I HAD found lodgings with one Peggy Ransom, whom I soon discovered to be
one of the chief characters in the village, as the Rector had reported
her. A tiny old lady she was, with a small and shrivelled face, like a
Ribston pippin that had survived well on into April, and bright beady
eyes that always reminded me of a squirrel’s. She had, too, something of
the same small creature’s animal vivacity, and talked in a queer little
chirpy strain that suggested its note of satisfaction when it has lighted
upon a particularly fine nut or acorn.
In dress she was scrupulously neat, though in the dress of some
pre-historic age. For example, she never appeared without a silk
’kerchief bound over her head, because, as she said, you never “knew
where a draught might find you, and prevention was better than cure.”
On Sundays and holidays she appeared resplendent in a black silk gown,
which, she told me with pride, could “stand of itself in the days when
the Rector gave it her”—how many years before I had never had the
rudeness to enquire. But it was still a fine article of raiment, and had
been preserved with such scrupulous care that even in its old age it
still retained its dignity.
She was not, I found, a heart-whole admirer of the Rector’s opinions.
“As good and kindly a gentleman,” she said, “as ever trod in shoeleather,
and a real Christian. But takes things a bit too pleasantly, I allow,
and makes out the next world to be a more comfortable place than some of
us, I fear, will find it. Not but what ’tis better that way than to go
about, as some of us do, with faces sad enough to sour the cream, finding
no pleasure in all the gifts the Almighty has showered upon us.”
She had lost her husband and all her family one by one, and found the joy
of her life in the Rector and the Rectory children, who were always in
and out of the kitchen, worrying her and hindering her work, it seemed to
me, though she would never hear a word from anyone against them. “Bless
their hearts,” she would say, “I’d be a lone and dreary old body without
them, though I do wish that child Aggie would come up the garden path
like a Christian, instead of jumping over the flower-beds and tempting
the cats to play hide-and-seek among my lilies of the valley.”
But of all the Rectory children Reginald was her first and special
favourite. This was unfortunate for me. Not but what I liked the
lad—what little I had seen of him before he left for the continent. But
it was tedious to be reminded so often of his perfections. Besides, I
had a lively remembrance of the love-scene that had passed between him
and his cousin on the day that followed my arrival, which for some reason
or other I had thought out of place and unseasonable. Though of course I
had no right to begrudge two cousins the pleasure of a cousinly
salutation, and perhaps, if Marion had been old and ill-favoured, I
should have found no temptation to do so. As it was, and for whatever
reason, I was glad that Reggie was for the moment out of the field of my
vision. And I should have tried to forget the liberty, for so I called
it, that he had taken in kissing her, if only Peggy had not so strongly
insisted on the nearness and intimacy of their relations. She was for
ever harping on Reggie’s good looks—he was well enough I admit, but,
after all, nothing to compare with Riverdale—and what a handsome pair
they’d make, and how suitable the match would be. “And Master Reginald
just worships the ground under her feet,” she would add; as if I couldn’t
see that much without Peggy’s interference. And then she would look
slyly at me and say, “I suppose _you_ think her good-looking, don’t you,
sir? The two curates who were here before you both made eyes at
her—really Peggy, I thought, you can be a little vulgar at times—indeed,
I may say it was for that reason they left us, and because they saw they
had no chance against Master Reginald. It is true they were none too
well favoured—short and dark the first was, and the last one thin and
scraggy. Not but what he was beautifully fair in complexion.”
For a while after this interview Peggy and I were at variance. Every
scrap of her information had been distasteful to me, especially her
reference to the complexion of the curate who had preceded me, in which I
detected, however gratuitously, an allusion to that slight tendency to
freckles which I thought somewhat marred my own completeness.
But on the whole Peggy and I got on capitally together, and she was in
most respects an ideal landlady for a curate who was new and strange to
his surroundings. She had lived her life in the parish, and knew its
landmarks as no one else knew them. Besides, she amused me with her
gossip, especially when I could draw her on the subject of the Rector and
his theories, which she was never weary of discussing.
“The worst of it is,” she would say authoritatively, “he’s none too
strict, to my way of thinking, in the matter of church-going. Only the
other day he said to me ‘Yes, Peggy, church-going is good for all of us,
not but what we may have too much of it’—did ever woman hear the like
from her minister?—or rather we may follow it to the exclusion of better
things. To _do_ the thing we ought is better than to _listen to_ it, and
I’d come down easy on any one who stayed away from Church to do a kind
act for a neighbour. Unluckily it’s usually to please ourselves, and not
to help our neighbours, that we fight so shy of our Church.’”
In her little peculiarities Peggy was wonderfully diverting. For
example, whenever she found herself in difficulties, as when the potatoes
were hard, or the meat overdone, she would take refuge in the platitude,
“I’ve done my best: I can no more,” thus casting all her care upon Fate
as the inscrutable power which had wrought the mischief and must take the
responsibility. She was also a firm believer in the guidance of
astrology, always planting her flowers and vegetables when two benign
planets were in conjunction, and avoiding with scrupulous care the
baleful influence of Mars and Saturn. Only I wish she had abstained more
wisely from words of which she had not mastered the meaning, as when she
told me they had been “hanging a hamlet” in the Rectory garden, or
“keeping the university” of the King’s birthday!
There was something else by the way that gave Peggy Ransom a special
interest in my eyes. She had been housekeeper at the Manor House in the
days of Marion’s youth, but had left it fifteen years before to form her
own ill-fated marriage.
It was not much, but I suppose it was better than nothing, for an
incipient lover like myself to learn at first-hand what his lady-love was
like in the days of her infancy. But either Peggy’s memory was failing
her, or her love for the Rectory children had made her forgetful of her
earlier charge, for her reminiscences of Marion at that age were hardly
of absorbing interest, being limited for the most part to a rambling
catalogue of childish illnesses, and the skill with which Peggy had
treated them. But possibly in the very warmest heart it would be
difficult to stimulate raptures by a record of what your lady-love was
doing at the early age of five.
This afternoon, for example, I had reached the stage at which Marion was
recovering from a vague and mysterious illness called “thrush,” when we
were interrupted by Aggie, who, as usual, made a bee-line towards us in
flying leaps and bounds across the garden beds. “Here’s a letter for
you, Mr. Stirling,” she cried, “from the Manor House. Uncle Edgar wants
you to dine with him this evening at eight. I told him you had no
engagement; besides, Marion who came with him said she was dying to make
your acquaintance. But you must hurry up and dress for it’s past seven
already.” As she spoke, she had pounced on Peggy’s two cats—Toby and
Sambo by name—who were reposing peacefully on the porch above our heads,
and was off again home down the garden with the pair of them close at her
heels, all the three doing their level best to break off as many flowers
as possible in their passage down the garden.
There were to be only four of us at dinner that evening. In the
ignorance of my heart I rejoiced at Reggie’s absence, little thinking
that, before the evening was over, I should have been glad to welcome his
cousinly attentions to Marion as a far less dangerous rivalry than the
one which was suddenly to burst upon me from a quarter wholly beyond the
range of my vision.