ABOUT NOTHING PARTICULAR.
It was as well that Grace had had this talk with her brother; for,
during the two days that remained of his brief visit, they were not
alone together until the last half-hour before his departure. The
young vicar had to return for his Sunday duties; but Mattie remained
behind for another week. Archie, indeed, had once sought her in his
old fashion,--running up to the school-room for a chat; but Susie had
been there all the time. In former days, Archie would have sent her
away with blunt peremptoriness; but now he seemed well content to have
her there. He had no secrets to discuss, as he sat in his old place in
the window-seat; yet Grace was too happy to see him there to find
fault with his discourse.
But on the morning of his departure she had come down early to pour
out his coffee. He had bidden his mother good-bye in her room; but he
knew that, in spite of the earliness of the hour, Grace would be in
her place to minister to his wants.
"Well, Grace," he said, entering with his travelling-plaid over his
arm, "so it is to be good-bye until Christmas."
"Yes," she returned, looking at him with a sort of wistfulness; "but
the time will pass quickly now. It is so nice to think that we shall
begin our new year together." And, as her brother checked an
involuntary sigh, she went on eagerly: "If you knew how happy I am
about it! It will be something to wake every morning and know you are
not a hundred miles off,--that when I come down to breakfast I shall
find you there,--that I shall be able to talk to you as much as I
like; and as for work, why, it will be play to me to work for you,
Archie!"
"Of course I know that," rather mischievously.
"I would work for you like a servant: would I not, dear? I mean to be
ever so good to you. Your friends shall be my friends; your likes and
dislikes shall be mine too."
"Why, Gracie," he said, humoring her, "this is more than a wife would
do for me!"
"Ah! but it is not too much to ask from a sister," she returned,
earnestly. "When you bring home your wife, Archie, I mean to be good
to her too. I shall have to leave you then, and come back here; but if
you are happy I shall not be miserable." But he interrupted her a
little impatiently.
"What put such nonsense into your head? I shall never marry. We shall
be a pattern of old-bachelor brother and maiden sister." And then he
pushed away his plate, and went to the window. "Is it not Mrs. Carlyle
who quotes that quaint old story about some one who always thanked God
'for the blessings that passed over his or her head'? Is not that a
curious idea, when one comes to think it out? Fancy thanking heaven
really and seriously for all our disappointed hopes and plans,--for
'the blessings that go over our heads'! It would be a new clause in
our petitions,--eh, Gracie?"
"Why, yes," she replied, as she came and stood near him. "I am afraid
I could never say that from my heart."
"It is not easy," he returned, quietly; "but I do not know that we
ought to give up trying, for all that." And then his manner changed,
and he put his arm round her in his old fashion. "Recollect, I want
you very much, Grace: your coming will make me far happier. Mattie
only touches the outside of things; I want some one near me who can go
deeper than that,--who will help me with real work, and put up with my
bad humors; for I am a man who is very liable to discouragement." And
when he had said this, he bade her good-bye.
It was a comfort to Archie to find himself hard at work again. These
few days of idleness had been irksome to him. Now he could throw
himself without stint or limit into his pastoral labors, walking miles
of country road until he was weary, and planning new outlets for the
feverish activity that seemed to stimulate him to fresh efforts.
People began to talk of the young vicar. His sermons were changed
somehow. There was more in them,--"less of the husk, and more of the
kernel," as Miss Middleton once remarked rather pithily.
They were wonderfully brief discourses; but, whereas they had once
been elegant and somewhat scholarly productions, they were now earnest
and even pungent. If the sentences were less carefully compiled, more
rough-hewn, and deficient in polish, there was matter in them that
roused people and made them think.
"I never could remember Mr. Drummond's sermons before," Dulce once
observed, "but now I can recollect whole sentences quite nicely."
Phillis, to whom she spoke, assented by a nod. If she had chosen, she
could have admitted the fact that she could remember not sentences,
but the entire sermon itself. In secret she marvelled also at the
change.
"He is more earnest," she would say to herself. "He preaches now, not
from the outside, but from the inside of things,--from his own
experience, not from other people's. That makes the difference."
And to Nan, who was her other conscience, she said one day, when they
were discussing this subject,--
"I have been thinking a great deal about sermons lately. I wish I
could publish the result of my cogitation. I feel inclined to write a
pamphlet and entitle it 'Hints to the Clergy.' I think it would take
vastly."
It was Sunday afternoon, and they were sitting together on their
favorite boulder. Phillis had christened it her "thinking-stone."
"I never think to more purpose than when I am sitting here," she would
say.
Nan, who was looking out to sea rather dreamily, intent on her usual
vision, Dick, roused herself at this, and began to smile in a lofty
way.
"You think yourself very clever, Phillis, and so do I; but sermons are
hardly in your province, my dear."
Phillis shook her head gravely. She dissented from this view of the
case.
"Common sense is in every one's province," she persisted. "I am a
practical woman, and some of my hints would be valuable. Sermons are
failures, Nan. They go over people's heads like a flight of badly-shot
arrows. Does not Goulburn say that? Now and then one touches the mark.
When they are all let fly hither and thither and anyhow, the preacher
shuts up his book, and his hearers cease to yawn."
"Oh, Phillis, how absurd you are! Suppose Mr. Drummond were to hear
you?"
"I should have no objection. But, Nan, seriously, do you not notice
how formal and cut-and-dried most sermons are? They come round
regularly, like Sunday. People have to bear being preached at, and so
the unfortunate parson must hammer it out of his head somehow. He
picks out his text, writes out his composition, drags in his learning
by the ear, and delivers it in his best fashion; and people listen to
it politely, and the best behaved do not yawn."
"Phillis, you are positively irreverent! I am shocked at you!"
"On the contrary, I am very reverent. Well, in my 'Hints to the
Clergy' I would say, first, 'Never preach what you do not feel
yourself, or the current of electricity or sympathy, or whatever it is
that communicates between preacher and people, will be checked or
impeded. Do not preach out of the book: we can read that for
ourselves. Preach out of your own head and your own experience, just
as much as you can.' Bless you," continued Phillis, in a wise,
half-sad tone, "half the pulpits would be empty: we should get
sometimes no sermons at all!"
This was too much for Nan's simplicity.
"But people would be so disappointed," she observed, plaintively. "All
the middle-aged people like sermons."
"It would not hurt them to be disappointed sometimes. They would
appreciate the real thing all the more when it came. It is as well to
go without food altogether as to be fed on husks. After all, people
forget that they come to church to say their prayers all together, and
sing glorias."
"That is very nicely said, dear," was Nan's admiring comment on this.
But Phillis waved aside the praise. She was quite in earnest.
"But if I were speaking to one of these real and not make-believe
preachers, I would say to him, 'Never be discouraged. Say what you
have got to say: if you really feel it and mean it, some one will feel
it too. You can't see into people's hearts: and a good thing, too, my
friend. But "the arrow at the venture" may tell; some one may be "hit
between the joints of the armor."' There, come along; you shall have
more of my hints another time. I have said my say for the present."
And Phillis rose from the boulder, with her eyes bright and kindled by
some moving thought, and went down to the edge of the water, and
watched a sea-gull dipping towards the shore in the midst of the windy
lights; while Nan, marvelling at her sister's unusual earnestness,
followed more slowly.
The Challoners were holding up their heads in the place now. There was
no denying that. By the people at the vicarage and the White House
they were owned and regarded as equals. Mrs. Cheyne made no secret of
her affection for Phillis; and she was full of kindness also to Nan
and Dulce. It was their own fault if they declined her frequent
invitations. But there was one person who refused to hold out the hand
of amity to the eccentric new-comers.
Colonel Middleton still shook his white head, and delivered his
protest into his daughter's ear. Elizabeth, declared, laughingly,
"that the Challoner girls were to her father what a red rag is to a
bull." He never met one of them without coming home and relieving his
mind, as he called it. "My father is dying to know them," she would
say to Mr. Drummond. "He has fallen in love with them all,--mother and
daughters too; but he is denying himself an introduction for a certain
reason." But, though Archie looked curious and questioned her very
closely, she chose to be provoking and say no more. It was Colonel
Middleton who at last enlightened the young man.
They were walking from the town together. The colonel was carrying his
stick musket-wise over his shoulder, and had the vicar by the arm,
when Phillis and Dulce came out of the gateway of the White House. As
the girls passed Archie, they smiled at him and nodded, and Phillis,
in a pretty way she had, waved her hand; and then they went on rapidly
towards the Friary. As they did so, Colonel Middleton groaned, and
touched his companion's arm impressively.
"There, now, Drummond, did you ever see girls with a better
carriage?--heads up--light springy step? Why, it is a pleasure even to
an old fellow like myself to watch them. Fancy that taller one on
horseback in the Row! Why, she would cut out half the girls. And think
that one dare not notice them!" And he struck his stick into the
ground almost angrily.
Archie smiled: he could not help it. The colonel was so whimsical in
his wrath.
"They had plenty of notice from the folk at the White House," he
returned, quietly.
"Ah, Cheyne was always a bit of a Radical, and madam is no better.
They can do as they like, without being afraid of consequences. But
that is not my case." And, as Archie looked at him rather mystified,
he went on: "Bless me, you do not suppose I am afraid of knowing them
for my own sake? Elizabeth tells me that she is intimate with them.
But that is not my business, so long as she does not have them at
Brooklyn. 'We must draw the line there, Elizabeth,' I said. 'If you
choose to visit your dressmakers, it is not for me to prevent you; you
are old enough to select your own friends, so you may be as eccentric
as you like. But your brother is coming home. Young men are young men;
and I do not choose to expose Hammond to such temptation.'"
"Oh, Hammond! That is your son, I suppose?" asked Archie, who was much
amused at the colonel's earnestness.
"Yes; my boy Hammond! the finest fellow in the regiment, though I say
it, who should not. Do you think that I, his father, would expose him
to such danger as to throw him into the society of a set of
fascinating young women who have chosen to emancipate themselves from
all conventionality, and who call themselves--stuff and
rubbish!--dressmakers?"
"Not call themselves, so: they are excellent dressmakers!" was
Archie's somewhat malicious reply.
"All the more reason that my son should not know them!" thundered the
old man. "What, sir! an officer in one of her Majesty's regiments--the
son and grandson of officers,--is such a one to be mixed up with a
family that has lost caste,--to flirt with or make love to girls who
are not above making gowns for my butcher's wife? Before Hammond does
such a thing as that----" And here the colonel paused from excess of
emotion.
"You are perfectly right to defend your son from such danger,"
returned the young clergyman with covert sarcasm. "In your case I
should probably feel the same. But, in my position, being intimate
with those ladies of whom you speak, and having had good opportunity
to form my opinions of them, I cannot help saying, in their defence,
that even your son, excellent officer as he is,--and, I am sure, a
most worthy young man,--would scarcely be dishonored by an alliance
with the finest young gentlewomen I ever met!" And, as he said this,
with all due gravity, Archie released his arm, and, with a farewell
nod, went off, leaving the colonel, open-mouthed and gasping with
astonishment, at his own gate.
Elizabeth met him on the threshold.
"Oh, father, why did you not bring Mr. Drummond in!" she said,
reproachfully; "it is so long since he has paid us a visit."
"Poor Drummond!" replied the colonel, with a mournful shake of his
head: "it is just as I thought. He has almost owned it, in fact. He is
seriously smitten with one of those Challoner girls, and before long
there will be a wedding in the place."
"Now, father, this is just one of your whimsies," replied Elizabeth,
placidly. "Mr. Drummond is going to have his favorite sister, Grace,
to live with him and keep his house. He told me so himself; and that
does not look as though he expected to bring home a wife. So you may
just put this idea out of your head." But, though Elizabeth was well
aware of the truth of her words, that no new mistress was to come to
the vicarage, still her fine sympathy and unerring woman's divination
had read the meaning of the young vicar's clouded brow, and she knew
that he, too, had to try and be grateful for "the blessings that went
over his head."
Archie's grand and somewhat heroic speech failed in its effect, as far
as the colonel was concerned. Elizabeth was right in saying her father
was longing to know the Challoners. The old man's fancy had been
mightily taken by the girls; but for Hammond, for his boy's sake, he
was capable of any amount of self-denial. Once he was sorely tempted
to give in. When turning the corner of the Braidwood Road, not far
from his own house, he came suddenly upon his daughter, who was
standing on the side-path, talking to Dulce.
Dulce, who always seemed a sort of reflection and shadow of her
sisters, and who withdrew somewhat in the background, obscured a
little by Nan's beauty and Phillis's sprightliness, was nevertheless
in her way a most bewitching little maiden.
"There comes my father!" observed Elizabeth, tranquilly, never
doubting that he would join them; and Dulce looked up a little shy and
fluttered from under her broad-brimmed hat; for she had taken a fancy
to the colonel, with his white moustache and kindly inquisitive
eyes. He was a sort of hero in her fancy; and Dulce loved
heroes,--especially when they wore a medal.
Colonel Middleton saw the little girl dimpling and blushing with
pleasure, and his old heart thumped a little with excitement and the
conflict of feeling: the innocent child-look appealed to his fatherly
sympathies. There was a moment's wavering; then he lifted his white
hat, with a muttered "Good-morning," and the next minute he was
walking on with squared shoulders and tremendous energy.
Poor little Dulce's lip quivered with disappointment: she thought it
hard, when other people were so kind to them. Elizabeth said nothing;
but she bade the child good-bye with greater tenderness than usual,
and sent all sort of messages to her mother and Nan.
The colonel, meanwhile, had retreated into the house, and was opening
his papers with more than his usual fuss.
"It is for Hammond," he murmured to himself. "When one has boys, one
must do one's duty by them; but it was confoundedly hard, by Jove!"
And all the remainder of the day a pair of appealing eyes seemed to
reproach him with unkindness. But Elizabeth never said a word; it was
not her place to find fault with her father.