The country town of Beckham was astir. It was a cloudy, changeful May
afternoon, and the white-capped country lasses who were alighting from
all sorts of strange vehicles at the churchyard gate had to hold up
their clean cotton frocks with what untutored grace they might, as they
trod the worn, wet flagstones that led up to the church door. Three
or four hundred lads and lasses of Beckham and the neighborhood were
collecting at the sound of the church-bells for the bishop to lay his
hands on their empty heads and confirm them in the faith in which they
were baptized.
The big bare building filled quickly, the vicar on Sunday never
gathered such a congregation. The candidates filled the two middle
aisles, the girls occupying the whole of one and the front benches of
the other, the boys the rest. The latter looked shame-faced, the former
self-conscious but content.
Long before the bishop’s appearance the church was full in every part,
for it was a pretty sight even to those who had no personal interest in
any of the candidates.
When from time to time the sun burst through the swift-flying clouds
and shone through the long windows full upon the young faces crowned
with the demure little white caps, women whispered to each other softly
that it looked like heaven. There were thoughts not unworthy of this
simile in some of the young minds, especially in those of the girls;
others, while trying to fix their thoughts--as they had been told to
do--upon the Catechism, could not help wishing they could renounce
the pomps and vanities in white cashmere with pretty frills of lace
at throat and wrists, like Miss Mainwaring of Garstone Vicarage, who
looked so like a picture of some fair-haired saint, as she sat with her
starry blue eyes fixed steadily on the communion table in front of
her, that it was impossible to guess that she was thinking more of her
new ivory-bound church-service than of the ceremony she was about to
go through. She and the girl by her side attracted more attention than
any others. There were a few of their class present, but of types as
commonplace and faces as vacuous as those of the village-girls.
Betty Mainwaring was sixteen. Her fresh young face was sweet and
silly, charming by the look of modest purity which passed so easily
under the tulle cap and veil for the expression of pious devotion;
but in truth Betty’s very innocence, and the fact that she had passed
her whole life in an atmosphere of the simplest, strictest religion,
had made it impossible for her to concentrate much earnest thought
upon this important step in the Christian life. She had read through
the devotional works prescribed for her as attentively as she could,
and had accepted all the formulas and dogmas of the Church with the
unshrinking faith of the most complete ignorance of their meaning. She
had been taught that confirmation is one of the most serious events of
life, and she believed it and let the fact rest, while her innocent
thoughts wandered to a consideration of the backs of the row of girls
in front of her, and to the reflection how strange it seemed to be
confirmed with one’s own governess.
For the girl beside her, with the passionate dark eyes and set,
serious face, only eighteen herself, and already carrying on her young
shoulders the responsibility of directing the minds of girls of her
own age, was Miss Lane, who taught “advanced” English, French, German,
Italian, music, and singing to the two grown-up Misses Mainwaring,
and the earlier stages of the same to their two younger sisters and
their seven-year-old brother. To her life was a serious hard-working
affair enough, and her tardy confirmation an event of quite desperate
importance, involving much doubt and anxious self-examining. She had
even thought of asking the vicar, her pupils’ father, for a private
interview, of laying bare the bewildered state of her mind, and of
asking him whether he thought her fit for confirmation. The papers on
the subject which he had given her to read had proved but dry bones
to the eager, earnest girl; but she had a strong conviction that
confession would procure little more. The Reverend John Mainwaring’s
religion was not of the hysterical, but of the independent sort; and
the girl felt that all he could do would be to throw her back on prayer
and her own conscience for an answer to her doubts. What was certain
was that he would unhesitatingly have pronounced the conscientious
little worker, striving hard to live up to an ideal standard of
excellence in her dull profession, as fitter for confirmation than
almost any member of his flock.
So she sat by her pupil’s side, with downcast eyes and mind fixed on
the service she was about to hear, curiously conscious at the same
time--being keenly alive to outward things and not without a young
girl’s vanity--of the interest her pretty, modest appearance was
exciting.
But, just before the entrance of the bishop, three persons came in
to whom all eyes turned at once, and there was almost a murmur of
admiration even in the hush of the sacred building at sight of the
girl who, at the foot of the middle aisle, stopped for her mother and
brother to take off the long white mantle which was wrapped round her,
and then followed the Reverend John Mainwaring up the aisle to the seat
he had kept for her in the pew with his own daughter and the governess,
Annie Lane.
Lilian Braithwaite came of a handsome race. Tall, with a well-molded
figure, gray eyes, brown hair, and complexion rich enough in its
tints to promise something more lovely still when a season or two in
town should have toned down its coloring, she gave promise of beauty
distinguished enough to hold its own amongst the fairest women she
might meet. The plain white cashmere which looked so simple on Betty
Mainwaring had quite a different effect upon her handsome figure, and
the tulle headdress, half cap, half veil, which she wore in common with
the other candidates of her own class, had as much of the veil and as
little of the cap about it as possible. Already, at seventeen, she
walked through the crowd of admiring faces with a bearing which showed
more of the dignity of an acknowledged beauty than of the modesty of a
young girl. She smiled at the young governess good-humoredly enough,
however, and would even have entered into a whispered conversation,
with scornfully critical remarks upon the rest of the candidates,
if Miss Lane had not received her overtures shyly and with all the
primness of her profession. Miss Braithwaite, who was not easily
repulsed, gave a little amused shrug of the shoulders, and said, in a
loud whisper:
“Are you afraid the vicar is looking at you?”
And then she met his rather uneasy glance in her own direction with a
bland smile.
It had been rather a difficult matter for him to bring himself to
believe that Miss Braithwaite was in all respects fit for confirmation;
but, as no scruple had ever entered her own head, and as, moreover, she
was technically prepared for the rite, being able to repeat the Lord’s
Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Catechism with perfect fluency,
he had no choice but to bring her to the bishop with the rest of the
candidates.
When the service was over, and she rejoined her mother and brother,
a young man with a rather handsome face, but deformed and resting
on crutches, came up to her and stood silently by while her brother
wrapped her again in the long, white mantle she had come in.
“You here, Stephen! How did you come? The doctor said you were not to
go out until your cough was better,” said Miss Braithwaite, in a voice
scarcely as low as it ought to have been.
“I wanted to see you--all in white like a bride, making all the other
girls look ugly and clumsy,” whispered the cripple, with his face
flushing; “so I got Thompson to get the pony-carriage ready, and
followed you as fast as I could.”
Stephen Lawler’s contempt for the appearance of the rest of the
candidates was not shared by his cousin, Harry Braithwaite, who turned
to watch one of the girls admiringly, and whispered:
“I say, Lilian, how awfully fetching little ‘Miss Prim’ looks in that
get-up!” “Little Miss Prim” was Annie Lane, the governess.
“Yes, she is a pretty girl,” answered his sister, who was handsome
enough to be able to afford to acknowledge beauty in others.
Meanwhile the crowd was surging toward the door, and Harry Braithwaite
kept his mother and sister as near the Vicarage party as he could. At
the church door they discovered that a heavy shower of rain was coming
down, and Mrs. Mainwaring was lamenting piteously that her husband, who
had come on the box of the brougham beside the coachman, would lose
his voice entirely if he were to return in the same way through the
rain. Harry Braithwaite whispered a few words into his mother’s ear,
and, raising his hat, stepped forward and placed a seat in their own
carriage at the disposal of the vicar’s wife, in his mother’s name.
“If Miss Lane will come with us, there will be lots of room in the
brougham for you and your two daughters and the vicar too,” said he.
And before Mrs. Mainwaring could say more than “Oh, thank you, but,” he
had severed Miss Lane from her pupils and was escorting her under an
umbrella to the big Braithwaite barouche.
Mrs. Mainwaring looked uneasy; her two daughters, Joan and Betty,
looked displeased.
“I am sure papa will not approve of that arrangement, mamma,” said
Joan, the eldest of the family, who had come to see her sister
confirmed.
“Well, what could I do, Joan? He meant to be good-natured; and it would
not do for the wife of the vicar of the parish to show any prejudice.
Of course I should not have allowed you or Betty to go, but with Miss
Lane it is different; she can take care of herself.”
“I should think so!” said Joan, sharply.
And then the vicar came up, and his wife hurried him into the brougham,
saying there was plenty of room; and it was not until they were on the
point of stating that she confessed, in answer to his inquiries, that
Miss Lane was going home in the Braithwaites’ carriage.
“That was Master Harry’s doing, I suppose?” said the vicar, with a very
grave face.
“It was all done so quickly, it was impossible for me to stop him,”
said his wife, deprecatingly. “You know you would not have minded if it
had been anybody else’s carriage; and, if they are rather a wild set,
we cannot reform them by holding aloof from them. And it is not as if I
had let one of the girls go,” said she, hurriedly, lowering her voice.
“But you have let ‘one of the girls’ go. Miss Lane is only a few months
older than Joan,” he answered, more gravely than ever.
And she, being a wise woman, dropped the conversation, to take it up
again when they two should be alone together.
This little incident and the discussion it had caused disturbed the
peace of all the occupants of the carriage. The vicar was annoyed that
a member of his household should be thrown into such very uncongenial
and perhaps dangerous society on the very day of her confirmation.
His wife was uneasy on account of his annoyance. Joan and Betty were
somewhat agitated, too; but they gave no vent to their feelings except
in a little soft-toned wrangle about the amount of space each was
authorized to take on the rather small front seat of the brougham. When
the Braithwaite carriage passed them they became suddenly silent, both
gazing eagerly out until it had passed out of sight. They had time to
see the portly Lady Braithwaite and her handsome daughter leaning back
comfortably on one seat, while Miss Lane and Harry Braithwaite sat
opposite; he was talking to her, and did not notice the brougham.
When the Vicarage was reached, a group of children rushed to the hall
door to criticise their elder sister in her white gown, and the missing
governess.
“Hasn’t Miss Lane come back yet?” asked Mrs. Mainwaring, rather
anxiously. “Their carriage passed us a long time ago,” she added, when
the children had shaken their heads in surprise.
“She will stay at the Grange to tea, of course, mamma,” said Joan,
acidly.
And again Mrs. Mainwaring, with a glance at her husband, dropped the
subject.
The Grange was a sort of an ogre’s castle to the simple lady, and not
quite without reason. There is in most quiet country neighborhoods
a house with this sort of reputation, where there lives a wicked
man who does not come regularly to church, and who goes to bed and
gets up again at unorthodox hours, and whose guests do the same and
worse things besides; where there is a tribe of servants who find it
difficult to obtain places in the neighborhood on leaving; and where,
above all, there is a family of healthy, high-spirited, ill-disciplined
children, rough girls and rougher boys, who grow up with a bad name,
which becomes steadily worse as the wild lads grow into manhood,
and the girls, without any one’s saying that there is any “harm in
them,” acquire the stigma of being “fast.” The Grange was more worthy
of its bad reputation than most homes of the same type. Sir George
Braithwaite, the present owner, had in his youth on several occasions
narrowly escaped appearing in the London police courts; he had sobered
down somewhat on coming into the baronetcy; but in four wild sons,
whose doings were the scandal of the neighborhood, he saw the follies
of his own youth repeated and developed.
When, two years before, the Reverend John Mainwaring became Vicar
of Garstone, the inmates of the Grange had made advances to the
new-comers, had petted the pretty Betty and invited the elder boys to
fish and shoot during the holidays. But the vicar and his wife soon
took alarm, and, while striving to maintain an appearance of perfect
good-will, discouraged the intimacy between the younger members of the
families, until the proud Braithwaites, seeing at last through the
civil excuses and regrets, drew back suddenly and held themselves as
far aloof as Mrs. Mainwaring could wish. The intimacy thus abruptly
checked had never been renewed, and, although the members of the two
families greeted each other without apparent ill-will when by chance
they met, there was no cordiality on either side--the Grange laughed at
the Vicarage as “slow,” the Vicarage shuddered at the Grange as “fast.”
The interest the latter took in the prim little Vicarage girls and
their brothers had died out long since, while, on the other hand, the
“wild Braithwaites” had an ever-increased secret attraction for the
clergyman’s family. Joan and Betty were more constrained than usual
when accident brought them face to face with any of the handsome
Braithwaite boys, and they both in their hearts sat in judgment upon
their parents, and thought that a policy of conciliation would be a
much more Christian way of treating the scapegraces. And each of these
demure and somewhat stiff maidens began, as she left the schoolroom, to
think she saw signs of redeeming grace in one of the Grange lads, and
to feel that she would like to have a hand in his reform.
So that, when Miss Lane--who, however prim and staid her manner might
be, was undeniably a very pretty girl--was carried off before their
eyes by one of their wicked neighbors, and taken to the interesting
Grange, feelings which their simple-minded mother never dreamed of
mingled with the indignation Joan expressed. Betty was silent, but
inclined to be tearful.
The Mainwarings were a somewhat stolid race, and meals at which no
stranger was present were very solemn feasts indeed. On this occasion
tea-time was passed in dead silence--even Marian and Bertram, the two
youngest, scarcely dared kick each other under the table. When they all
rose, a tear was rolling down Betty’s fair cheek. Her mother caressed
her anxiously, fearing that the excitement of the solemn vows she had
made that day had proved too much for her. Betty gave way.
“Oh, how that Miss Lane must be enjoying herself at the Grange!” she
cried bitterly.