Ay indeed!" murmured Walden, absently--"That's all right!"

Bainton paused expectantly. No further word however was vouchsafed to him, and he knew by experience that such silence implied his master's wish to be left alone. With an almost magisterial gravity he surveyed the Reverend John's bent head, and with another scrutinising glance, ascertained the nature of the occupation on which his fingers were engaged, whereupon his face expressed the liveliest amazement. Shouldering his ladder, he went his way,--and once out of earshot gave vent to a long low whistle.

"It do beat me!" he said, slapping one corduroy-trousered leg vehemently--"It do beat me altogether--it do reely now! I ain't no swearin' sort, an' bad langwidge ain't my failin', but I feel like takin' a bet, or sayin' a swear when I sees a sensible man like, makin' a fool of hisself! If Passon ain't gone looney all on a suddint, blest if I knows wot's come to 'im. 'Tain't Miss Vancourt,- -'tain't no one nor nothink wot I knows on, but I'm blowed if he worn't sittin' under that tree, like a great gaby, a' fastenin' a mis'able threepenny bit to 'is watch-chain! Did anyone ever 'ear the like! A threepenny bit with a 'ole in it! To think of a man like that turnin' to the sup'stitions o' maids an' wearin' a oley bit o' silver! It do make me wild!--it do reely now!"

And snorting with ineffable disdain, Bainton almost threw his ladder into the tool-shed, thereby scaring a couple of doves who had found their way within, and who now flew out with a whirr of white wings that glistened like pearl in the sunlight as they spread upwards and away into the sky.

"A threepenny bit with a 'ole in it!" he repeated, mechanically watching the birds of peace in their flight--"An' on his watch-chain too, along wi' the gold cross wot he allus wears there, an' which folks sez was the last thing wore by 'is dead sister! Somethin's gone wrong with 'im-somethin' MUST a' gone wrong! Ginerally speakin' a 'oley bit means a woman in it--but 'tain't that way wi' Passon for sure--there's a deeper 'ole than the 'ole in the threepenny--a 'ole wot ain't got no bottom to it, so fur as I can see. I'm just fair 'mazed with that 'ole!--'mazed an' moithered altogether, blest if I ain't!"

The Reverend John, meanwhile, seated under his canopy of apple- blossoms, had succeeded in attaching the ''oley bit' to his chain in such a manner that it should not come unduly into notice with the mere action of pulling out his watch. He could not, for the life of him, have explained, had he been asked, the reason why he had determined to thus privately wear it on his own person. To himself he said he 'fancied' it. And why should not parsons have 'fancies' like other people? Why should they not wear ''oley bits' if they liked? No objection, either moral, legal or religious could surely be raised to such a course of procedure!

And John actually whistled a tune as he slipped back his chain with its new adornment attached, into his waistcoat pocket, and surveyed his garden surroundings with a placid smile. His interview with Miss Vancourt had not been an unpleasant experience by any means. He liked her better than when he had first seen her on the morning of their meeting under the boughs of the threatened 'Five Sister' beeches. He could now, as he thought, gauge her character and temperament correctly, with all the wonderful perspicuity and not- to-be-contradicted logic of a man. She was charming,--and she knew her charm;--she was graceful, and she was aware of her grace;--she was bright and intelligent in the prettily 'surface' way of women,-- she evidently possessed a kind heart, and she seemed thoughtful of other people's feelings,--she had a sweet voice and a delightfully musical laugh,--and--and--that was about all. It was not much, strictly speaking;--yet he found himself considerably interested in weighing the pros and cons of her nature, and wondering how she had managed to retain, in the worldly and social surroundings to which she had been so long accustomed, the child-like impulsiveness of her manner, and the simple frankness of her speech.

"Of course it may be all put on,"--he reflected, though with a touch of shamed compunction at the bare suggestion--"One can never tell! It seemed natural. And it would hardly be worth her while to act a part for the benefit of an old fogey like myself. I think she is genuine. I hope so! At any rate I will believe she is, till she proves herself otherwise. Of course 'the trend of modern thought' has touched her. The cruellest among the countless cruel deeds of latter-day theism is to murder the Christ in women. For, as woman's purity first brought the Divine Master into the world, so must woman's purity still keep Him here with us,--else we men are lost-- lost through the sins, not only of our fathers, but chiefly of our mothers!"

That same evening Maryllia received a prompt reply to one of the telegrams which Walden had sent off for her in the morning. It was brief and to the point, and only ran:--'Coming. Cicely';--a message which Mrs. Tapple had no difficulty in deciphering, and which she sent up to the Manor, post haste, as soon as it arrived. The telegraph-boy who conveyed it, got sixpence for himself as a reward for the extra speed he had put on in running all the way from the village to the house, thereby outstripping the postman, who being rotund in figure was somewhat heavily labouring up in the same direction with the last delivery of letters for the day. Miss Vancourt's correspondents were generally very numerous,--but on this occasion there was only one letter for her,--one, neatly addressed, with a small finely engraved crest on the flap of the envelope. Maryllia surveyed that envelope and crest with disfavour,--she had seen too many of the same kind. The smile that brightened her face when she read Cicely's telegram, faded altogether into an expression of cold weariness as with a small silver paper-knife she slowly slit the closed edges of the unwelcome missive and glanced indifferently at its contents. It ran as follows:

"MY DEAR MISS MARYLLIA,--I feel sure you do not realise the great pain you are inflicting on your aunt, as well as on myself, by declining to answer our letters except by telegram. Pray remember that we are quite in the dark as to the state of your health, your surroundings and your general well-being. Your sudden departure from town, was, if you will permit me to say so, a most unwise impulse, causing as it has done, the greatest perplexity in your own social circle and among your hosts of friends. I have done my best to smooth matters over, by assuring all enquirers that certain matters on your country estate required your personal supervision, but rumour, as you know, has many tongues which are not likely to be easily silenced. Your aunt was much surprised and disturbed to receive from you a box of peacock's feathers, without any word from yourself. She has no doubt you meant the gift kindly, but was not the manner of giving somewhat strange?--let me say eccentric? I hope you will allow me to point out to you that nothing is more fatal to a woman in good society than to attain any sort of reputation for eccentricity. I may take the liberty of saying this to you as an old friend, and as one who still holds persistently to the dear expectation, despite much discouragement, of being able soon to call you by a closer name than mere friendship allows. The disagreement between your aunt and yourself should surely be a matter of slight duration, and not sufficient in any case to warrant your rash decision to altogether resign the protection and kindly guardianship which she, on her part, has exercised over you for so many years. I cannot too strongly impress upon your mind the fatal effect any long absence from her is likely to have on your position in society, and though as yet you have only been about three weeks away, people are talking and will no doubt continue to talk. If you find your old home an agreeable change from town life, pray allow your aunt to join you there. She will do so, I am sure, with pleasure. She misses you very greatly, and I will never believe that you would wilfully cause her needless trouble. I may not, I know, express my own feelings on the subject, as I should probably only incur your scorn or displeasure, but simply as an honest man who wishes you nothing but good, I ask you quietly to consider to what misrepresentation and calumny you voluntarily expose yourself by running away, as it were, from a rightful and affectionate protector and second mother like your good aunt, and living all alone in the country without any one of your immediate circle of friends within calling distance. Is there a more compromising or more ludicrous position than that of the independent and defenceless female? I think not! She is the laughing-stock of the clubs, and the perennial joke of the comic press. Pray do not place yourself in the same category with the despised and unlovely of your sex, but remain on the height where Nature placed you, and where your charm and intelligence can best secure acknowledgment from the less gifted and fortunate. Entreating your pardon for any word or phrase in this letter which may unluckily chance to annoy you, I am. my dear Miss Maryllia,--Yours with the utmost devotion," "ROXMOUTH."

"What a humbug he is!" said Maryllia, half aloud, as she nut the letter back in its envelope and set it aside--"What a soft, smooth, civil, correctly trained humbug! How completely he ignores the possibility of my having any intelligence, even while he asks me to remain 'on the height' where it can best secure acknowledgment! He never appears to realise that my intelligence may be of such a quality as to enable me to see through him pretty clearly! And so the 'independent and defenceless female' is the laughing-stock of the clubs, is she? Well, I daresay he is quite right there! There's nothing braver for men to do at their clubs than to laugh at the 'defenceless' women who would rather fight the world alone and earn their own livelihood, than enter into loveless marriages! The quaintest part of the letter is the bit about Aunt Emily. Roxmouth must really think me a perfect idiot if he dreams that I would accept such a story as that she was 'surprised and disturbed' at receiving the box of peacock's feathers. Aunt Emily was never 'surprised' or 'disturbed' at anything in her life, I am sure! When poor Uncle Fred died, she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes for five minutes, and then sat down at her desk to write her orders for mourning. And when I spoke my mind to her about Roxmouth, she only smiled and told me not to excite myself. Then when I said I had determined to leave her altogether and go back to my own home to live, she took it quite easily, and merely stated she would have to alter her will. I assured her I hoped she would do so at once, as I had no wish to benefit by her death. Then she didn't speak to me for several days, and I came away quietly without bidding her good-bye. And here I am,--and here I mean to stay!"

She laughed a little, and moving to the open window, looked out on the quiet beauty of the landscape. "Yes!--I too will become a laughing-stock of the clubs;--and even I may attain the distinction of being accepted as a 'joke by the comie press'! I will be an 'independent and defenceless female,' and see how I get on! In any case I'd rather be defenceless than have Roxmouth as a defender. And I shall not be alone here, now that Cicely is coming. Besides, I have two men friends in the village,--at least, I think I have! I'm sure of one,--old Josey Letherbarrow!" The smile lingered on her lips, as she still looked out on the lawn and terrace, shadowed by the evening dusk, and sweet with the cool perfume of the rising dew. "And the other,--if he should turn out as agreeable as he seemed this morning,--why, he is a tower of strength so far as respectability is concerned! What better protection can an 'independent and defenceless female' have than the minister of the parish? I can go to him for a character, ask him for a reference, throw myself and my troubles upon him as upon a rock, and make him answer for me as an honest and well-intentioned parishioner! And I believe he would 'speak up' for me, as the poor folks say,--yes, my Lord Roxmouth!--I believe he would,--and if he did, I'm certain he would speak straight, and not whisper a few small poisonous lies round the corner! For I think"--and here the train of her reflections wandered away from her aunt and her lordly wooer altogether, "yes,--I think Mr. Walden is a good man! I was not quite sure about him when I first met him,--I thought his eyes seemed deceitful,--so many parsons' eyes are!--but I looked well into them to-day,--and they're not the usual eyes of a parson at all,--they're just the eyes of a British sailor who has watched rough seas all his life,--and such eyes are always true!"

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XV

On the following Monday afternoon Cicely Bourne, to whom Walden had so successfully telegraphed Maryllia's commands, arrived. She was rather an odd-looking young person. Her long thin legs were much too long for the shortness of her black cashmere frock, which was made 'en demoiselle,' after the fashion adhered to in French convents, where girls are compelled to look as ugly as possible, in order that they may eschew the sin of personal vanity,--her hair, of a rich raven black, was plaited in a stiff thick braid resembling a Chinese pigtail, and was fastened at the end with a bow of ribbon,--and a pair of wonderfully brilliant dark eyes flashed under her arching brows, suggesting something weird and witchlike in their roving glances, and giving an almost uncanny expression to her small, sallow face. But she was full of the most exuberant vitality,--she sparkled all over with it and seemed to exhale it in the mere act of breathing. Brimful of delight at the prospect of spending the whole summer with her friend and patroness, to whom she owed everything, and whom she adored with passionate admiration and gratitude, she dashed into the old-world silence and solitude of Abbot's Manor like a wild wave of the sea, crested with sunshine and bubbling over with ripples of mirth. Her incessant chatter and laughter awoke the long- hushed echoes of the ancient house to responsive gaiety,--and every pale lingering shadow of dullness or loneliness fled away from the exhilarating effect of her presence, which acted at once as a stimulant and charm to Maryllia, who welcomed her arrival with affectionate enthusiasm.

"But oh, my dear!" she exclaimed--"What a little school-guy they have made of you! You must have grown taller, surely, since November when I saw you last? Your frock is ever so much too short!"

"I don't think I've grown a bit,"--said Cicely, glancing down at her own legs disparagingly--"But my frock wore shabby at the bottom, and the nuns had a fresh hem turned up all round. That reduced its length by a couple of inches at least. I told them as modestly as I could that my ankles were too vastily exposed, but they said it didn't matter, as I was only a day-boarder."

Maryllia's eyebrows went up perplexedly.

"I don't see what that has to do with it,"--she said--"Would you have preferred to live in the Convent altogether, dear?"

"Grand merci!" and Cicely made an expressive grimace--"Not I! I should not have had half as many lessons from Gigue, and I should never have been able to write to you without the Mere Superieure spying into my letters. That's why none of the girls are allowed to have sealing wax, because all their letters are ungummed over a basin of hot water and read before going to post. Discipline, discipline! Torquemada's Inquisition was nothing to it! Of course I had to tell the Mere Superieure that you had sent for me, and that I should be away all summer. She asked heaps of questions, but she got nothing out of me, so of course she wrote to your aunt. But that doesn't matter, does it?"

"Not in the least,"--answered Maryllia, decisively,--"My aunt has nothing whatever to do with me now, nor I with her. I am my own mistress."

"And it becomes you amazingly!" declared Cicely--"I never saw you looking prettier! You are just the sweetest thing that ever fell out of heaven in human shape! Oh, Maryllia, what a lovely, lovely place this is! And is it all yours?--your very, very own?"

"My very, very own!" and Maryllia, in replying to the question, felt a thrill of legitimate pride in the beautiful old Tudor house of her ancestors,--"I wish I had never been taken away from it! The more I see of it, the more I feel I ought not to have left it so long."

"It is real home, sweet home!" said Cicely, and her great eyes grew suddenly sad and wistful, as she slipped a caressing arm round her friend's waist--"How grateful I am to you for asking me to come and stay in it! Because, after all, I am only a poor little peasant,-- with a musical faculty!"

Maryllia kissed her affectionately.

"You are a genius, my dear!" she said--"There's is no higher supremacy. What does Gigue say of you now?"

"Gigue is satisfied, I think. But I don't really know. He says I'm too precocious--that my voice is a woman's before I'm a girl. It's abnormal--and I'm abnormal too. I know I am,--and I know it's horrid--but I can't help it! Whers'a the piano?"

"There isn't one in the house," said Maryllia, smiling; "Abbot's Manor has always lived about a hundred and fifty years behind the times. But I've sent for a boudoir grand--it will be here this week. Meanwhile, won't this do?" and she pointed to a quaint little instrument occupying a recess near the window--"It's a spinet of Charles the Second's period---"

"Delightful!" cried Cicely, ecstatically--"There's nothing sweeter in the whole world to sing to!"

Opening the painted lid with the greatest tenderness and care, she passed her hands lightly over the spinet's worn and yellow ivory keys and evoked a faint fairy-like tinkling.

"Listen! Isn't it like the wandering voice of some little ghost of the past trying to speak to us?" she said--"And in such sweet tune, too! Poor little ghost! Shall I sing to you? Shall I tell you that we have a sympathy in common with you, even though you are so old and so far, far away!"

Her lips parted, and a pure note, crystal clear, and of such silvery softness as to seem more supernatural than human, floated upward on the silence. Maryllia caught her breath, and listened with a quickly beating heart,--she knew that the voice of this child whom she had rescued from a life of misery, was a world's marvel.

"Le douce printemps fait naitre,-- Autant d'amours que de fleurs; Tremblez, tremblez, jeunes coeurs! Des qu'il commence a paraitre Il faut cesser les froideurs."

Here with a sudden brilliant roulade the singer ran up the scale to the C in alt, and there paused with a trill as delicious and full as the warble of a nightingale.

"Mais ce qu'il a de douceurs Vous coutera cher peut-etre! Tremblez, tremblez jeunes coeurs, Le douce printemps fait naitre, Autant d'amours que de fleurs!"

She ceased. The air, broken into delicate vibrations, carried the lovely sounds rhythmically outward, onward and into unechoing distance.

She turned and looked at Maryllia--then smiled.

"I see you are pleased,"--she said.

"Pleased! Cicely, I don't believe anyone was ever born into the world to sing as you sing!"

Cicely looked quaintly meditative.

"Well, I don't know about that! You see there have been several millions of folks born into the world, and there may have been just one naturally created singer among them!" She laughed, and touched a chord on the spinet. "The old French song exactly suits this old French instrument. I see it is an ancient thing of Paris. Gigue says I have improved--but he will never admit much, as you know. He has forbidden me to touch the C in alt, and I did it just now. I cannot help it sometimes--it comes so easy. But you must scold me, Maryllia darling, when you hear me taking it,--I don't want to strain the vocal cords, and I always forget I'm only fourteen; I feel--oh! ever so much older!--ages old, in fact!" She sighed, and stretched her arms up above her head. "What a perfect room this is to sing in! What a perfect house!--and what a perfect angel you are to have me with you!"

Her eyes filled with sudden tears of emotion, but she quickly blinked them away.

"Et ce cher Roxmouth?" she queried, suddenly, glancing appreciatively at the rippling gold-brown lights and shades of her friend's hair, the delicate hues of her complexion, and the grace of her form--"Has he been to see you in this idyllic retreat?"

Maryllia gave a slight gesture of wearied impatience.

"Certainly not! How can you ask such a question, Cicely! I left my aunt on purpose to get rid of him once and for all. And he knows it;--yet he has written to me every two days regularly since I came here!"

"Helas!--ce cher Roxmouth!" murmured Cicely, with a languid gesture imitative of the 'society manner' of Mrs. Fred Vancourt,--"Parfait gentilhomme au bout des ongles!"

Maryllia laughed.

"Yes,--Aunt Emily all over!" she said--"How tired I am of that phrase! She knows as well as anybody that Roxmouth, for all his airs of aristocratic propriety, is a social villain of the lowest type of modern decadence, yet she would rather see me married to him than to any other man she has ever met. And why? Simply because he will be a Duke! She would like to say to all her acquaintances--'My niece is a Duchess.' She would feel a certain fantastic satisfaction in thinking that her millions were being used to build up the decayed fortunes of an English nobleman's family, as well as to 'restore' Roxmouth Castle, which is in a bad state of repair. And she would sacrifice my heart and soul and life to such trumpery ambitions as these!"

"Trumpery ambitions!" echoed Cicely--"My dear, they are ambitions for which nearly all women are willing to scramble, fight and die! To be a Duchess! To dwell in an ancient 'restored' castle of once proud English nobles! Saint Moses! Who wouldn't sacrifice such vague matters as heart, life and soul for the glory of being called 'Your Grace' by obsequious footmen! My unconventional Maryllia! You are setting yourself in rank, heretical opposition to the conventionalities of society, and won't all the little conventional minds hate you for it!"

"It doesn't matter if they do,"--rejoined Maryllia--"I have never been loved since my father's death,--so I don't mind being hated."

"I love you!" said Cicely, with swift ardour--"Don't say you have never been loved!"

Maryllia caught her hand tenderly and kissed it.

"I was not thinking of you, dear!" she said--"Forgive me! I was thinking of men. They have admired me and flirted with me,--many of them have wanted to marry me, in order to get hold of Aunt Emily's fortune with me,--but none of them have ever loved me. Cicely, Cicely, I want to be loved!"

"So do I!" said Cicely, with answering light in her eyes--"But I don't see how it's going to be done in my case! You may possibly get your wish, but I!--why, my dear, I see myself in futur-oe as a 'prima donna assoluta' perhaps, with several painted and padded bassi and tenori making sham love to me in opera till I get perfectly sick of cuore and amore, and cry out for something else by way of a change! I am quite positive that love,--love such as we read of in poetry and romance, doesn't really exist! And I have another fixed opinion--which is, that the people who write most about it have never felt it. One always expresses best, even in a song, the emotions one has never experienced."

Maryllia looked at her in a little wonder.

"Do you really think that?"

"I do! It's not one of Gigue's sayings, though I know I often echo Gigue!"

She went to the window. "How lovely the garden is! Come out on the lawn, Maryllia, and let us talk!" And as they sauntered across the grass together with arms round each other's waists, she chattered on--"People who write books and music are generally lonely,--and they write best about love because they need it. They fancy it must be much better than it is. But, after all, the grandest things go unloved. Look at the sky, how clear it is and pure. Is it loved by any other sky that we know of? And the sun up there, all alone in its splendour,--I wonder if any other sun loves it? There are so many lonely things in the universe! And it seems to me that the loneliest are always the loveliest and grandest. It is only stupid ephemera that are gregarious. Worms crawl along in masses,--mites swarm in a cheese--flies stick in crowds on jam--and brainless people shut themselves up all together within the walls of a city. I'd rather be an eagle than a sparrow,--a star than one of a thousand bonfire sparks,--and as a mere woman, I would rather ten thousand times live a solitary life by myself till I die, than be married to a rascal or a fool!"

"Exactly my sentiments,"--said Maryllia--"Only you put them more poetically than I can. Do you know, Cicely, you talk very oddly sometimes?--very much in advance of your age, I mean?"

"Do I?" And Cicely's tone expressed a mingling of surprise and penitence--"I didn't know it. But I suppose I really can't help it, Maryllia! I was a very miserable child--and miserable children age rapidly. Perhaps I shall get younger as I grow older! You must remember that at eleven years old I was scrubbing floors like any charwoman in the Convent for two centimes an hour. I gained a lot of worldly wisdom that way by listening to the talk of the nuns, which is quite as spiteful and scandalous as anything one hears in outside 'wicked' society. Then I got into the Quartier Latin set with Gigue, who picked me up because he heard me singing in the street,--and altogether my experiences of life haven't been toys and bonbons. I know I THINK 'old'--and I'm sure I feel old!"

"Not when you play or sing," suggested Maryllia.

"No--not then--never then! Then, all the youth of the world seems to rush into me,--it tingles in my fingers, and throbs in my throat! I feel as if I could reach heaven with sound!--yes! I feel that I could sing to God Himself, if He would only listen!"

Her eyes glowed with passion,--the plainness of her features was transformed into momentary beauty. Maryllia was silent. She knew that the aspirations of genius pent up in this elf-like girl were almost too strong for her, and that the very excitability and sensitiveness of her nature were such as to need the greatest care and tenderness in training and controlling. Tactfully she changed the conversation to ordinary subjects, and in a little while Cicely had learned all that Maryllia herself knew about the village of St. Rest and its inhabitants. She was considerably interested in the story of the rescue of the 'Five Sister' beeches, and asked with a touch of anxiety, what had become of the dismissed agent, Oliver Leach?

"Oh, he is still in the neighbourhood,"--said Maryllia, indifferently--"He works for Sir Morton Pippitt, and I believe has found a home at Badsworth. His accounts are not yet all handed in to my solicitors. But I have a new agent now,--a Mr. Stanways--he is just married to quite a nice young woman,--and he has already begun work. Mr. Stanways has splendid recommendations--so that will be all right."

"No doubt--so far as Mr. Stanways himself is concerned it will be all right,"--rejoined Cicely, musingly--"But if, as you say, the man Oliver Leach cursed you, it isn't pleasant to think he is hanging around here."

"He isn't hanging round anywhere,"--declared Maryllia, easily--"He is out of this beat altogether. He cursed me certainly,--but he was in a temper,--and I should say that curses come naturally to him. But, as the clergyman was present at the time, the curse couldn't take any effect." She laughed. "You know Satan always runs away from the Church."

"Who is the clergyman, and what is he like?" asked Cicely.

"He's not at all disagreeable"--answered Maryllia, carelessly-- "Rather stiff perhaps and old-fashioned,--but he seems to be a great favourite with all his parishioners. His name is John Walden. He has restored the church here, quite at his own expense, and according to the early original design. It is really quite wonderful. When I was a child here, I only remember it as a ruin, but now people come from far and near to see it. It will please you immensely."

"But you don't go to it," observed Cicely, suggestively.

"No. I haven't attended a service there as yet. But I don't say I never will attend one. That will depend on circumstances."

"I remember you always hated parsons," said Cicely, thoughtfully.

Maryllia laughed.

"Yes, I always did!"

"And you always will, I suppose?"

"Well, I expect I shall have to tolerate Mr. Walden,"--Maryllia answered lightly,--"Because he's really my nearest neighbour. But he's not so bad as most of his class."

"I daresay he's a better type of man than Lord Roxmouth," said Cicely. "By the way, Maryllia, that highly distinguished nobleman has spread about a report that you are 'peculiar,' simply because you won't marry him? The very nuns at the Convent have heard this, and it does make me so angry! For when people get hold of the word 'peculiar,' it is made to mean several things."

"I know!" and for a moment Maryllia's fair brows clouded with a shadow of perplexity and annoyance--"It is a word that may pass for madness, badness, or any form of social undesirability. But I don't mind! I'm quite aware that Roxmouth, if he cannot marry me, will slander me. It's a way some modern men have of covering their own rejection and defeat. The woman in question is branded through the 'smart set' as 'peculiar,' 'difficult,' 'impossible to deal with'-- oh yes!--I know it all! But I'm prepared for it--and just to forestall Roxmouth a little, I'm going to have a few people down here by way of witnesses to my '-peculiar' mode of life. Then they can go back to London and talk."

"They can, and they will,--you may be sure of that!" said Cicely, satirically--"Is this a 'dressed' county, Maryllia?"

Maryllia gave vent to a peal of laughter.

"I should say not,--but I really don't know!" she replied,--"People have called on me, but I have not, as yet, returned their calls. We'll do that in this coming week. The only person I have seen, who poses as a 'county' lady, is an elderly spinster named Tabitha Pippitt, only daughter of Sir Morton Pippitt, who is a colonial manufacturer, and, therefore, not actually in the 'county' at all. Miss Tabitha was certainly not 'dressed,' she was merely covered."

"That's the very height of propriety!" declared Cicely--"For, after all, covering alone is necessary. 'Dress,' in the full sense of the word, implies vanity and all its attendant sins. Gigue says you can always pick out a very dull, respectable woman by the hidecmsness of her clothes. I expect Miss Tabitha is dull."

"She is--most unquestionably! But I'm afraid she is only a reflex of country life generally, Cicely. Country life IS dull,--especially in England."

"Then why do you go in for it?" queried Cicely, arching her black brows perplexedly.

"Simply to escape something even duller,"--laughed Maryllia--"London society and its 'Souls'!"

Cicely laughed too, and shrugged her shoulders expressively. She understood all that was implied. And with her whole heart she rejoiced that her friend whom she loved with an almost passionate adoration and gratitude, had voluntarily turned her back on the 'Smart Set,' and so, of her own accord, instead of through her godfathers and godmothers, had 'renounced the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world and all the sinful lusts of the flesh.'

Within a very few days St. Rest became aware of Cicely's quaint personality, for she soon succeeded in making herself familiar with everybody in the place. She had a knack of winning friends. She visited old Josey Letherbarrow, and made him laugh till he nearly choked, so that Maryllia had to pat him vigorously on the back to enable him to recover his breath--she cut jokes with Mrs. Tapple,-- chatted with the sexton, Adam Frost, and scattered 'sweeties' galore among all his children,--and she furthermore startled the village choir at practice by suddenly flitting into the church and asking Miss Eden, the schoolmistress, to allow her to play the organ accompaniment, and on Miss Eden's consenting to this proposition, she played in such a fashion that the church seemed filled with musical thunder and the songs of angels,--and the village choristers, both girls and boys, became awestruck and nervous, and huddled themselves together in a silent group, afraid to open their mouths lest a false note should escape, and spoil the splendour of the wonderful harmony that so mysteriously charmed their souls. And then, calming the passion of the music down, she turned with gentlest courtesy to Miss Eden, and asked: 'What were the children going to sing?'--whereupon, being told that it waft a hymn called 'The Lord is my Shepherd,' she so very sweetly entreated them to sing it with her, that none of them could refuse. And she led them all with wondrous care and patience, giving to the very simple tune, a tender and noble pathos such as they had never heard before, yet which they unconsciously absorbed into their own singing, as they lifted up their youthful voices in tremulous unison.

"The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want, He maketh me down to lie, In pleasant fields where the lilies grow. And the river runneth by.

"The Lord is my Shepherd; He feedeth me In the depth of a desert land, And lest I should in the darkness slip, He holdeth me by the hand.

"The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want, My mind on Him is stayed, And though through the Valley of Death I walk, I shall not be afraid.

"The Lord is my Shepherd; O Shepherd sweet, Leave me not here to stray; But guide me safe to Thy heavenly fold, And keep me there, I pray!"

John Walden, passing through the churchyard just at this time, heard the rhythmic rise and fall of the quaint old melody with a strange thrill at his heart. He had listened to the self-same hymn over and over again,--every year the school-children re-studied and re-sang it,--but there was something altogether new in its harmony this time,--something appealing and pathetic which struck to the inmost core of his sensitive nature. Noiselessly, he entered the church, and for a moment or two stood unobserved, watching the little scene before him. Cicely was at the organ, and her hands still rested on the keys, but she was speaking to the members of the choir.

"That is very nicely done,"--she said, encouragingly--"But you must try and keep more steadily together in tune, must they not, Miss Eden?"--and she turned to the schoolmistress at her side, who, with a smile, agreed. "You"--and she touched pretty Susie Prescott on the arm,--"You sing delightfully! It is a little voice--but so very sweet!"

Susie blushed deeply and curtsied. It had got about in the village that Miss Vancourt's young friend from Paris was a musical 'prodigy,' and praise from her was something to be remembered.

"Now listen!" went on Cicely--"I'm not going to sing full voice, because I'm not allowed to yet,--but this is how that hymn should go!" And her pure tones floated forth pianissimo, with slow and tender solemnity:--

"The Lord is my Shepherd; O Shepherd sweet, Leave me not here to stray; But guide me safe to Thy heavenly fold, And keep me there, I pray! Amen!"

Silence followed. The children stood wonder-struck, and Miss Eden's eyes filled with emotional tears.

"How beautiful!" she murmured--"How very beautiful!"

Cicely rose from the organ-stool, and turned round.

"Here is Mr. Walden," she said, in quite a matter-of-fact way as she perceived him. "It IS Mr. Walden, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," replied John, advancing with a smile--"And very fortunate Mr. Walden is to have heard such lovely singing!"

"Oh, that's not lovely," said Cicely, carelessly--"I was only humming the last verse, just to put the expression right. I thought it must be you!--though, of course, as I have not been introduced to you, I couldn't be sure! Maryllia--Miss Vancourt--has told me all about you,--and I know she has written twice since I've been here to ask you up to the Manor--once to tea, and once to dinner. Why haven't you come?" Walden was slightly embarrassed by this point- blank question. It was perfectly true he had received two invitations from the lady of the Manor, and had refused both. Why he had refused, he could not himself have told.

"I suppose you didn't want to meet me!" said Cicely, showing all her white teeth in a flashing smile--"But there's no escape for it, you see,--here I am! I'm not such a rascal as I look, though! I've been playing accompaniments for the children!--go on singing, please!"-- and she addressed Miss Eden and Susie Prescott, who collecting their straying thoughts, began hesitatingly to resume the interrupted practice--"It's a nice little organ--very full and sweet. The church is perfectly exquisite! I come in every day to look at it except Sundays."

"Why except Sundays?" asked Walden, amused.

She gave him a quaint side-glance.

"I'll tell you some day,--not now!"--she answered--"This is not the fitting time or place." She moved to the altar rails, and hung over them, looking at the alabaster sarcophagus "This thing has a perfect fascination for me!" she went on--"I can't bear not to know whose bones are inside! I wonder you haven't opened it."

"It was not meant to be opened by those who closed it," said Walden, quietly.

Cicely drooped her gipsy-bright eyes.

"That's one for me!" she thought--"He's just like what Maryllia says he is,--very certain of his own mind, and not likely to move out of his own way."

"I think," pursued Walden--"if you knew that someone very dear to you had been laid in that sarcophagus 'to eternal rest,' you would resent any disturbance of even the mere dust of what was once life,- -would you not?"

"I might;" said Cicely dubiously--"But I have never had any 'someone very dear to me' except Maryllia Vancourt. And if she died, I should die too!"

John was silent, but he looked at her with increased interest and kindliness.

They walked out of the church together, and once in the open air, he became politely conventional.

"And how is Miss Vancourt?" he enquired.

"She is very well indeed,"--replied Cicely--"But tremendously busy just now with no end of household matters. The new agent, Mr. Stanways, is going over every yard of the Abbot's Manor property with her, and she is making any quantity of new rules. All the tenants' rents are to be reduced, for one thing--I know THAT. Then there are a lot of London people coming down to stay--big house- parties in relays,--I've helped write all the invitations. We shall be simply crowded at the end of June and all July. We mean to be very gay!"

"And you will like that, of course?" queried Walden, indulgently, while conscious of a little sense of hurt and annoyance, though he knew not why.

"Naturally!" and Cicely shrugged her shoulders carelessly, "Doesn't the Bible say 'the laughter of fools is like the crackling of thorns under a pot'? I love to set the pot down and hear the thorns crackle!"

What a weird girl she was! He looked at her in mute amaze, and she smiled.

"Do come up to tea some afternoon!" she said coaxingly, "We should be so glad to see you! I know Maryllia would like it--she thinks you are rather rude, you know! I'm to be here all the summer, but I'll try to be good and not say things to vex you. And as you're a clergyman, I can tell you all about myself--like the confessional secrets! And when you hear some of my experiences, you won't wonder a bit at my queer ways. I can't be like other girls of my age,--I really CAN'T!--my life won't let me!"

Her tone was one of light banter, but her eyes were wistful and pathetic. Walden was conscious of a sudden sympathy with this wild little soul of song, and taking her hand, pressed it kindly.

"Wait till I see some of your 'queer ways,' as you call them!" he said, with a genial laugh--"I know you sing very beautifully-is that a 'queer way'?"

Cicely shook her mop-like tresses of hair back over her shoulders with a careless gesture.

"It is--to people who can't do it!" she said. "Surely you know that? For example, if you preach very well--I don't know that you do, because I've never heard you, but Maryllia's housekeeper, Mrs. Spruce, says you've got 'a mouth of angels'--she does really!" and, as Walden laughed, she laughed with him--"Well, as I say, if you preach very well with a mouth of angels, there must be several parsons round here who haven't got that mouth, and who say of you, of course metaphorically: 'He hath a devil'! Isn't it so?"

John hesitated.

"No doubt opinions differ,"---he began.

"Oh, of course!--you can get out of it that way, if you like!" she retorted, gaily--"You won't say uncharitable things of the rest of your brethren if you can help it, but you know--yes, you must know that parsons are as jealous of each other and as nasty to each other as actors, singers, writers, or any other 'professional' persons in the world. In fact, I believe if you were to set two spiteful clergymen nagging at each other, they'd beat any two 'leading ladies' on the operatic stage, for right-down malice and meanness!"

"The conversation is growing quite personal!" said Walden, a broad smile lighting up his fine soft eyes--"Shall we finish it at the Manor when I come up to tea?"

"But are you really coming?" queried Cicely--"And when?"

"Suppose I say this afternoon---" he began. Cicely clapped her hands.

"Good! I'll scamper home and tell Maryllia! I'll say I have met you, and that I've been as impudent as I possibly could be to you---"

"No, don't say that!" laughed Walden--"Say that I have found you to be a very delightful and original young lady---"

"I'm not a young lady,"--said Cicely, decisively--"I was born a peasant on the sea-coast of Cornwall--and I'm glad of it. A 'young lady' nowadays means a milliner's apprentice or a draper's model. I am neither. I am just a girl--and hope, if I live, to be a woman. I'll take my own ideas of a suitable message from you to Maryllia-- don't YOU bother!" And she nodded sagaciously. "I won't make ructions, I promise! Come about five!"

She waved her hand and ran off, leaving Walden in a mood between perplexity and amusement. She was certainly an 'original,' and he hardly knew what to make of her. There was something 'uncanny' and goblin-like in her appearance, and yet her sallow face had a certain charm when the smile illumined it, and the light of aspiration burned up in the large wild eyes. In any case, she had persuaded him in a moment, as it were, and almost involuntarily, to take tea at the Manor that afternoon. Why he had consented to do what he had hitherto refused, he could not imagine. Cicely's remark that Miss Vancourt thought him 'rather rude,' worried him a little.

"Perhaps I have been rude"--he reflected, uneasily--"But I am not a society man;--I'm altogether out of my element in the company of ladies--and it seemed so much better that I should avoid being drawn into any intimacy with persons who are not likely to have anything in common with me--but of course I ought to be civil--in fact, I suppose I ought to be neighbourly---"

Here a sudden irritation against the nature of his own thoughts disturbed him. He was not arguing fairly with himself, and he knew it. He was perfectly aware that ever since the day of their meeting in the village post-office, he had wished to see Miss Vancourt again. He had hoped she might pass the gate of the rectory, or perhaps even look into his garden for a moment,--but his expectation had not been realised. He had heard of Cicely Bourne's arrival,--and he had received two charmingly-worded notes from Maryllia, inviting him to the Manor,--which invitations, as has already been stated, he had, with briefest courtesy, declined. Now, why,--if he indeed wished to see her again,--had he deliberately refused the opportunities given him of doing so? He could not answer this at all satisfactorily to his own mind, and he was considerably annoyed with himself to be forced to admit the existence of certain portions of his mental composition which were apparently not to be probed by logic, or measured by mathematics.

"Well, at any rate, as I have promised the little singer, I can go up to tea just this once, and have done with it," he decided--"I shall then be exonerated from 'rudeness'--and I can explain to Miss Vancourt--quite kindly and courteously of course--that I am not a visiting man,--that my habits are rather those of a recluse, and then--for the future--she will understand."

Cicely Bourne, meanwhile, on her way back to the Manor through the fields, paused many times to gather cowslips, which were blooming by thousands in the grass at her feet, and as she recklessly pulled up dozens of the pale-green stems, weighted with their nodding golden honey-bells, she thought a good deal about John Walden.

"Maryllia never told me he was handsome,"--she mused; "But he is! I wonder why she didn't mention it? So odd of her,--because really there are very few good-looking men anywhere, and one in the shape of a parson is a positive rarity and ought to go on exhibition! He's clever too--and--obstinate? Yes, I should say he was obstinate! But he has kind eyes. And he isn't married. What a comfort THAT is! Parsons are uninteresting enough in themselves as a rule, but their wives are the last possibility in the way of dullness. Oh, that honeysuckle!" And she sprang over the grass to the corner of a hedge where a long trail of the exquisitely-scented flower hung temptingly, as it seemed within reach, but when she approached it, she found it just too high above her to be plucked from the bough where its tendrils twined. Looking up at it, she carolled softly:

"O Fortune capricieuse! Comme tu es cruelle! Pourquoi moques-tu ton esclave Qui sert un destin immortel!"

Here a sudden rustle in the leaves on the other side of the hedge startled her, and a curious-looking human head adorned profusely with somewhat disordered locks of red hair perked up enquiringly. Cicely jumped back with an exclamation.

"Saint Moses! What is it?"

"It is me! Merely me!" and Sir Morton Pippitt's quondam guest, Mr. Julian Adderley, rose to his full lanky height, and turned his flaccid face of more or less comic melancholy upon her--"Pray do not be alarmed! I have been reposing under the trees,--and I was, or so I imagine, in a brief slumber, when some dulcet warblings as of a nightingale awoke me"--here, stooping to the ground for his hat, he secured it, and waved it expressively--"and I have, I fear, created some dismay in the mind of the interesting young person who, if I mistake not, is a friend of Miss Vancourt?"

Cicely surveyed him with considerable amusement.

"Never mind who I am!" she said, coolly--"Tell me who YOU are! My faith!--you are as rough all over as a bear! What have you been doing to yourself? Your clothes are covered with leaves!"

"Even as a Babe in the Wood!" responded Adderley, "Yes!--it is so!" and he began to pick off delicately the various burs and scraps of forest debris which had collected and clung to his tweed suit during his open-air siesta--"To speak truly, I am a trespasser in these domains,--they are the Manor woods, I know,--forbidden precincts, and possibly guarded by spring-guns. But I heeded not the board which speaks of prosecution. I came to gather bluebells,--innocent bluebells!--merely that and no more, to adorn my humble cot,--I have a cot not far from here. And as for my identity, my name is Adderley--Julian Adderley--a poor scribbler of rhymes--a votre service!"

He waved his hat with a grand flourish again, and smiled.

"Oh I know!" said Cicely--"Maryllia has spoken of you--you've taken a cottage here for the summer. Pick that bit of honeysuckle for me, will you?--that long trail just hanging over you!"

"With pleasure!" and he gathered the coveted spray and handed it to her.

"Thanks!" and she smiled appreciatively as she took it. "How did you get into that wood? Did you jump the hedge?"

"I did!" replied Adderley.

"Could you jump it again?"

"Most assuredly!"

"Then do it!"

Whereupon Adderley clapped his hat on his head, and resting a hand firmly on one of the rough posts which supported the close green barrier between them, vaulted lightly over it and stood beside her.

"Not badly done,"--said Cicely, eyeing him quizzically--"for 'a poor scribbler of rhymes' as you call yourself. Most men who moon about and write verse are too drunken, and vicious to even see a hedge,-- much less jump over it."

"Oh, say not so!" exclaimed Adderley--"You are too young to pass judgment on the gods!"

"The gods!" exclaimed Cicely--"Whatever are you talking about? The gods of Greece? They were an awful lot--perfectly awful! They wouldn't have been admitted EVEN into modern society, and that's bad enough. I don't think the worst woman that ever dined at a Paris restaurant with an English Cabinet Minister would have spoken to Venus, par exemple. I'm sure she wouldn't. She'd have drawn the line there."

"Gracious Heavens!" and Adderley stared in wonderment at his companion, first up, then down,--at her wild hair, now loosened from its convent form of pigtail, and scarcely restrained by the big sun- hat which was tied on anyhow,--at her great dark eyes,--at her thin angular figure and long scraggy legs,--legs which were still somewhat too visible, though since her arrival at Abbot's Manor Maryllia had made some thoughtful alterations in the dress of her musical protegee which had considerably improved her appearance--"Is it possible to hear such things---"

"Why, of course it is, as you've got ears and HAVE heard them!" said Cicely, with a laugh--"Don't ask 'is it possible' to do a thing when you've done it! That's not logical,--and men do pride themselves on their logic, though I could never find out why. Do you like cowslips?" And she thrust the great bunch she had gathered up against his nose--"There's a wordless poem for you!"

Inhaling the fresh fine odour of the field blossoms, he still looked at her in amazement, she meeting his gaze without the least touch of embarrassment.

"You can walk home with me, if you like!"--she observed condescendingly--"I won't promise to ask you into the Manor, because perhaps Maryllia won't want you, and I daresay she won't approve of my picking up a young man in the woods. But it's rather fun to talk to a poet,--I've never met one before. They don't come out in Paris. They live in holes and corners, drinking absinthe to keep off hunger."

"Alas, that is so!" and Adderley began to keep pace with the thin black-stockinged legs that were already starting off through the long grass and flowers--"The arts are at a discount nowadays. Poetry is the last thing people want to read."

"Then why do you write it?" and Cicely turned a sharp glance of enquiry upon him--"What's the good?"

"There you offer me a problem Miss--er--Miss---"

"Bourne,"--finished Cicely--"Don't fight with my name--it's quite easy--though I don't know how I got it. I ought to have been a Tre or a Pol-I was born in Cornwall. Never mind that,--go on with the 'problem.'"

"True--go on with the problem,"--said Julian vaguely, taking off his hat and raking his hair with his fingers as he was wont to do when at all puzzled--"The problem is--'why do I write poetry if nobody wants to read it'--and 'what's the good'? Now, in the first place, I will reply that I am not sure I write 'poetry.' I try to express my identity in rhythm and rhyme--but after all, that expression of myself may be prose, and wholly without interest to the majority. You see? I put it to you quite plainly. Then as to 'what's the good?'--I would argue 'what's the bad?' So far, I live quite harmlessly. From the unexpected demise of an uncle whom I never saw, I have a life-income of sixty pounds a year. I am happy on that--I desire no more than that. On that I seek to evolve myself into SOMETHING--from a nonentity into shape and substance--and if, as is quite possible, there can be no 'good,' there may be a certain less of 'bad' than might otherwise chance to me. What think you?"

Cicely surveyed him scrutinisingly.

"I'm not at all sure about that"--she said--"Poets have all been doubtful specimens of humanity at their best. You see their lives are entirely occupied in writing what isn't true--and of course it tells' on them in the long run. They deceive others first, and then they deceive themselves, though in their fits of 'inspiration' as they call it, they may, while weaving a thousand lies, accidentally hit on one truth. But the lies chiefly predominate. Dante, for example, was a perfectly brazen liar. He DIDN'T go to Hell, or Purgatory, or Paradise--and he DIDN'T bother himself about Beatrice at all. He married someone else and had a family. Nothing could be more commonplace. He invented his Inferno in order to put his enemies there, all roasting, boiling, baking or freezing. It was pure personal spite--and it is the very force of his vindictiveness that makes the Inferno the best part of hid epic. The portraits of Dante alone are enough to show you the sort of man he was. WHAT a creature to meet in a dark lane at midnight!"

Here she made a grimace, drawing her mouth down into the elongated frown of the famous Florentine, with such an irresistibly comic effect that Adderley gave way to a peal of hearty, almost boyish laughter.

"That's right!" said Cicely approvingly--"That's YOU, you know! It's natural to laugh at your age--you're only about six or seven-and- twenty, aren't you?"

"I shall be twenty-seven in August,"--he said with a swift return to solemnity--"That is, as you will admit, getting on towards thirty."

"Oh, nonsense! Everybody's getting on towards thirty, of course--or towards sixty, or towards a hundred. I shall be fifteen in October, but 'you will admit'"--here she mimicked his voice and accent--"that I am getting on towards a hundred. Some folks think I've turned that already, and that I'm entering my second century, I talk so 'old.' But my talk is nothing to what I feel--I feel--oh!" and she gave a kind of angular writhe to her whole figure--"like twenty Methusalehs in one girl!"

"You are an original!"--said Julian, nodding at her with an air of superior wisdom--"That's what you are!"

"Like you, Sir Moon-Calf"--said Cicely--"The word 'moon-calf,' you know, stands for poet--it means a human calf that grazes on the moon. Naturally the animal never gets fat,--nor will you; it always looks odd--and so will you; it never does anything useful,--nor will you; and it puts a kind of lunar crust over itself, under which crust it writes verses. When you break through, its crust you find something like a man, half-asleep--not knowing whether he's man or boy, and uncertain, whether to laugh or be serious till some girl pokes fun at him--and then---"

"And then?"--laughed Adderley, entering vivaciously into her humour- -"What next?"

"This, next!"--and Cicely pelted him full in the face with one of her velvety cowslip-bunches--'And this,--catch me if you can!"

Away she flew over the grass, with Adderley after her. Through tall buttercups and field daisies they raced each other like children,-- startling astonished bees from repasts in clover-cups--and shaking butterflies away from their amours on the starwort and celandines. The private gate leading into Abbot's Manor garden stood open,-- Cicely rushed in, and shut it against her pursuer who reached it almost at the same instant.

"Too bad!" he cried laughingly--"You mustn't keep me out! I'm bound to come inside!"

"Why?" demanded Cicely, breathless with her run, but looking all the better for the colour in her cheeks and the light in her eyes--"I don't see the line of argument at all. Your hair is simply dreadful! You look like Pan, heated in the pursuit of a coy nymph of Delphos. If you only wore skins and a pair of hoofs, the resemblance would be perfect!"

"My dear Cicely!" said a dulcet voice at this moment,--"Where HAVE you been all the morning! How do you do, Mr. Adderley? Won't you come in?"

Adderley took off his hat, as Maryllia came across to the gate from the umbrageous shadow of a knot of pine-trees, looking the embodiment of fresh daintiness, in a soft white gown trimmed with wonderfully knotted tufts of palest rose ribbon, and wearing an enchanting 'poke' straw hat with a careless knot of pink hyacinths tumbling against her lovely hair. She was a perfect picture 'after Romney,' and Adderley thought she knew it. But there he was wrong. Maryllia knew little and cared less about her personal appearance.

"Where have you been?" she repeated, taking Cicely round the waist-- "You wild girl! Do you know it is lunch time? I had almost given you up. Spruce said you had gone into the village--but more than that she couldn't tell me."

"I did go to the village,"--said Cicely--"and I went into the church, and played the organ, and helped the children sing a hymn. And I met the parson, Mr. Walden, and had a talk with him. Then I started home across the fields, and found this man"--and she indicated Adderley with a careless nod of her head--"asleep in a wood. I almost promised him some lunch--I didn't QUITE---"

"My dear Miss Vancourt,"--protested Adderley--"Pray do not think of such a thing!--I would not intrude upon you in this unceremonious way for the world!"

"Why not?" said Maryllia, smiling graciously--"It will be a pleasure if you will stay to luncheon with us. Cicely has carte blanche here you know--genius must have its way!"

"Of course it must!"--agreed Cicely--"If genius wants to etand on its head, it must be allowed to make that exhibition of itself lest it should explode. If genius asks the lame, halt, blind and idiotic into the ancestral halls of Abbot's Manor, then the lame, halt, blind and idiotic are bound to come. If genius summons the god Pan to pipe a roundelay, pipings there shall be! Shall there not, Mr. Pan Adderley?"

Her eyes danced with mirth and mischief, as they flashed from his face to Maryllia's. "Genius,"--she continued--"can even call forth a parson from the vasty deep if it chooses to do so,--Mr. Walden is coming to tea this afternoon."

"Indeed!" And Maryllia's sweet voice was a trifle cold. "Did you invite him, Cicely?"

"Yes. I told him that you thought it rather rude of him not to have come before---"

"Oh Cicely!" said Maryllia reproachfully--"You should not have said that!"

"Why not? You did think him rude,--and so did I,--to refuse two kind invitations from you. Anyhow he seemed sorry, and said he'd make up for it this afternoon. He's really quite good-looking."

"Quite--quite!" agreed Julian Adderley--"I considered him exceptionally so when I first saw him in his own church, opposing a calm front to the intrusive pomposity and appalling ignorance of our venerable acquaintance, Sir Morton Pippitt. I decided that I had found a Man. So new!--so fresh! That is why I took a cottage for the summer close by, that I might be near the rare specimen!"

Maryllia laughed.

"Are you not a man yourself?" she said.

"Not altogether!" he admitted,--"I am but half-grown. I am a raw and impleasing fruit even to my own palate. John Walden is a ripe and mellow creature,--moreover, he seems still ripening in constant sunshine. I go every Sunday to hear him preach, because he reminds me of so much that I had forgotten."

Here they went into luncheon. Maryllia threw off her hat as she seated herself at the head of the table, ruffling her hair with the action into prettier waves of brown-gold. Her cheeks were softly flushed,--her blue eyes radiant.

"You are a better parishioner than I am, Mr. Adderley!"--she said-- "I have not been to church once since I came home. I never go to church."

"Naturally! I quite understand! Few people of any education or intelligence can stand it nowadays," he replied--"The Christian myth is well-nigh exploded. Yet one cannot help having a certain sympathy and interest in men, who, like Mr. Walden, appear to still honestly believe in it."

"The Christian myth!" echoed Cicely--"My word! You do lay down the law! Where should we be without the 'myth' I wonder?"

"Pretty much where we are now,"--said Julian--"Two thousand years of the Christian dispensation leaves the world still pagan. Self- indulgence is still paramount. Wealth still governs both classes and masses. Politics are still corrupt. Trade still plays its old game of 'beggar my neighbour.' What would you! And in this day there is no restraining influence on the laxity of social morals. Literature is decadent,--likewise Painting;--Sculpture and Poetry are moribund. Man's inborn monkeyishness is obtaining the upper hand and bearing him back to his natural filth,--and the glimmerings of the Ideal as shown forth in a few examples of heroic and noble living are like the flash of the rainbow-arch spanning a storm-cloud,--beautiful, but alas!--evanescent."

"I'm afraid you are right"--said Maryllia, with a little sigh; "It is very sad and discouraging, but I fear very true."

"It's nothing of the kind!"--declared Cicely, with quick vehemence-- "It's just absolute nonsense! It is! Ah, 'never shake thy gory locks at me,' Sir Moon-Calf!" and she made a little grimace across the table at Julian, who responded to it with a complacent smile--"You can talk, talk, talk--of course! every man that ever sat in clubs, smoking and drinking, can talk one's head off--but you've got to LIVE, as well as talk! What do you know about self-indulgence being 'paramount,' except in your own case, eh? Do you think at all of the thousands and thousands of poor creatures everywhere, who completely sacrifice their lives to the needs of others?"

"Of course there are such--" admitted Adderley; "But---"

"No 'buts' come into the case," went on the young girl, her eyes darkening with the earnestness of her thoughts--"I have seen quite enough even in my time to know how good and kind to one another even the poorest people can be. And I have had plenty of hardships to endure, too! But I can tell you one thing--and that is, that the Christian 'myth' as you call it, is just the one thing that makes MY life worth living! I don't want to talk about religion--I never do,- -I only just say this--that the great lesson of Christianity is exactly what we most need to learn."

"In what way?" asked Julian, smiling indulgently.

"Why,--merely that if one is honest and true, one MUST be crucified. Therefore one is prepared,--and there's no need to cry out when the nails are driven in. The Christian 'myth' teaches us what to expect, how to endure, and how at last to triumph!"

A lovely light illuminated her face, and Maryllia looked at her very tenderly. Adderley was silent.

"Nothing does one so much good as to be hurt,"--went on Cicely in a lighter tone--"You then become aware that you are a somebody whom other bodies envy. You never know how high you have climbed till you feel a few dirty hands behind you trying to pull you down! When I start my career as a singer, I shall not be satisfied till I get anonymous letters every morning, telling me what a fraud and failure I am. Then I shall realise that I am famous!"

"Alas!" said Julian with a comically resigned air--"I shall never be of sufficient importance for that! No one would waste a penny stamp on me! All I can ever hope to win is the unanimous abuse of the press. That will at least give me an interested public!"

They laughed.

"Is Mr. Marius Longford a great friend of yours?" enquired Maryllia.

"Ah, that I cannot tell!" replied Julian--"He may be friend, or he may be foe. He writes for a great literary paper--and is a member of many literary clubs. He has produced three books--all monstrously dull. But he has a Clique. Its members are sworn to praise Longford, or die. Indeed, if they do not praise Longford, they become mysteriously exterminated, like rats or beetles. I myself have praised Longford, lest I also get a dose of his unfailing poison. He will not praise me--but no matter for that. If he would only abuse me!--but he won't! His blame is far more valuable than his eulogy. At present he stands like a kind of neutral whipping-post--very much in my way!"

"He knows Lord Roxmouth, he tells me,"--went on Maryllia; whereat Cicely's sharp glance flashed at her inquisitively--"Lord Roxmouth is by way of being a patron of the arts."

The tone of her voice, slightly contemptuous, was not lost on Adderley. He fancied he was on dangerous ground.

"I have never met Lord Roxmouth myself"--he said--"But I have heard Longford speak of him. Longford however rather 'makes' for society. I do not. Longford is quite at home with dukes and duchesses---"

"Or professes to be--" put in Maryllia, with a slight smile.

"Or professes to be,--I accept the correction!" agreed Adderley.

"Personally, I know nothing of him,"--said Maryllia--"I have never seen him at any of the functions in London, and I should imagine him to be a man who rather over-estimated himself. So many literary men do. That is why most of them are such terrible social bores."

"To the crime of being a literary man I plead not guilty!" and Julian folded his hands in a kind of mock-solemn appeal--"Moreover, I swear never to become one!"

"Good boy!" smiled Cicely--"Be a modern Pan, and run away from all the literary cliques, kicking up the dust behind you in their faces as you go! Roam the woods in solitude and sing!

"'The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tinolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings!'"

"Ah, Shelley!" cried Adderley--"Shelley the divine! And how divinely you utter his lines! Do you know the last verse of that poem:--'I sang of the dancing stars'?"

Cicely raised her hand, commanding attention, and went on:

"'I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven,--and the giant wars, And Love and Death and Birth. And then I changed my pipings,-- Singing, how down the vale of Menalus, I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed, Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed; All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings!'"

"Beau-tiful!--beau-tiful!" sighed Adderley--"But so remote!--so very remote! Alas!--who reads Shelley now!"

"I do"--said Cicely--"Maryllia does. You do. And many more. Shelley didn't write for free-libraries and public-houses. He wrote for the love of Art,--and he was drowned. You do the same, and perhaps you'll be hung! It doesn't much matter how you end, so long as you begin to be something no one else can be."

"You have certainly begun in that direction!" said Julian.

Cicely shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know! I am myself. Most people try to be what they're not. Such a waste of time and effort! That's why I've taken a fancy to the parson I met this morning, Mr. Walden. He is himself and no other. He is as much himself as old Josey Letherbarrow is. Josey is an individuality. So is Mr. Walden. So is Maryllia. So am I. And"-- here she pointed a witch-like finger at Adderley--"so would you bes if you didn't 'pose' as much as you do!"

"Cicely!" murmured Maryllia, warningly, though she smiled.

A slight flush swept over Adderley's face. But he took the remark without offence, thereby showing himself to be of better mettle than the little affectations of his outward appearance indicated.

"You think so?" he said, placidly--"That is very dear of you!--very young! You may be right--you may be wrong,--but from one so unsophisticated as yourself it is a proposition worth considering-- to pose, or not to pose! It is so new--so fresh!"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVI

Walden kept his promise and duly arrived to tea at the Manor that afternoon. He found his hostess in the library with Cicely and Julian. She was showing to the latter one or two rare 'first editions,' and was talking animatedly, but she broke off her conversation the moment he was announced, and advanced to meet him with a bright smile.

"At last, Mr. Walden!" she said--"I am glad Cicely has succeeded where I failed, in persuading you to accept the welcome that has awaited you here for some time!"

The words were gracefully spoken, with just the faintest trace of kindly reproach in their intonation. Simple as they were, they managed to deprive John of all power to frame a suitable reply. He bowed over the little white hand extended to him, and murmured something which was inaudible even to himself, while he despised what he considered his own foolishness, clumsiness and general ineptitude from the bottom of his heart. Maryllia saw his embarrassment, and hastened to relieve him of it.

"We have been talking books,"--she said, lightly--"Mr. Adderley has almost knelt in adoration before my Shakespeare 'first folio.' It is very precious, being uncalendared in the published lists of ordinary commentators. I suppose you have seen it?"

"Indeed I have"--replied Walden, as he shook hands with Cicely and nodded pleasantly to Julian--"I'm afraid, Miss Vancourt, that if you knew how often I have sat alone in this library, turning over the precious volumes, you might be very angry with me! But I have saved one or two from the encroaches of damp, such as the illuminated vellum 'Petrarch,' and some few rare manuscripts--so you must try to forgive my trespass. Mrs. Spruce used to let me come in and study here whenever I liked."

"Will you not do so still?" queried Maryllia, sweetly--"I can promise you both solitude and silence."

Again a wave of awkwardness overcame him. What could he say in response to this friendly and gentle graciousness!

"You are very kind,"--he murmured.

"Not at all. The library is very seldom used--so the kindness will be quite on your side if you can make it of service. I daresay you know more about the books than I do. My father was very proud of them."

"He had cause to be,"--said Walden, beginning to recover his equanimity and ease as the conversation turned into a channel which was his natural element--"It is one of the finest collections in England. The manuscripts alone are worth a fortune." Here he moved to the table where Adderley stood turning over a wondrously painted 'Book of Hours'--"That is perfect twelfth-century work"--he said-- "There is a picture in it which ought to please Miss Cicely," and he turned the pages over tenderly--"Here it is,--the loveliest of Saint Cecilias, in the act of singing!"

Cicely smiled with pleasure, and hung over the beautifully illuminated figure, surrounded with angels in clouds of golden glory.

"There's one thing about Heaven which everybody seems agreed upon,"- -she said--"It's a place where we're all expected to sing!"

"Not a doubt of it!" agreed Walden--"You will be quite in your element!"

"The idea of Heaven is remote--so very remote!" said Adderley--"But if such a place existed, and I were bound to essay a vocal effort there, I should transform it at once to Hell! The angels would never forgive me!"

They laughed.

"Let us go into the garden"--said Maryllia--"It is quite lovely just now,--there are such cool deep shadows on the lawn."

Cicely at once ran out, beckoning Adderley to follow. Maryllia tied on her hat with its pink strings and its bunch of pink hyacinths tumbling against her small shell-like ear, and looked up from under its brim with an entrancing smile.

"Will you come, Mr. Walden?"

John murmured something politely inarticulate in assent. He was, as has already been stated, apt to be rather at a loss in the company of women, unless they were well-seasoned matrons and grandames, with whom he could converse on the most ordinary and commonplace topics, such as the curing of hams, the schooling of children, or the best remedies for rheumatism. A feminine creature who appeared to exist merely to fascinate the eye and attract the senses, moved him to a kind of mental confusion, which affected himself chiefly, as no one, save the most intimate of his friends, would ever have noticed it, or guessed that he was at any sort of pains to seem at ease. Just now, as he took his soft shovel-hat, and followed his fair hostess out on the lawn, his mind was more or less in a state of chaos, and the thoughts that kept coming and going were as difficult to put into consecutive order as a Chinese puzzle. One uncomfortable memory however sat prominently in a corner of his brain like the mocking phantasm of a mischievous Puck, pointing its jeering finger and reminding him of the fact, not to be denied, that but a short while ago, he had made up his mind to dislike, ay, even to detest, that mysterious composition of white and rose, blue eyes and chestnut- gold hair, called Maryllia Vancourt,--that he had resolved she would be an altogether objectionable personage in the village--HIS village--of St. Rest,--and that he had wished--Ah! what had he wished? Back, O teazing reminder of the grudging and suspicious spirit that had so lately animated the soul of a Christian cleric! Yet it had to be admitted, albeit now reluctantly, that he had actually wished the rightful mistress of Abbot's Manor had never returned to it! Smitten with sorest compunction at the recollection of his former blind prejudice against the woman he had then never seen, he walked by her side over the warm soft grass, listening with a somewhat preoccupied air to the remarks she was making concerning Cicely Bourne, and the great hopes she entertained of the girl's future brilliant career.

"Really," she declared, "the only useful thing I have ever done in my life is to rescue Cicely from uncongenial surroundings, and provide her with all she needs for her musical studies. To help bring out a great genius gives ME some little sense of importance, you see! In myself I am such an utter nonentity."

She laughed. Walden looked at her with an earnestness of which he was scarcely conscious. She coloured a little, and her eyes fell. Something in the sudden delicate flush of her cheeks and the quick droop of her eyelashes startled him,--he felt a curious sense of contrition, as though he had given her some indefinable, altogether shadowy cause for that brief discomposure. The idea that she seemed, even for a second, not quite so much at her ease, restored his own nerve and self-possession, and it was with an almost paternal gentleness that he said.

"Do you really consider yourself a nonentity, Miss Vancourt? I am sure the society you have left behind you in London does not think you so."

She opened her sea-blue eyes full upon him.

"Society? Why do you speak of it? Its opinion of me or of anyone else, is surely the last thing a sensible man. or woman would care for, I imagine! One 'season' of it was enough for me. I have unfortunately had several 'seasons,' and they were all too many."

Again Walden looked at her, but this time she did not seem to be aware of his scrutiny.

"Do you take me for a member of the 'smart' set, Mr. Walden?" she queried, gaily--"You are very much mistaken if you do! I have certainly mixed with it, and know all about it--much to my regret-- but I don't belong to it. Of course I like plenty of life and amusement, but 'society' as London and Paris and New York express it in their modes and manners and 'functions,' is to me the dullest form of entertainment in the world."

Walden was silent. She gave him a quick side-glance of enquiry.

"I suppose you have been told something about me?" she said-- "Something which represents me otherwise than as I represent myself. Have you?"

At this abrupt question John fairly started out of his semi- abstraction in good earnest.

"My dear Miss Vancourt!" he exclaimed, warmly--"How can you think of such a thing! I have never heard a word about you, except from good old Mrs. Spruce who knew you as a child, and who loves to recall these days,--and--er--and---"

He broke off, checking himself with a vexed gesture.

"And--er--and--er--who else?" said Maryllia, smiling---"Now don't play tricks with ME, or I'll play tricks with YOU!"

His eyes caught and reflected her smile.

"Well,--Sir Morton Pippitt spoke of you once in my hearing"--he said--"And a friend of his whom he brought to see the church, the Duke of Lumpton. Also a clergyman in this neighbourhood, a Mr. Leveson--rector at Badsworth--HE mentioned you, and presumed"--here John paused a moment,--"yes, I think I may say presumed--to know yon personally."

"Did he really! I never heard of him!" And she laughed merrily. "Mr. Walden, if I were to tell you the number of people who profess to know ME whom I do not know and never WILL know, you would be surprised! I never spoke to Sir Morton Pippitt in my life till the other day, though he pretends he has met me,-but he hasn't. He may have seen me perhaps by chance when I was a child in the nursery, but I don't remember anything about him. My father never visited any of the people here,--we lived very much to ourselves. As for the Duke of Lumpton,--well!--nobody knows him that can possibly avoid it--and I have never even so much as seen him. Aunt Emily may possibly have spoken of me in these persons' hearing--that's quite likely,--but they know nothing of me at first hand." She paused a moment, "Look at Cicely!" she said--"How quickly she makes friends! She and Mr. Adderley are chattering away like two magpies!"

Walden looked in the direction indicated, and saw the couple at some distance off, under the great cedar-tree which was the chief ornament of the lawn,--Cicely seated in a low basket-chair, and Adderley stretched on the grass at her feet. Both were talking eagerly, both were gesticulating excitedly, and both looked exactly what they were, two very eccentric specimens of humanity.

"They seem perfectly happy!" he said, smiling--"Adderley is a curious fellow, but I think he has a good heart. He puts on a mannerism, because he has seen the members of a certain literary 'set' in London put it on--but he'll drop that in time,--when he is a little older and wiser. He has been in to see me once or twice since he took up his residence here for the summer. He tries to discuss religion with me--or rather, I should say. irreligion. His own special 'cult' is the easy paganism of Omar Kayyam."

"Is he clever?"

"I think he is. He has a more or less original turn of mind. He read me some of his verses the other day."

"Poor you!" laughed Maryllia.

"Well, I was inclined to pity myself when he first began"--said Walden, laughing also--"But I must confess I was agreeably surprised. Some of his fancies are quite charming."

They had been walking slowly across the lawn, and were now within a few steps of the big cedar-tree.

"I must take you into the rose-garden, Mr. Walden!"--and she raised her eyes to his with that childlike confiding look which was one of her special charms,--"The roses are just budding out, and I want you to see them before the summer gets more advanced. Though I daresay you know every rosebush in the place, don't you?"

"I believe I do!" he admitted--"You see an old fogey like myself is bound to have hobbies, and my particular hobby is gardening. I love flowers, and I go everywhere I can, or may, to see them and watch their growth. So that for years I have visited your rose-garden, Miss Vancourt! I have been a regular and persistent trespasser,--but all the same, I have never plucked a rose."

"Well, I wish you had!" said Maryllia, feeling somewhat impatient with him for calling himself an 'old fogey,'--why did he give himself away?--she thought,--"I wish you had plucked them all and handed them round in baskets to the villagers, especially to the old and sick persons. It would have been much better than to have had them sold at Riversford through Oliver Leach."

"Did he sell them?" exclaimed John, quickly--"I am not surprised!"

"He sold everything, and put the money in his own pocket"--said Maryllia,--"But, after all, the loss is quite my own fault. I ought to have enquired into the management of the property myself. And I certainly ought not to have stayed away from home so many years. But it's never too late to mend!" She smiled, and advancing a step or two called "Cicely!"

Cicely turned, looking up from beneath her spreading canopy of dark cedar boughs.

"Oh, Maryllia, we're having such fun!" she exclaimed--"Mr. Adderley is talking words, and I'm talking music! We'll show you how it goes presently!"

"Do, please!" laughed Maryllia; "It must be delightful! Mr. Walden and I are going into the rose-garden. We shall be back in a few minutes!"

She moved along, her white dress floating softly over the green turf, its delicate flounces and knots of rosy ribbon looking like a trail of living flowers. Walden, walking at her side, nodded smilingly as he passed close by Cicely and Julian, his tall athletic figure contrasting well with Maryllia's fairy-like grace,--and presently, crossing from the lawn to what was called the 'Cherry- Tree Walk,' because the path led under an arched trellis work over which a couple of hundred cherry-trees were trained to form a long arbour or pergola, they turned down it, and drawing closer together in conversation, under the shower of white blossoms that shed fragrance above their heads, they disappeared. Cicely, struck by a certain picturesqueness, or what she would have called a 'stage effect' in the manner of their exit, stopped abruptly in the pianissimo humming of a tune with which she declared she had been suddenly inspired by some lines Adderley had just recited.

"Isn't she pretty!" she said, indicating with a jerk of her ever gesticulating hand the last luminous glimmer of Maryllia's vanishing gown--"She's like Titania,--or Kilmeny in Fairyland. Why don't you write something about HER, instead of about some girl you 'imagine' and never see?"

Adderley, lying at his ease on the grass, turned on his arm and likewise looked after the two figures that had just passed, as it seemed, into a paradise of snowy flowers.

"The girls I 'imagine' are always so much better than those I see,"- -he replied, with uncomplimentary candour.

"Thank you!" said Cicely--"You are quite rude, you know! But it doesn't matter."

He stared up at her in vague astonishment.

"Oh, I didn't mean you!" he explained--"You're not a girl."

"No, really!" ejaculated Cicely--"Then what am I, pray?"

He looked at her critically,--at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows,--at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat- iron model,--then he smiled oddly.

"You are a goblin!"--he said--"An elf,--a pixie--a witch! You were born in a dark cave where the sea dashed in at high tide and made the rough stones roar with music. There were sea-gulls nesting above your cradle, and when the wind howled, and you cried, they called to you wildly in such a plaintive way that you stopped your tears to listen to them, and to watch their white wings circling round you! You are not a girl--no!--how can you be? For when you grew a little older, the invisible people of the air took you away into a great forest, and taught you to swing yourself on the boughs of the trees, while the stars twinkled at you through the thick green leaves,--and you heard the thrushes sing at morning and the nightingales at evening, till at last you learned the trill and warble and the little caught sob in the throat which almost breaks the heart of those who listen to it? And so you have become what you are, and what I say you always will be--a goblin--a witch!--not a girl, but a genius!"

He waved his hand with fantastic gesture and raked up his hair.

"That's all very well and very pretty,"--said Cicely, showing her even white teeth in a flashing 'goblin' grin,--"But of course you don't mean a word of it! It's merely a way of talking, such as poets, or men that call themselves poets, affect when the 'fit' is on them. Just a string of words,--mere babble! You'd better write them down, though,--you musn't waste them! Publishers pay for so many words I believe, whether they're sense or nonsense,--please don't lose any halfpence on my account! Do you know you are smiling up at the sky as if you were entirely mad? Ordinary people would say you were,--people to whom dinner is the dearest thing in life would suggest your being locked up. And me, too, I daresay! You haven't answered my question,--why don't you write something about Maryillia?"

"She, too, is not a girl,"--rejoined Adderley--"She is a woman. And she is absolutely unwritable!"

"Too lovely to find expression even in poetry,"--said Cicely, complacently.

"No no!--not that! Not that!" And Adderley gave a kind of serpentine writhe on the grass as he raised himself to a half-sitting posture-- "Gentle Goblin, do not mistake me! When I say that Miss Vancourt is unwritable, I would fain point out that she is above and beyond the reach of my Muse. I cannot 'experience' her! Yes--that is so! What a poet needs most is the flesh model. The flesh model may be Susan, or Sarah, or Jane of the bar and tap-room,--but she must have lips to kiss, hair to touch, form to caress---"

"Saint Moses!" cried Cicely, with an excited wriggle of her long legs--"Must she?"

"She must!" declared Julian, with decision--"Because when you have kissed the lips, you have experienced a 'sensation,' and you can write--'Ah, how sweet the lips I love.' You needn't love them, of course,--you merely try them. She must be amenable and good-natured, and allow herself to be gazed at for an hour or so, till you decide the fateful colour of her eyes. If they are blue, you can paraphrase George Meredith on the 'Blue is the sky, blue is thine eye' system-- if black, you can recall the 'Lovely as the light of a dark eye in woman,' of Byron. She must allow you to freely encircle her waist with an arm, so that having felt the emotion you can write--"How tenderly that yielding form, Thrills to my touch!' And then,--even as a painter who pays so much per hour for studying from the life,-- you can go away and forget her--or you can exaggerate her charms in rhyme, or 'imagine' that she is fairer than Endymion's moon-goddess- -for so long as she serves you thus she is useful,--but once her uses are exhausted, the poet has done with her, and seeks a fresh sample. Hence, as I say, your friend Miss Vancourt is above my clamour for the Beautiful. I must content myself with some humbler type, and 'imagine' the rest!"

"Well, I should think you must, if that's the way you go to work!" said Cicely, with eyes brimful of merriment and mischief--"Why you are worse than the artists of the Quartier Latin! If you must needs 'experience' your models, I wonder that Susan, Sarah and Jane of the bar and tap-room are good enough for you!"

"Any human female suffices,"--murmured Julian, drowsily, "Provided she is amenable,--and is not the mother of a large family. At the spectacle of many olive branches, the Muse shrieks a wild farewell!" Cicely broke into a peal of laughter.

"You absurd creature!" she said--"You don't mean half the nonsense you talk--you know you don't!"

"Do I not? But then, what do I mean? Am I justified in assuming that I mean anything?" And he again ran his fingers through his ruddy locks abstractedly. "No,--I think not! Therefore, if I now make a suggestion, pray absolve me from any serious intentions underlying it--and yet---"

"'And yet'--what?" queried Cicely, looking at him with some curiosity.

"Ah! 'And yet'! Such little words, 'and yet'!" he murmured--"They are like the stepping-stones across a brook which divides one sweet woodland dell from another! 'And yet'!" He sighed profoundly, and plucking a daisy from the turf, gazed into its golden heart meditatively. "What I would say, gentle Goblin, is this,--you call me Moon-calf, therefore there can be no objection to my calling you Goblin, I think?"

"Not the least in the world!" declared Cicely--"I rather like it!"

"So good of you!--so dear!" he said, softly--"Well!--'and yet'--as I have observed, the Muse may, like the Delphic oracle, utter words without apparent signification, which only the skilled proficient at her altar may be able to unravel. Therefore,--in this precise manner, my suggestion may be wholly without point,--or it may not."

"Please get on with it, whatever it is,"--urged Cicely, impatiently- -"You're not going to propose to me, are you? Because, if so, it's no use. I'm too young, and I only met you this morning!"

He threw the daisy he had just plucked at her laughing face.

"Goblin, you are delicious!" he averred--"But the ghastly spectre of matrimony does not at present stand in my path, luring me to the frightful chasms of domesticity, oblivion and despair. What was it the charming Russian girl Bashkirtseff wrote on this very subject? 'Me marier et'---?"

"I can tell you!" exclaimed Cicely--"It was the one sentence in the whole book that made all the men mad, because it showed such utter contempt for them! 'Me marier et avoir des enfants? Mais--chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant! Je veux la gloire!' Oh, how I agree with her! Moi, aussi, je veux la gloire!"

Her dark eyes flamed into passion,--for a moment she looked almost beautiful. Adderley stared languidly at her as he would have stared at the heroine of an exciting scene on the stage, with indolent, yet critical interest.

"Goblin incroyable!" he sighed--"You are so new!--so fresh!"

"Like salad just gathered," said Cicely, calming down suddenly from his burst of enthusiasm--"And what of your 'suggestion'?"

"My suggestion," rejoined Adderley--"is one that may seem to you a strange one. It is even strange to myself! But it has flashed into my brain suddenly,--and even so inspiration may affect the dullard. It is this: Suppose the Parson fell in love with the Lady, or the Lady fell in love with the Parson? Either, neither, or both?"

Cicely sat up straight in her chair as though she had been suddenly pulled erect by an underground wire.

"What do you mean?" she asked--"Suppose the parson fell in love with the lady or the lady with the parson! Is it a riddle?"

"It may possibly become one;" he replied, complacently--"But to speak more plainly--suppose Mr. Walden fell in love with Miss Vancourt, or Miss Vancourt fell in love with Mr. Walden, what would you say?"

"Suppose a Moon-calf jumped over the moon!" said Cicely disdainfully--"Saint Moses! Maryllia is as likely to fall in love as I am,--and I'm the very last possibility in the way of sentiment. Why, whatever are you thinking of? Maryllia has heaps of men in, love with her,--she could marry to-morrow if she liked."

"Ay, no doubt she could marry--that is quite common--but perhaps she could not love!" And Julian waved one hand expressively. "To love is so new!--so fresh!"

"But Maryllia would never fall in love with a PARSON!" declared Cicely, almost resentfully--"A parson!--a country parson too! The idea is perfectly ridiculous!"

A glimmer of white in the vista of the flowering 'Cherry-Tree Walk' here suddenly appeared and warned her that Maryllia and the Reverend John were returning from their inspection of the rose-garden. She cheeked herself in an outburst of speech and silently watched them approaching. Adderley watched them too with a kind of lachrymose interest. They were deep in conversation, and Maryllia carried a bunch of white and blush roses which she had evidently just gathered. She looked charmingly animated, and now and then a light ripple of her laughter floated out on the air as sweet as the songs of the birds chirming around them.

"The roses are perfectly lovely!" she exclaimed delightedly, as she came under the shadow of the great cedar-tree; "Mr. Walden says he has never seen the standards so full of bud." Here she held the cluster she had gathered under Cicely's nose. "Aren't they delicious! Oh, by the bye, Mr. Walden, I have promised you one! You must have it, in return for the spray of lilac you gave me when I came to see YOUR garden! Now you must take a rose from mine!" And, laying all the roses on Cicely's lap, she selected one delicate half-opened, blush-white bloom. "Shall I put it in your coat for you?"

"If you will so far honour me!" answered Walden;--he was strangely pale, and a slight tremor passed over him as he looked down at the small fingers,--pink-tipped as the petals of the flower they so deftly fastened in his buttonhole; "And how"--he continued, with an effort, addressing Cicely and Julian--"How have Music and Poetry got on together?"

"Oh, we're not married yet,"--said Cicely, shaking off the dumb spell which Adderley's 'suggestion' had for a moment cast upon her mind--"We ought to be, of course,--for a real good opera. But we're only just beginning courtship. Mr. Adderley has recited some lines of his own composition, and I have improvised some music. You shall hear the result some day."

"Why not now?" queried Maryllia, as she seated herself in another chair next to Cicely's under the cedar boughs, and signed to Walden to do the same.

"Why, because I believe that the tea is about to arrive. I saw the majestic Primmins in the distance, wrestling with a table--didn't you, Mr. Adderley?"

Adderley rose from his half recumbent position on the grass, and shading his eyes from the afternoon sunshine, looked towards the house.

"Yes,--it is even so!" he replied--"Primmins and a subordinate are on the way hither with various creature comforts. Music and Poetry must pause awhile. Yet why should there be a pause? It is for this that I am a follower of Omar Kayyam. He was a materialist as well as a spiritualist, and his music admits of the aforesaid creature comforts as much as the exalted and subtle philosophies and ironies of life."

"Poor Omar!" said Walden,--"The pretty piteousness of him is like the wailing of a lamb led to the slaughter. Grass is good to graze on, saith lambkin,--other lambs are fair to frisk with,--but alas!-- neither grass nor lambs can last, and therefore as lambkin cannot always be lambkin, it bleats its end in Nothingness! But, thank God, there is something stronger and wiser in the Universe than lambkin!"

"True!" said Adderley, "But even lambkin has a right to complain of its destiny."

Walden smiled.

"I think not,"--he rejoined--"No created thing has a right to complain of its destiny. It finds itself Here,--and the fact that it IS Here is a proof that there is a purpose for its existence. What that purpose is we do not know yet, but we SHALL know!"

Adderley lifted dubious eyelids.

"You think we shall?"

"Most assuredly! What does Dante Rosetti say?--

'The day is dark and the night To him that would search their heart; No lips of cloud that will part Nor morning song in the light; Only, gazing alone To him wild shadows are shown, Deep under deep unknown,

And height above unknown height Still we say as we go: "Strange to think by the way Whatever there is to know That shall we know one day."'"

He recited the lines softly, but with eloquent emphasis. "You see, those of us who take the trouble to consider the working and progress of events, know well enough that this glorious Creation around us is not a caprice or a farce. It is designed for a Cause and moves steadily towards that Cause. There may be--no doubt there are--many men who elect to view life from a low, material, or even farcical standpoint--nevertheless, life in itself is serious and noble."

Cicely's dark face lightened as with an illumination while she listened to these words. Maryllia, who had taken up the roses she had laid in Cicely's lap, and was now arranging them afresh, looked up suddenly.

"Yet there are many searching truths in the philosophy of Omar Kayyam, Mr. Walden,"--she said--"Many sad facts that even our religion can scarcely get over, don't you think so?"

He met her eyes with a gentle kindliness in his own.

"I think religion, if true and pure, turns all sad facts to sweetness, Miss Vancourt,"--he said--"At least, so I have found it."

The clear conviction of his tone was like the sound of a silver bell calling to prayer. A silence followed, broken only by the singing of a little bird aloft in the cedar-tree, whose ecstatic pipings aptly expressed the unspoilt joys of innocence and trust.

"One pretty verse of Omar I remember," then said Cicely, abruptly, fixing her penetrating eyes on Walden,--"And it really isn't a bit irreligious. It is this:--

'The Bird of Life is singing on the bough, His two eternal notes of "I and Thou"-- O hearken well, for soon the song sings through, And would we hear it, we must hear it Now!'"

A white rose slipped from the cluster Maryllia held, and dropped on the grass. John stooped for it, and gave it back to her. Their hands just touched as she smiled her thanks. There was nothing in the simple exchange of courtesies to move any self-possessed man from his normal calm, yet a sudden hot thrill and leap of the heart dazed Walden's brain for a moment and made him almost giddy. A sick fear-- an indefinable horror of himself possessed him,--caught by this mmameable transport of sudden and singular emotion, he felt he could have rushed away, away!--anywhere out of reach and observation, and have never entered the fair and halcyon gardens of Abbot's Manor again. Why?--in Heaven's name, why? He could not tell,--but--he had no right to be there!--no right to be there!--he kept on repeating to himself;--he ought to have remained at home, shut up in his study with his dog and his books,--alone, alone, always alone! The brief tempest raged over his soul with soundless wind and fire,--then passed, leaving no trace on his quiet features and composed manner. But in that single instant an abyss had been opened in the depths of his own consciousness,--an abyss into which he looked with amazement and dread at the strange foolhardiness which had involuntarily led him to its brink,--and he now drew back from it, nervously shuddering.

"'And would we hear it, we must hear it Now!'" repeated Adderley, with opportune bathos at this juncture--"As I have said, and will always maintain, Omar's verse always fits in with the happy approach of creature comforts! Behold the illustration and example!--Primmins with the tea!"

"It is a pretty verse, though, isn't it?" queried Cicely, moving her chair aside to make more space for the butler and footman as they nimbly set out the afternoon tea-table in the deepest shade bestowed by the drooping cedar boughs--"Isn't it?"

And her searching eyes fastened themselves pertinaciously upon John's face.

"Very pretty!" he answered, steadily--"And--so far-as it goes--very true!"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVII

After tea, they re-entered the house at Maryllia's request to hear Cicely play. Arrived in the drawing-room they found the only truly modern thing in it, a grand piano, of that noted French make which as far surpasses the German model as a genuine Stradivarius surpasses a child's fiddle put together yesterday, and, taking her seat at this instrument, Cicely had transformed both herself and it into unspeakable enchantment. The thing of wood and wire and ivory keys had become possessed, as it were, with the thunder of the battling clouds and the great rush of the sea,--and then it had suddenly whispered of the sweetness of love and life, till out of storm had grown the tender calm of a flowing melody, on which wordless dreams of happiness glittered like rainbow bubbles on foam, shining for a moment and then vanishing at a breath; it had caught the voices of the rain and wind,--and the pattering drops and sibilant hurricane had whizzed sharply through the scale of sound till the very notes seemed alive with the wrath of nature,--and then it had rolled all the wild clamour away into a sustained magnificence of prayerful chords which seemed to plead for all things grand, all things true, all things beautiful,--and to list the soul of man in panting, labouring ecstasy up to the very threshold of Heaven! And she--the 'goblin' who evoked all this phantasmagoria of life set in harmony--she too changed as it seemed, in nature and aspect,--her small meagre face was as the face of a pictured angel, with the dark hair clustering round it in thick knots and curling waves as of blackest bronze,--while the eyes, full of soft passion and fire, glowed beneath the broad temples with the light of youth's imperial dream of fame. What human creature could accept the limited fact of being mere man, mere woman only, while Cicely played? Such music as hers recalled and revealed the earliest splendour of the days when Poesy was newly born,--when gods and goddesses were believed to walk the world in large and majestic freedom,--and when brave deeds of chivalry and self-sacrifice became exalted by the very plenitude of rich imagination, into supernatural facts of heaven conquering, hell-charming prowess. Not then was man made to seem uncouth, or mean and savage in his attempts to dominate the planet, but strong, fearless, and endowed with dignity and power. Not then was every noble sentiment derided,--every truth scourged,--every trust betrayed,-every tenderness mocked,--and every sweet emotion made the subject of a slander or a sneer. Not then was love mere lust, marriage mere convenience, and life mere covetousness of gain. There was something higher, greater, purer than these,--something of the inspiring breath of God, which, according to the old Biblical narrative, was breathed into humanity with the words--"Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness." That 'image' of God was featured gloriously in the waves of music which surged through Cicely's brain and fingers, out on the responsive air,--and when she ceased playing there followed a dumb spell of wonderment and awe, which those who had listened to her marvellous improvisation were afraid to break by a word or movement. And then, with a smile at their mute admiration and astonishment, she had passed her small supple hands lightly again over the piano- keys, evoking therefrom a playful prelude, and the pure silvery sound of her voice had cloven the air asunder with De Musset's 'Adieu, Suzon!'

"Adieu, Suzon, ma rose blonde, Qui m'as aime pendant huit jours! Les plus courts plaisirs de ce monde Souvent font les meilleurs amours.

Sais-je au moment ou je te quitte Ou m'entraine mon astre errant? Je m'en vais pourtant, ma petite, Bien loin, bien vite, Adieu, Suzon!"

Was it possible for any man with a drop of warm blood flowing through his veins, not to feel a quicker heart-beat, a swifter pulse, at the entrancing, half-melancholy, half-mocking sweetness she infused into these lines?

"Je pars, et sur ma levre ardente Brule encor ton dernier baiser. Entre mes bras, chere imprudente Ton beau front vient de reposer. Sens-tu mon coeur, comme il palpite? Le tien, comme il battait gaiment!

Je m'en vais pourtant, ma petite, Bien loin, bien vite Tourjours t'aimant! Adieu, Suzon!"

With the passion, fire and exquisite abandon of her singing of this verse in tones of such youthful freshness and fervour as could scarcely be equalled and never surpassed, Adderley could no longer restrain himself, and crying 'Brava!--brava! Bravissima!' fell to clapping his hands in the wildest ecstasy. Walden, less demonstrative, was far more moved. Something quite new and strange to his long fixed habit and temperament had insidiously crept over him,--and being well accustomed to self-analysis, he was conscious of the fact, and uneasy at finding himself in the grip of an emotion to which he could give no name. Therefore, he was glad when,--the music being ended, and when he had expressed his more or less incoherent praise and thanks to Cicely for the delight her wonderful gift had afforded him,--he could plead some business in the village as an excuse to take his departure. Maryllia very sweetly bade him come again.

"As often as you like,"--she said--"And I want you to promise me one thing, Mr. Walden!--you must consent to meet some of my London friends here one evening to dinner."

She had given him her hand in parting, and he was holding it in his own.

"I'm afraid I should be very much in the way, Miss Vancourt,"--he replied, with a grave smile--"I am not a social acquisition by any means! I live very much alone,--and a solitary life, I think, suits me best."

She looked at him thoughtfully, and withdrew her hand.

"That means that you do not care to come,"--she said, simply--"I am so sorry you do not like me!"

The blood rushed up to his brows.

"Miss Vancourt!" he stammered--"Pray--pray do not think---"

But here she turned aside to receive Adderley's farewells and thanks for the charming afternoon he had spent in her company. After this, and when Julian had made his exit, accompanied by Cicely who wanted him to give her a written copy of certain verses he had composed, Maryllia again spoke:

"Well, at any rate, I shall send you an invitation to one of my parties, whether you come or not, Mr. Walden;" she said, playfully-- "Otherwise, I shall feel I have not done my social duty to the minister of the parish! It will be for some evening during the next three weeks. I hope you will be able to accept it. If not---"

A sudden resolve inspired John's hesitating soul. Taking the hand she offered, he raised it lightly to his lips with all the gallantry of an old-world courtier rather than a modern-time parson.

"If you wish me to accept it, it shall be accepted!"--he said, and his voice shook a little--"Forgive me if in any way. I have seemed to you discourteous, Miss Vancourt!--I am so much of a solitary, that 'society' has rather an intimidating effect upon me,--but you must never"--here he looked at her full and bravely--"You must never say again or think that I do not like you! I DO like you!"

Her eyes met his with pure and candid earnestness.

"That is kind of you,"--she said--"And I am glad! Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

And so he left her presence.

When he started to walk home across the fields, Adderley proffered his companionship, which could not in civility be refused. They left the Manor grounds together by the little wicket-gate, and took the customary short-cut to the village. The lustrous afternoon light was mellowing warmly into a deeper saffron glow,--a delicate suggestion of approaching evening was in the breath of the cooling air, and though the uprising orb of Earth had not yet darkened the first gold cloud beneath the western glory of the sun, there was a gentle murmur and movement among the trees and flowers and birds, which indicated that the time for rest and sleep was drawing nigh. The long grasses rustled mysteriously, and the smafl unseen herbs hidden under them sent up a pungently sweet odour as the two men trod them down on their leisurely way across the fields,--and it was with a certain sense of relief from mental strain that Walden lifted his hat and let the soft breeze fan his temples, which throbbed and ached very strangely as though with a weight of pent-up tears. He was very silent,--and Julian Adderley, generally accustomed to talk for two, seemed disposed to an equal taciturnity. The few hours they had spent in the society of Maryllia Vancourt and her weird protegee, Cicely Bourne, had given both men subject for various thoughts which neither of them were inclined to express to one another. Walden, in particular, was aware of a certain irritation and uneasiness of mind which troubled him greatly and he looked askance at his companion with unchristian impatience. The long- legged, red-haired poet was decidedly in his way at the present moment,--he would rather have been alone. He determined in any case not to ask him to enter the rectory garden,--more of his society would be intolerable,--they would part at the gate,--

"I'm afraid I'm boring you, Mr. Walden,"--said the unconscious object of his musings, just then--" I am dull! I feel myself under a cloud. Pray excuse it!"

The expression of his face was comically lachrymose, and John felt a touch of compunction at the nature of his own immediate mental attitude towards the harmless 'moon-calf.'

"Don't apologise!" he said, with a frank smile--"I myself am not in a companionable humour. I think Miss Bourne's music has not only put something into us, but taken something out of us as well."

"You are right!" said Julian--"You are perfectly right. And you express the emotion aptly. It was extraordinary music! But that voice! That voice will be a wonder of the world!"

"It is a wonder already"--rejoined Walden--"If the girl keeps her health and does not break down from nervous excitement and overstrain, she will have a dazzling career. I think Miss Vancourt will take every possible care of her."

"Miss Vancourt is very lovely,"--said Adderley reflectively, "I have made up my mind on that point at last. When I first saw her, I was not convinced. Her features are imperfect. But they are mobile and expressive--and in the expression there is a subtle beauty which is quite provocative. Then again, my own 'ideals' of women have always been tall and queenly,--yet in Miss Vanconrt we have a woman who is queenly without being tall. It is the regal air without the material inches. And I am now satisfied that the former is more fascinating than the latter. Though I admit that it was once my dream to die upon the breast of a tall woman!"

Walden. laughed forcedly. He was vexed to be compelled to listen to Adderley's criticism of Maryllia Vancourt's physical charms, yet he was powerless to offer any remonstrance.

"But, after all," continued Julian, gazing up into the pink and mauve clouds of the kindling sunset,--"The tall woman might possibly, from the very coldness of her height, be unsympathetic. She might be unclaspable. Juno seems even more repellent than Venus or Psyche. Then again, there are so many large women. They are common. They obstruct the public highway. They tower forth in theatre-stalls, and nod jewelled tiaras from the elevation of opera- boxes, blocking out the view of the stage. They are more often assertive than lovable. Therefore let me not cling to an illusion which will not bear analysis. For Miss Vancourt is not a tall woman,--nor for that matter is she short,--she is indescribable, and therefore entirely bewitching!"

John said nothing, but only walked on a trifle more quickly.

"You are perhaps not an admirer of the fair sex, Walden?" pursued his companion--"And therefore my observations awaken no sympathy in your mind?"

"I never discuss women,"--replied Walden, drily--"I am not a poet, you see,--" and he smiled--"I am merely a middle-aged parson. You can hardly expect me to share in your youthful enthusiasms, Adderley! You are going up the hill of life,--I am travelling down. We cannot see things from the same standpoint." Here, they left the fields and came to the high road,--from thence a few more paces brought them to the gate of the rectory. "But I quite agree with you in your admiration of Miss Vancourt. She seems a most kindly and charming lady--and--I believe--I am sure"--and his remarks become somewhat rambling and disjointed--"yes--I am sure she will try to do good in the village now that she has taken up her residence here. That is, of course, if she stays. She may get tired of country life- -that is quite probable--but--it is, of course, a good thing to have a strong social influence in the neighbourhood--especially a woman's influence--and I should say Miss Vancourt will make herself useful and beloved in the parish---"

At this period he caught Adderley's eyes fixed upon him somewhat quizzically, and realised that he was getting quite 'parochial' in his talk. He checked himself abruptly and swung open his garden gate.

"I'm sorry I can't ask you in just now,"--he said--"I have some pressing work to do---"

"Don't mention it!" and Julian clasped him by the hand fervently--"I would not intrude upon you for worlds! You must be alone, of course. You are delightful!--yes, my dear Walden, you are delicious! So new- -so fresh! It is a privilege to know you! Good-bye for the moment! I may come and talk to you another time!"

"Oh, certainly! By all means!" And Walden, shaking hands with all the vigour Adderley's grasp enforced upon him, escaped at last into the sanctuary of his own garden, and hastened under the covering shadow of the trees that bordered the lawn. Adderley watched him disappear, and then went on his own way with a gratified air of perfect complacency.

"Those who 'never discuss women' are apt to be most impressed by them,"--he sagaciously reflected--"The writhings of a beetle on a pin are not so complex or interesting as the writhings of a parson's stabbed senses! Now a remarkable psychological study might be made-- My good friend! Kindly look where you are going!"

This last remark was addressed to a half-drunken man who pushed past him roughly without apology, almost jostling him off the foot-path. It was Oliver Leach, who hearing himself spoken to, glanced round sullenly with a muttered oath, and stumbled on.

"That is Miss Vancourt's dismissed agent,"--said Adderley, pausing a moment to watch his uncertain progress up the road. "What an objectionable beast!"

He walked on, and, his former train of thought being entirely disturbed, he went to the 'Mother Huff,' where he was a frequent visitor, his elaborate courtesies to Mrs. Buggins enabling him to hear from that lady's pious lips all the latest news, scandal and gossip, true or untrue, concerning the whole neighbourhood.

Walden, meanwhile, finding himself once more alone in his own domain, breathed freely. The faithful Nebbie, who had passed all the hours of his master's absence, 'on guard' by the window of the vacant study, came running to meet him as he set foot upon the lawn,--three or four doves that were brooding on the old tiled and gabled roof of the rectory, rose aloft in a short flight and descended again, cooing softly as though with satisfaction at his return,--and there was a soothing silence everywhere, the work of the day being done, and Bainton having left the garden trim and fair to its own sweet solitude and calm. Gently patting his dog's rough head, as the animal sprang up to him with joyous short barks of welcome, John looked about him quietly for a moment or two with an expression in his eyes that was somewhat dreamy and pathetic.

"I have known the old place so long and loved every corner of it!"-- he murmured--"And yet,--to-day it seems all strange and unfamiliar!"

The glow of the sunset struck a red flare against the walls of his house, and beat out twinkling diamond flashes from the latticed windows,--the clambering masses of honeysuckle and roses shone forth in vivid clusters as though inwardly illuminated. The warmth and ecstasy of life seemed palpitating in every flush of colour, every shaft of light,--and the wild, voluptuous singing of unseen skylarks, descending to their nests, and shaking out their songs, as it seemed, like bubbles of music breaking asunder in the clear empyrean, expressed the rapture of heaven wedded to the sensuous, living, breathing joys of earth. The glamour and radiance of the air affected Walden with a sudden unwonted sense of fatigue and pain, and pressing one hand across his eyes, he shut out the dazzle of blue sky and green grass for a moment's respite,--then went slowly, and with bent head into his study. Here everything was very quiet,-- and, as it struck him then, curiously lonely,--on his desk lay various notes and messages and accounts--the usual sort of paper litter that accumulated under his hands every day,--two or three visiting cards had been left for him during his absence,--one on the part of the local doctor, a very clever and excellent fellow named James Forsyth, who was familiarly called 'Jimmy' by the villagers, and who often joined Walden of an evening to play a game of chess with him,--and another bearing the neat superscription 'Mrs. Mandeville Poreham. The Leas. At Home Thursdays,'--whereat he smiled. Mrs. Mandeville Poreham was a 'county' lady, wife of a gentleman-at-ease who did nothing but hunt, and who never had done anything in all his life but hunt,--she was also the mother of five marriageable daughters, and her calls on the Reverend John were marked by a polite and patient persistency that seemed altogether admirable. She lived some two miles out of St. Rest, but always attended Walden's church regularly, driving thither with her family in a solemnly closed private omnibus of the true 'county' type. She professed great interest in all Church matters, on the ground that she was herself the daughter of a dead-and-gone clergyman.

"My poor father!" she was wont to say, smoothing her sleek bandeaux of grey hair on either side of her forehead with one long, pale, thin finger--"He was such a good man! Ah yes!--and he had such a lovely mind! My mother was a Beedle."

This last announcement, generally thrown in casually, was apt to be startling to the uninitiated,--and it was not till the genealogy of the Beedle family had been duly explained to the anxious enquirer, that it was seen how important and allsufficing it was to have had a Beedle for one's maternal parent. The Beedles were a noted 'old stock' in Suffolk, so it appeared,--and to be connected with a Suffolk Beedle was, to certain provincial minds of limited perception, a complete guarantee of superior birth and breeding. Walden was well accustomed to receiving a call from Mrs. Poreham about every ten days or so, and he did his utmost best to dodge her at all points. Bainton was his ready accomplice in this harmless conspiracy, and promptly gave him due warning whenever the Poreham ''bus' or landau was seen weightily bearing down upon the village, with the result that, on the arrival of the descendant of the Beedles at the rectory door she was met by Hester Rockett, the parlourmaid, with a demure smile and the statement,--'Mr. Walden is out, mim.' Then, when Walden, according to the laws of etiquette, had to return the lady's visit, Bainton again assisted him by watching and waiting till he could inform him, ''as 'ow he'd seen that blessed old Poreham woman drivin' out with 'er fam'ly to Riversford. They won't likely be back for a couple of hours at least.' Whereupon Walden straightway took a swinging walk up to 'The Leas,' deposited his card with the footman, for the absent 'fam'ly' and returned again in peace to his own dwelling.

This afternoon he had again, as usual, missed the worthy lady, and he set aside her card, the smile with which he had glanced at it changing suddenly to a sigh of somewhat wearied impatience. Surely there was something unusually dark and solitary in the aspect of the room to which, for so many years, he had been accustomed, and where he had generally found comfort and contentment? The vivid hues of the sunset were declining rapidly, and the solemn shadow of evening was creeping up apace over the sky and outer landscape--but something heavier than the mild obscurity of approaching night seemed weighing on the air around him, which oppressed his nerves and saddened his soul. He stood absently turning over the papers on his desk, in a frame of mind which left him uncertain how to employ himself,--whether to read,--to write,--to finish a sketch of the flowering reeds on the river which he had yesterday begun,--or to combat with his own mood, fathom its meaning, and conquer its tendency? There came a light tap at his door and the maid Hester entered with a letter.

"The last post, sir. Only one for you."

He took it up indifferently as the girl retired,--then uttered a slight exclamation of pleasure.

"From Brent,"--he said, half aloud--"Dear old fellow! I have not heard from him since New Year."

He opened the letter, and began to read. The interested look in his eyes deepened,--and he moved nearer to the open window to avail himself as much as possible of the swiftly decreasing light.

"DEAR WALDEN,"--it ran--"The spirit moves me to write to you, not only because it occurs to me that I have failed to do so for a long time, but also because I feel a certain necessity for thought- expansion to someone, who, like yourself, is accustomed to the habit of thinking. The tendency of the majority nowadays is,--or so it appears to me,--to forget the purpose for which the brain was designed, or rather to use it for no higher object than that for which it is employed by the brute creation, namely to consider the ways and means of securing food, and then to ruminate on the self- gratification which follows the lusts of appetite. In fact, 'to rot and rot,--and thereby hangs a tale!' But before I enter into any particulars of my own special phase or mood, let me ask how it fares with you in your small and secluded parish? All must be well, I imagine, otherwise doubtless I should have heard. It seems only the other day that I came, at your request, to consecrate your beautiful little church of 'The Saint's Rest,'--yet seven years have rolled away since then, leaving indelible tracks of age on me, as probably on you also, my dear fellow!--though you have always carried old Time on your back more lightly and easily than I. To me he has ever been the Arabian Nights' inexorable 'Old Man of the Sea,' whose habit is to kill unless killed. At fifty-one I feel myself either 'rusting' or mellowing; I wonder which you will judge the most fitting appellation for me when we next meet? Mind and memory play me strange tricks in my brief moments of solitude, and whenever I think of you, I imagine it can only be yesterday that we two college lads walked and talked together in the drowsy old streets of Oxford and made our various plans for our future lives with all the superb dominance and assertiveness of youth, which is so delightful while it lasts, despite the miserable deceptions it practises upon us. One thing, however, which I gained in the past time, and which has never deceived me, is your friendship,--and how much I owe to you no one but myself can ever tell. Good God!--how superior you always were, and are, to me! Why did you efface yourself so completely for my sake? I often ask this question, and except for the fact that it would be impossible to you to even make an attempt to override, for mere ambition, anyone for whom you had a deep affection, I cannot imagine any answer. But as matters have turned out with me I think it might have been better after all, had you been in my place and I in yours! A small 'cure of souls' would have put my mental fibre to less torture, than the crowding cares of my diocese, which depress me more and more as they increase. Many things seem to me hopeless,- -utterly irremediable! The shadow of a pre-ponderating, defiant, all-triumphant Evil stalks abroad everywhere--and the clergy are as much affected by it as the laymen. I feel that the world is far more Christ-less to-day after two thousand years of preaching and teaching, than it was in the time of Nero. How has this happened? Whose the fault? Walden, there is only one reply--it is the Church itself that has failed! The message of salvation,--the gospel of love,--these are as God-born and true as ever they were,--but the preachers and teachers of the Divine Creed are to blame,--the men who quarrel among themselves over forms and ceremonies instead of concentrating their energies on ministering to others,--and I confess I find myself often at a loss to dispose Church affairs in such wise as to secure at one and the same time, peace and satisfaction amongst the clergy under me, with proper devotion to the mental and physical needs of the thousands who have a right, yes a right to expect spiritual comfort and material succour from those who profess, by their vows of ordination, to be faithful and disinterested servants of Christ.

"I daresay you remember how we used to talk religious matters over when we were young and enthusiastic men, studying for the Church. You will easily recall the indignation and fervour with which we repudiated all heresies new and old, and turned our backs with mingled pity and scorn on every writer of agnostic theories, estimating such heterodox influences as weighing but lightly in the balance of belief, and making little or no effect on the minds of the majority. We did not then grasp in its full measure the meaning of what is to-day called the 'rush' of life. That blind, brutal stampede of humanity over every corner and quarter of the earth,--a stampede which it is impossible to check or to divert, and which arises out of a nameless sense of panic, and foreboding of disaster! Like hordes of wild cattle on the prairies, who scent invisible fire, and begin to gallop furiously headlong anywhere and everywhere, before the first red gleam of the devouring element breaks from the undergrowth of dry grass and stubble,--so do the nations and peoples appear to me to-day. Reckless, maddened, fear- stricken and reasonless, they rush hither and thither in search of refuge from themselves and from each other, yet are all the while driven along unconsciously in heterogeneous masses, as though swept by the resistless breath of some mysterious whirlwind, impelling them on to their own disaster. I feel the end approaching, Walden!-- sometimes I almost see it! And with the near touch of a shuddering future catastrophe on me, I am often disposed to agree with sad King Solomon that after all 'there is nothing better for a man than that he should eat, drink and be merry all the days of his life.' For I grow tired of my own puny efforts to lift the burden of human sorrow which is laid upon me, aloft on the fainting wings of prayer, to a God who seems wholly irresponsive,--mind, Walden, I say seems--so do not start away from my words and judge me as beginning to weaken in the faith that formerly inspired me. I confess to an intense fatigue and hopelessness,--the constant unrelieved consciousness of human wretchedness weighs me down to the dust of spiritual abasement, for I can but think that if God were indeed merciful and full of loving- kindness, He would not, He could not endure the constant spectacle of man's devilish injustice to his brother man! I have no right to permit myself to indulge in such reflections as these, I know,--yet they have gained such hold on me that I have latterly had serious thoughts of resigning my bishopric. But this is a matter involving other changes in my life, on which I should like to have some long friendly talks with you, before taking any decisive step. Your own attitude of mind towards the 'calling and election' you have chosen has always seemed to me so pre-eminently pure and lofty, that I should condemn ray own feelings even more than I do, were I to allow the twin forces of pessimism and despair to possess me utterly without an attempt to bring them under your sane and healthful exorcism, the more so, as you know all my personal history and life- long sorrow. And this brings me to the main point of my letter which is, that I should much like to see you, if you can spare me two or three days of your company any time before the end of August. Try to arrange an early visit, though I know how ill your parishioners can spare you, and how more than likely they are to grumble at your absence. You are to be envied in having secured so much affection and confidence in the parish you control, and every day I feel more and more how wisely you have chosen your lot in that comparative obscurity, which, at one time, seemed to those who know your brilliant gifts, a waste of life and opportunity. Of course you are not without jealous enemies,--no true soul ever is. Sir Morton Pippitt still occasionally sends me a spluttering note of information as to something you have, or have not done, to the church on which you have spent the greater part of your personal fortune; and Leveson, the minister at Badsworth, appears to think that I should assist him by heading a subscription list to obtain funds for the purpose of making his church as perfect a gem of architecture as yours. Due enquiries have been made as to the nature and needs of his parishioners, and it appears that only twenty--five adult persons on an average ever attend his ministrations, and that the building for which he pleads is a brick edifice built in 1870 and deliberately allowed to decay by disuse and neglect. However, Sir Morton Pippitt is taking some interest in it, so I am given to understand,--and perhaps in 'restoring' a modern chapel, he will be able to console himself for the ruthless manner in which you stripped off his 'galvanised tin' roof from your old Norman church walls!

"I am sorry to hear that the historic house of Abbot's Manor is again inhabited, and by one who is likely to be a most undesirable neighbour to you."

Here Walden, unable to read very quickly at the window, stepped out on the lawn, still holding the letter close to his eyes. "A most undesirable neighbour"--he-murmured-"Yes--now let me see!--where is that phrase?--Oh, here it is,--'a most undesirable neighbour.'" And he read on:-"I allude to Miss Vancourt, the only child of the late Robert Vancourt who was killed some years ago in the hunting field. The girl was taken away at her father's death by her uncle Frederick, who, having sown an unusual crop of wild oats, had married one of those inordinately wealthy American women to whom the sun itself appears little more than a magnified gold-piece--and of course between the two she has had a very bad training. Frederick Vancourt was the worst and weakest of the family, and his wife has been known for years as a particularly hardened member of the 'smart' set. Under their tutelage Miss Vancourt, or 'Maryllia Van,' as she appears to be familiarly known and called in society, has attained a rather unenviable notoriety; and when I heard the other day that she had left her aunt's house in a fit of ungovernable temper, and had gone to her own old house to live, I thought at once of you with a pang of pity. For, if I remember rightly, you have a great opinion of the Manor as an unspoilt relic of Tudor times, and have always been rather glad that it was left to itself without any modern improvement or innovation. I can imagine nothing worse to your mind than the presence of a 'smart' lady in the unsophisticated village of St. Rest! However, you may take heart of grace, as it is not likely she will stay there long. Rumour asserts that she is shortly to be married to Lord Roxmouth,--he who will be Duke of Ormistoune and owner of that splendid but half-ruined pile, Roxmouth Castle. She has, it appears, kept this poor gentleman dancing attendance on her for a sufficient time to make evident to the world her desire to secure his title, and her present sudden capricious retirement into country life is understood to be a mere RUSE to draw him more swiftly on to his matrimonial doom. No doubt he has an eye on Mrs. Fred Vancourt's millions, which her niece would inherit in the event of her marrying a future English duke,--still, from what I gather, he would deserve some compensation for risking his life's happiness with such a very doubtful partner. But I daresay I am retailing information with which you are no doubt already quite familiar, and in all probability 'Maryllia Van' is not likely to cross your path at any time, as among her other reported characteristics is that of a cheap scorn for religion,--a scorn which sits so unbecomingly on our modern women, and forbodes so much disaster in the future, they being the mothers of the coming race. I expect the only circumstance likely to trouble your calm and pleasant routine of life and labour is, that the present occupation of Abbot's Manor may have stopped some of your romantic rambles in the beautiful woods surrounding it! May never any greater care disturb you, my dear fellow!--for even that is one, which, as I have pointed out to you, will be of brief duration. Let me know when you think you will be able to come and spend a couple of days here,--and I will clear my work ahead in order to leave the time free for an entire unburdening of my soul to you, as in the days of our youth, so long ago.--Sincerely and affectionately yours, H.A. BRENT."

Slowly, and with methodical nicety, Walden folded up the letter and put it in his pocket. With a kind of dazed air he looked about him, vaguely surprised that the evening seemed to have fallen so soon. Streaks of the sunset still glowed redly here and there in the sky, but the dense purple of the night had widened steadily over the spaces of the air, and just above the highest bough of the apple- tree on the lawn, the planet Venus twinkled bravely in all its silver panoply of pride as the Evening Star. Low and sweet on the fragrant silence came the dulcet piping of a nightingale, and the soft swishing sound of the river flowing among the rushes, and pushing against the pebbly shore. A sudden smarting sense of pain stung Walden's eyes,--pressing them with one hand he found it wet,-- with tears? No, no!--not with tears,--merely with the moisture of strain and fatigue,--his sight was not so good as it used to be;--of course he was getting old,--and Bishop Brent's small caligraphy had been difficult to decipher by the half-light. All at once something burning and passionate stirred in him,--a wave of chivalrous indignation that poured itself swiftly through every channel of his clean and honest blood, and he involuntarily clenched his hand.

"What liars there are in the world!" he said aloud and fiercely-- "What liars!"

Venus, peeping at him over the apple-boughs, gave out a diamond-like sparkle as though she were no greater thing than a loving eye,--the unseen nightingale, tuning its voice to richer certainties, broke into a fuller, deeper warble,--more stars flew, like shining fire- flies, into space, and on the lowest line of the western horizon a white cloud fringed with silver, floated slowly, the noiseless herald of the coming moon. But Walden saw nothing of the mystically beautiful transfiguration of the evening into night. His thoughts were elsewhere.

"And yet"--he mused sorrowfully--"How do I know? How can I tell? The clear childlike eyes may be trained to deceive,--the smile of the sweet, all too sweet mouth, may be insincere--the pretty, impulsive confiding manner may be a mere trick---and---after all---what is it to me? I demand of myself plainly and fairly--what is it to me?"

He gave a kind of unconscious despairing gesture. Was there some devil in his soul whom he was bound to wrestle with by fasting and prayer, and conquer in the end? Or was it an angel that had entered there, before whose heavenly aspect he must kneel and succumb? Why this new and appalling loneliness which had struck himself and his home-surroundings as with an earthquake shock, shaking the foundations of all that had seemed so safe and secure? Why this feverish restlessness in his mind, which forbade him to occupy himself with any of the work waiting for him to do, and which made him unhappy and ill at ease for no visible or reasonable cause?

He walked slowly across the lawn to his favourite seat under the apple-tree,--and there, beneath the scented fruiting boughs, with the evening dews gathering on the grass at his feet, he tried manfully to face the problem that troubled his own inner consciousness.

"Let me brave it out!" he said--"Let me realise and master the thoughts that seek to master ME, otherwise I am no man, but merely a straw to be caught by the idle wind of an emotion. Why should I shirk the analysis of what I feel to be true of myself? For, after all, it is only a weakness of nature,--a sense of regret and loss,-- a knowledge of something I have missed in life,--all surely pardonable if quelled in the beginning. She,--Maryllia Vancourt--is only at woman,--I am only a man. There is more than at first seems apparent in that simple qualification 'only'! She, the woman, has charm, and is instinctively conscious of her power, as why should she not be?--she has tried it, and found it no doubt in every case effectual. I, the man, am long past the fervours and frenzies of life,--and charm, whether it be hers or that of any other of her sex, should have, or ought to have, no effect upon me, particularly in my vocation, and with my settled habits. If I am so easily moved as to be conscious of a certain strange glamour and fascination in this girl,--for she is a girl to me, nay almost a child,--that is not her fault, but mine. As well expect the sun not to shine or a bird not to sing, as expect Maryllia Vancourt not to smile and look sweet! Walking with her in her rose-garden, where she took me with such a pretty air of confiding grace, to show me her border of old French damask roses, I listened to her half-serious, sometimes playful talk as in a dream, and answered her kindly questions concerning some of the sick and poor in the village as best I could, though I fear I must occasionally have spoken at random. Oh, those old French damask roses! I have known them growing in that border for years,--yet I never saw them as I saw them to-day,--never looked they so darkly red and glowing!--so large and open-hearted! I fancy I shall smell their fragrance all my life! 'Are they doing well, do you think?'--she said, and the little white chin perked up from under the pink ribbon which tied her hat, and the dark blue eyes gleamed drowsily from beneath their drooping lids,--and the lips parted, smiling--and then--then came the devil and tempted me! I was no longer middle-aged John Walden, the quiet parson of a country 'cure,'--I was a man unknown to myself,--possessed as it were, by the ghost of a dead youth, clamouring for youthful joy! I longed to touch that delicate little pink-and-white creature, so like a rose herself!--I was moved by an insane desire--yes!--it was insane, and fortunately quite momentary,--such impulses are not uncommon"--and here, as he unravelled, to his own satisfaction, the tangled web of his impressions, his brow cleared, and he smiled gravely,--"I was, I say, moved by an insane desire to draw that dainty small bundle of frippery and prettiness into my arms--yes,--it was so, and why should I not confess it to myself? Why should I be ashamed? Other men have felt the same, though perhaps they do not count so many years of life as I do. At any rate with me the feeling was momentary,--and passed. Then,--some moments later,--under the cedar- tree she dropped a rose from the cluster she had gathered,--and in giving it back to her I touched her hand--and our eyes met."

Here his thoughts became disconnected, and wandered beyond his control. He let them go,--and listened, instead of thinking, to the notes of the nightingale singing in his garden. It was now being answered by others at a distance, with incessant repetitions of a flute-like warble,--and then came the long sobbing trill and cry of love, piercing the night with insistant passion.

"The Bird of Life is singing on the bough, His two eternal notes of 'I and Thou'-- O hearken well, for soon the song sings through, And would we hear it, we must hear it Now."

A faint tremor shook him as the lines quoted by Cicely Bourne rang back upon his memory. He rose to go indoors.

"I am a fool!"--he said--"I must not trouble my head any more about a summer day's fancy. It was a kind of 'old moonlight in the blood,' as Hafiz says,--an aching sense of loss,--or rather a touch of the spring affecting a decaying tree!" He sighed. "I shall not suffer from it again, because I will not. Brent's letter has arrived opportunely,--though I think--nay, I am sure, he has been misinformed. However, Miss Vancourt's affairs have nothing to do with me,--nor need I interest myself in what is not my concern. My business is with those who depend on my care,--I must not forget myself--I must attend to my work."

He went into the house,--and there was confronted in his own hall by a big burly figure clad in rough corduroys,--that of Farmer Thorpe, who doffed his cap and pulled his forelock respectfully at the sight of him.

"'Evenin', Passon!" he said--"I thought as 'ow I'd make bold to coom an' tell ye my red cow's took the turn an' doin' wonderful! Seems a special mussy of th' A'mighty, an' if there's anythin' me an' my darter can do fur ye, ye'll let us know, Passon, for I'm darn grateful, an' feels as 'ow the beast pulled round arter I'd spoke t'ye about 'er. An' though as ye told me, 'tain't the thing to say no prayers for beasties which is worldly goods, I makes a venture to arsk ye if ye'll step round to the farm to-morrer, jest to please Mattie my darter, an' take a look at the finest litter o' pigs as ever was seen in this county, barrin' none! A litter as clean an' sweet as daisies in new-mown hay, an' now's the time for ye to look at 'em, Passon, an' choose yer own suckin' beast for bilin' or roastin' which ye please, for both's as good as t'other,--an' there ain't no man about 'ere what desarves a sweet suckin' pig more'n you do, an' that I say an' swear to. It's a real prize litter I do assure you!--an' Mattie my darter, she be that proud, an' all ye wants to do is just to coom along an' choose your own!"

"Thank you, Mr. Thorpe!" said Walden with his usual patient courtesy--"Thank you very much! I will certainly come. Glad to hear the cow is better. And is Miss Thorpe well?"

"She's that foine,"--rejoined the farmer--"that only the pigs can beat 'er! I'll be tellin' 'er you'll coom to-morrer then?"

"Oh yes--by all means! Certainly! Most kind of you, I'm sure! Good- evening, Thorpe!"

"Same t'ye, Passon, an' thank ye kindly!" Whereat John escaped at last into his own solitary sanctum.

"My work!" he said, with a faint smile, as he seated himself at his desk--"I must do my work! I must attend to the pigs as much as anything else in the parish! My work!"

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