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[Illustration]
RECTOR
OF
ST. MARKS
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE
RECTOR OF ST. MARK'S
BY
MRS. MARY J. HOLMES
AUTHOR OF "DORA DEANE," "MAGGIE MILLER," "LENA RIVERS,"
"THE ENGLISH ORPHAN," ETC.
M. A. DONOHUE & CO.,
CHICAGO.
* * * * *
THE RECTOR OF ST. MARK'S
CHAPTER I.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON.
The Sunday sermon was finished, and the young rector of St. Mark's
turned gladly from his study-table to the pleasant south window where
the June roses were peeping in, and abandoned himself for a few
moments to the feeling of relief he always experienced when his week's
work was done. To say that no secular thoughts had intruded themselves
upon the rector's mind, as he planned and wrote that sermon, would not
be true; for, though morbidly conscientious on many points and
earnestly striving to be a faithful shepherd of the souls committed to
his care, Arthur Leighton possessed the natural desire that those who
listened to him should not only think well of what he taught but also
of the form in which the teaching was presented. When he became a
clergyman he did not cease to be a man, with all a man's capacity to
love and to be loved, and so, though he fought and prayed against it,
he had seldom brought a sermon to the people of St. Mark's in which
there was not a thought of Anna Ruthven's soft, brown eyes, and the
way they would look at him across the heads of the congregation. Anna
led the village choir, and the rector was painfully conscious that far
too much of earth was mingled with his devotional feelings during the
moments when, the singing over, he walked from his armchair to the
pulpit and heard the rustle of the crimson curtain in the organ loft
as it was drawn back, disclosing to view the five heads of which
Anna's was the center. It was very wrong, he knew, and to-day he had
prayed earnestly for pardon, when, after choosing his text, "Simon,
Simon, lovest thou me?" instead of plunging at once into his subject,
he had, without a thought of what he was doing, idly written upon a
scrap of paper lying near, "Anna, Anna, lovest thou me, more than
these?" the these, referring to the wealthy Thornton Hastings, his old
classmate in college, who was going to Saratoga this very summer, for
the purpose of meeting Anna Ruthven and deciding if she would do to
become Mrs. Thornton Hastings, and mistress of the house on Madison
Square. With a bitter groan at the enormity of his sin, and a fervent
prayer for forgiveness, the rector had torn the slips of paper in
shreds and given himself so completely to his work that his sermon was
done a full hour earlier than usual, and he was free to indulge in
reveries of Anna for as long a time as he pleased.
"I wonder if Mrs. Meredith has come," he thought, as, with his feet
upon the window-sill, he sat looking across the meadow-land to where
the chimneys and gable roof of Captain Humphreys' house was visible,
for Captain Humphreys was Anna Ruthven's grandfather, and it was there
she had lived since she was three years old.
As if thoughts of Mrs. Meredith reminded him of something else, the
rector took from the drawer of his writing table a letter received the
previous day, and, opening to the second page, read again as follows:
"Are you going anywhere this summer? Of course not, for so long
as there is an unbaptized child, or a bed-ridden old woman in the
parish, you must stay at home, even if you do grow as rusty as
did Professor Cobden's coat before we boys made him a present of
a new one. I say, Arthur, there was a capital fellow spoiled when
you took to the ministry, with your splendid talents, and rare
gift for making people like and believe in you.
"Now, I suppose you will reply that for this denial of self you
look for your reward in heaven, and I suppose you are right; but
as I have no reason to think I have any stock in that region, I
go in for a good time here, and this summer I take it at
Saratoga, where I expect to meet one of your lambs. I hear you
have in your flock forty in all, their ages varying from fifteen
to fifty. But this particular lamb, Miss Anna Ruthven, is, I
fancy, the fairest of them all, and as I used to make you my
father confessor in the days when I was rusticated out in
Winsted, and fell so desperately in love with the six Miss
Larkins, each old enough to be my mother, so now I confide to you
the programme as marked out by Mrs. Julia Meredith, the general
who brings the lovely Anna into the field.
"We, that is, Mrs. Meredith and myself, are on the best of
terms. I lunch with her, dine with her, lounge in her parlors,
drive her to the park, take her to the operas, concerts and
plays, and compliment her good looks, which are wonderfully well
preserved for a woman of forty-five. I am twenty-six, you know,
and so no one ever associates us together in any kind of gossip.
She is the very quintessence of fashion, and I am one of the
danglers whose own light is made brighter by the reflection of
her rays. Do you see the point? Well, then, in return for my
attentions, she takes a very sisterly interest in my future wife,
and has adroitly managed to let me know of her niece, a certain
Anna Ruthven, who, inasmuch as I am tired of city belles, will
undoubtedly suit my fancy, said Anna being very fresh, very
artless, and very beautiful withal. She is also niece to Mrs.
Meredith, whose only brother married very far beneath him, when
he took to wife the daughter of a certain old-fashioned Captain
Humphreys, a pillar, no doubt, in your church. This young Ruthven
was drowned, or hung, or something, and the sister considers it
as another proof of his wife's lack of refinement and discretion
that at her death, which happened when Anna was three years old,
she left her child to the charge of her own parents, Captain
Humphreys and spouse, rather than to Mrs. Meredith's care, and
that, too, in the very face of the lady's having stood as sponsor
for the infant, an act which you will acknowledge was very
unnatural and ungrateful in Mrs. Ruthven, to say the least of it.
"You see I am telling you all this, just as if you did not know
Miss Anna's antecedents even better than myself, but possibly you
do not know that, having arrived at a suitable age, she is this
summer to be introduced into society at Saratoga, while I am
expected to fall in love with her at once and make her Mrs.
Hastings before another winter. Now, in your straightforward way
of putting things, don't imagine that Mrs. Meredith has
deliberately told me all this, for she has not, but I understand
her perfectly, and know exactly what she expects me to do.
Whether I do or not depends partly upon how I like Miss Anna,
partly upon how she likes me, and partly upon yourself.
"Now, Arthur, you know, I was always famous for presentiments or
fancies, as you termed them, and the latest of these is that you
like Anna Ruthven. Do you? Tell me, honor bright, and by the
memory of the many scrapes you got me out of, and the many more
you kept me from getting into, I will treat Miss Anna as gingerly
and brotherly as if she was already your wife. I like her
picture, which I have seen, and believe I shall like the girl,
but if you say that by looking at her with longing eyes I shall
be guilty of breaking some one of the ten commandments--I don't
know which--why, then, hands off at once. That's fair, and will
prove to you that, although not a parson like yourself, there is
still a spark of honor, if not of goodness, in the breast of
"Yours truly,
"THORNTON HASTINGS.
"If you were here this afternoon, I'd take you to drive after a
pair of bays which are to sweep the stakes at Saratoga this
summer, and I'd treat you to a finer cigar than often finds its
way to Hanover. Shall I send you out a box, or would your people
pull down the church about the ears of a minister wicked enough
to smoke? Again adieu.
"T. H."
There was a half-amused smile on the face of the rector as he
finished the letter, so like its thoughtless, lighthearted writer, and
wondered what the Widow Rider, across the way, would say of a
clergyman who smoked cigars and rode after a race-horse with such a
gay scapegrace as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look passed away,
and was succeeded by a shadow of pain as the rector remembered the
real import of Thornton's letter, and felt that he had no right to
say, "I have a claim on Anna Ruthven; you must not interfere." For he
had no claim on her, though half his parishioners, and many outside
his parish, had long ago given her to him, and said that she was
worthy; while he had loved her, as only natures like his can love,
since that week before Christmas, when their hands had met with a
strange, tremulous flutter, as together they fastened the wreaths of
evergreen upon the wall, he holding them up and she driving the
refractory tacks, which would keep falling in spite of her, so that
his hand went often from the carpet or basin to hers, and once
accidentally closed almost entirely over the little, soft, white
thing, which felt so warm to his touch.
How prettily Anna had looked to him during those memorable days, so
much prettier than the other young girls of his flock, whose hair was
tumbled ere the day's work was done, and whose dresses were soiled and
disordered; while here was always so tidy and neat and the braids of
her chestnut hair were always so smooth and bright. How well, too, he
remembered that brief ten minutes, when, in the dusky twilight which
had crept so early into the church, he stood alone with her, and
talked, he did not know of what, only that he heard her voice replying
to him, and saw the changeful color on her cheek as she looked
modestly in his face. That was a week of delicious happiness, and the
rector had lived it over many times, wondering if, when the next
Christmas came, it would find him any nearer to Anna Ruthven than the
last had left him.
"It must," he suddenly exclaimed. "The matter shall be settled before
she leaves Hanover with this Mrs. Meredith. My claim is superior to
Thornton's, and he shall not take her from me. I'll write what I lack
the courage to tell her, and to-morrow I will call and deliver it
myself."
An hour later, and there was lying in the rector's desk a letter in
which he had told Anna Ruthven how much he loved her, and had asked
her to be his wife. Something whispered that she would not refuse him,
and with this hope to buoy him up, his two miles walk that warm
afternoon was neither long nor tiresome, and the old lady, by whose
bedside he had read and prayed, was surprised to hear him as he left
her door whistling an old love-tune which she, too, had known and sung
fifty years before.