It was quite as warm on the following Thursday evening, when Mr. Dempster
and his colleagues were to return from their mission to Elmstoke Rectory;
but it was much pleasanter in Mrs. Linnet’s parlour than in the bar of
the Red Lion. Through the open window came the scent of mignonette and
honeysuckle; the grass-plot in front of the house was shaded by a little
plantation of Gueldres roses, syringas, and laburnums; the noise of looms
and carts and unmelodious voices reached the ear simply as an agreeable
murmur, for Mrs. Linnet’s house was situated quite on the outskirts of
Paddiford Common; and the only sound likely to disturb the serenity of
the feminine party assembled there, was the occasional buzz of intrusive
wasps, apparently mistaking each lady’s head for a sugar-basin. No
sugar-basin was visible in Mrs. Linnet’s parlour, for the time of tea was
not yet, and the round table was littered with books which the ladies
were covering with black canvass as a reinforcement of the new Paddiford
Lending Library. Miss Linnet, whose manuscript was the neatest type of
zigzag, was seated at a small table apart, writing on green paper
tickets, which were to be pasted on the covers. Miss Linnet had other
accomplishments besides that of a neat manuscript, and an index to some
of them might be found in the ornaments of the room. She had always
combined a love of serious and poetical reading with her skill in
fancy-work, and the neatly-bound copies of Dryden’s ‘Virgil,’ Hannah
More’s ‘Sacred Dramas,’ Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck,’ Mason ‘On
Self-Knowledge,’ ‘Rasselas,’ and Burke ‘On the Sublime and Beautiful,’
which were the chief ornaments of the bookcase, were all inscribed with
her name, and had been bought with her pocket-money when she was in her
teens. It must have been at least fifteen years since the latest of those
purchases, but Miss Linnet’s skill in fancy-work appeared to have gone
through more numerous phases than her literary taste; for the japanned
boxes, the alum and sealing-wax baskets, the fan-dolls, the ‘transferred’
landscapes on the fire-screens, and the recent bouquets of wax-flowers,
showed a disparity in freshness which made them referable to widely
different periods. Wax-flowers presuppose delicate fingers and robust
patience, but there are still many points of mind and person which they
leave vague and problematic; so I must tell you that Miss Linnet had dark
ringlets, a sallow complexion, and an amiable disposition. As to her
features, there was not much to criticize in them, for she had little
nose, less lip, and no eyebrow; and as to her intellect, her friend Mrs.
Pettifer often said: ‘She didn’t know a more sensible person to talk to
than Mary Linnet. There was no one she liked better to come and take a
quiet cup of tea with her, and read a little of Klopstock’s ‘Messiah.’
Mary Linnet had often told her a great deal of her mind when they were
sitting together: she said there were many things to bear in every
condition of life, and nothing should induce her to marry without a
prospect of happiness. Once, when Mrs. Pettifer admired her wax-flowers,
she said, “Ah, Mrs. Pettifer, think of the beauties of nature!” She
always spoke very prettily, did Mary Linnet; very different, indeed, from
Rebecca.’
Miss Rebecca Linnet, indeed, was not a general favourite. While most
people thought it a pity that a sensible woman like Mary had not found a
good husband--and even her female friends said nothing more ill-natured
of her, than that her face was like a piece of putty with two Scotch
pebbles stuck in it--Rebecca was always spoken of sarcastically, and it
was a customary kind of banter with young ladies to recommend her as a
wife to any gentleman they happened to be flirting with--her fat, her
finery, and her thick ankles sufficing to give piquancy to the joke,
notwithstanding the absence of novelty. Miss Rebecca, however, possessed
the accomplishment of music, and her singing of ‘Oh no, we never mention
her’, and ‘The Soldier’s Tear’, was so desirable an accession to the
pleasures of a tea-party that no one cared to offend her, especially as
Rebecca had a high spirit of her own, and in spite of her expansively
rounded contour, had a particularly sharp tongue. Her reading had been
more extensive than her sister’s, embracing most of the fiction in Mr.
Procter’s circulating library, and nothing but an acquaintance with the
course of her studies could afford a clue to the rapid transitions in her
dress, which were suggested by the style of beauty, whether sentimental,
sprightly, or severe, possessed by the heroine of the three volumes
actually in perusal. A piece of lace, which drooped round the edge of her
white bonnet one week, had been rejected by the next; and her cheeks,
which, on Whitsunday, loomed through a Turnerian haze of network, were,
on Trinity Sunday, seen reposing in distinct red outline on her shelving
bust, like the sun on a fog-bank. The black velvet, meeting with a
crystal clasp, which one evening encircled her head, had on another
descended to her neck, and on a third to her waist, suggesting to an
active imagination either a magical contraction of the ornament, or a
fearful ratio of expansion in Miss Rebecca’s person. With this constant
application of art to dress, she could have had little time for
fancy-work, even if she had not been destitute of her sister’s taste for
that delightful and truly feminine occupation. And here, at least, you
perceive the justice of the Milby opinion as to the relative suitability
of the two Miss Linnets for matrimony. When a man is happy enough to win
the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with _crochet_,
and respond to all his most cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and
chair-covers in German wool, he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic
comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it
is under fatigue and irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied
with small mats, which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set
anything on them! And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious
squares of _crochet_, which are useful for slipping down the moment you
touch them? How our fathers managed without _crochet_ is the wonder; but
I believe some small and feeble substitute existed in their time under
the name of ‘tatting’. Rebecca Linnet, however, had neglected tatting as
well as other forms of fancy-work. At school, to be sure, she had spent a
great deal of time in acquiring flower-painting, according to the
ingenious method then fashionable, of applying the shapes of leaves and
flowers cut out in cardboard, and scrubbing a brush over the surface thus
conveniently marked out; but even the spill-cases and hand-screens which
were her last half-year’s performances in that way were not considered
eminently successful, and had long been consigned to the retirement of
the best bedroom. Thus there was a good deal of family unlikeness between
Rebecca and her sister, and I am afraid there was also a little family
dislike; but Mary’s disapproval had usually been kept imprisoned behind
her thin lips, for Rebecca was not only of a headstrong disposition, but
was her mother’s pet; the old lady being herself stout, and preferring a
more showy style of cap than she could prevail on her daughter Mary to
make up for her.
But I have been describing Miss Rebecca as she was in former days only,
for her appearance this evening, as she sits pasting on the green
tickets, is in striking contrast with what it was three or four months
ago. Her plain grey gingham dress and plain white collar could never have
belonged to her wardrobe before that date; and though she is not reduced
in size, and her brown hair will do nothing but hang in crisp ringlets
down her large cheeks, there is a change in her air and expression which
seems to shed a softened light over her person, and make her look like a
peony in the shade, instead of the same flower flaunting in a parterre in
the hot sunlight.
No one could deny that Evangelicalism had wrought a change for the better
in Rebecca Linnet’s person--not even Miss Pratt, the thin stiff lady in
spectacles, seated opposite to her, who always had a peculiar repulsion
for ‘females with a gross habit of body’. Miss Pratt was an old maid; but
that is a no more definite description than if I had said she was in the
autumn of life. Was it autumn when the orchards are fragrant with apples,
or autumn when the oaks are brown, or autumn when the last yellow leaves
are fluttering in the chill breeze? The young ladies in Milby would have
told you that the Miss Linnets were old maids; but the Miss Linnets were
to Miss Pratt what the apple-scented September is to the bare, nipping
days of late November. The Miss Linnets were in that temperate zone of
old-maidism, when a woman will not say but that if a man of suitable
years and character were to offer himself, she might be induced to tread
the remainder of life’s vale in company with him; Miss Pratt was in that
arctic region where a woman is confident that at no time of life would
she have consented to give up her liberty, and that she has never seen
the man whom she would engage to honour and obey. If the Miss Linnets
were old maids, they were old maids with natural ringlets and embonpoint,
not to say obesity; Miss Pratt was an old maid with a cap, a braided
‘front’, a backbone and appendages. Miss Pratt was the one blue-stocking
of Milby, possessing, she said, no less than five hundred volumes,
competent, as her brother the doctor often observed, to conduct a
conversation on any topic whatever, and occasionally dabbling a little in
authorship, though it was understood that she had never put forth the
full powers of her mind in print. Her ‘Letters to a Young Man on his
Entrance into Life’, and ‘De Courcy, or the Rash Promise, a Tale for
Youth’, were mere trifles which she had been induced to publish because
they were calculated for popular utility, but they were nothing to what
she had for years had by her in manuscript. Her latest production had
been Six Stanzas, addressed to the Rev. Edgar Tryan, printed on glazed
paper with a neat border, and beginning, ‘Forward, young wrestler for the
truth!’
Miss Pratt having kept her brother’s house during his long widowhood, his
daughter, Miss Eliza, had had the advantage of being educated by her
aunt, and thus of imbibing a very strong antipathy to all that remarkable
woman’s tastes and opinions. The silent handsome girl of two-and-twenty,
who is covering the ‘Memoirs of Felix Neff,’ is Miss Eliza Pratt; and the
small elderly lady in dowdy clothing, who is also working diligently, is
Mrs. Pettifer, a superior-minded widow, much valued in Milby, being such
a very respectable person to have in the house in case of illness, and of
quite too good a family to receive any money-payment--you could always
send her garden-stuff that would make her ample amends. Miss Pratt has
enough to do in commenting on the heap of volumes before her, feeling it
a responsibility entailed on her by her great powers of mind to leave
nothing without the advantage of her opinion. Whatever was good must be
sprinkled with the chrism of her approval; whatever was evil must be
blighted by her condemnation.
‘Upon my word,’ she said, in a deliberate high voice, as if she were
dictating to an amanuensis, ‘it is a most admirable selection of works
for popular reading, this that our excellent Mr. Tryan has made. I do not
know whether, if the task had been confided to me, I could have made a
selection, combining in a higher degree religious instruction and
edification with a due admixture of the purer species of amusement. This
story of ‘Father Clement’ is a library in itself on the errors of
Romanism. I have ever considered fiction a suitable form for conveying
moral and religious instruction, as I have shown in my little work ‘De
Courcy,’ which, as a very clever writer in the Crompton ‘Argus’ said at
the time of its appearance, is the light vehicle of a weighty moral.’
‘One ’ud think,’ said Mrs. Linnet, who also had her spectacles on, but
chiefly for the purpose of seeing what the others were doing, ‘there
didn’t want much to drive people away from a religion as makes ’em walk
barefoot over stone floors, like that girl in Father Clement--sending the
blood up to the head frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat’ral
creed.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Pratt, ‘but asceticism is not the root of the error, as
Mr. Tryan was telling us the other evening--it is the denial of the great
doctrine of justification by faith. Much as I had reflected on all
subjects in the course of my life, I am indebted to Mr. Tryan for opening
my eyes to the full importance of that cardinal doctrine of the
Reformation. From a child I had a deep sense of religion, but in my early
days the Gospel light was obscured in the English Church, notwithstanding
the possession of our incomparable Liturgy, than which I know no human
composition more faultless and sublime. As I tell Eliza I was not blest
as she is at the age of two-and-twenty, in knowing a clergyman who unites
all that is great and admirable in intellect with the highest spiritual
gifts. I am no contemptible judge of a man’s acquirements, and I assure
you I have tested Mr. Tryan’s by questions which are a pretty severe
touchstone. It is true, I sometimes carry him a little beyond the depth
of the other listeners. Profound learning,’ continued Miss Pratt,
shutting her spectacles, and tapping them on the book before her, ‘has
not many to estimate it in Milby.’
‘Miss Pratt,’ said Rebecca, ‘will you please give me Scott’s “Force of
Truth?” There--that small book lying against the “Life of Legh
Richmond.”’
‘That’s a book I’m very fond of--the “Life of Legh Richmond,”’ said Mrs.
Linnet. ‘He found out all about that woman at Tutbury as pretended to
live without eating. Stuff and nonsense!’
Mrs. Linnet had become a reader of religious books since Mr. Tryan’s
advent, and as she was in the habit of confining her perusal to the
purely secular portions, which bore a very small proportion to the whole,
she could make rapid progress through a large number of volumes. On
taking up the biography of a celebrated preacher, she immediately turned
to the end to see what disease he died of; and if his legs swelled, as
her own occasionally did, she felt a stronger interest in ascertaining
any earlier facts in the history of the dropsical divine--whether he had
ever fallen off a stage coach, whether he had married more than one wife,
and, in general, any adventures or repartees recorded of him previous to
the epoch of his conversion. She then glanced over the letters and diary,
and wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and
notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage
in which she saw such promising nouns as ‘small-pox’, ‘pony’, or ‘boots
and shoes’, at once arrested her.
‘It is half-past six now,’ said Miss Linnet, looking at her watch as the
servant appeared with the tea-tray. ‘I suppose the delegates are come
back by this time. If Mr. Tryan had not so kindly promised to call and
let us know, I should hardly rest without walking to Milby myself to know
what answer they have brought back. It is a great privilege for us, Mr.
Tryan living at Mrs. Wagstaff’s, for he is often able to take us on his
way backwards and forwards into the town.’
‘I wonder if there’s another man in the world who has been brought up as
Mr. Tryan has, that would choose to live in those small close rooms on
the common, among heaps of dirty cottages, for the sake of being near the
poor people,’ said Mrs. Pettifer. ‘I’m afraid he hurts his health by it;
he looks to me far from strong.’
‘Ah,’ said Miss Pratt, ‘I understand he is of a highly respectable family
indeed, in Huntingdonshire. I heard him myself speak of his father’s
carriage--quite incidentally, you know--and Eliza tells me what very fine
cambric handkerchiefs he uses. My eyes are not good enough to see such
things, but I know what breeding is as well as most people, and it is
easy to see that Mr. Tryan is quite _comme il faw_, to use a French
expression.’
‘I should like to tell him better nor use fine cambric i’ this place,
where there’s such washing, it’s a shame to be seen,’ said Mrs. Linnet;
‘he’ll get ’em tore to pieces. Good lawn ’ud be far better. I saw what a
colour his linen looked at the sacrament last Sunday. Mary’s making him a
black silk case to hold his bands, but I told her she’d more need wash
’em for him.’
‘O mother!’ said Rebecca, with solemn severity, ‘pray don’t think of
pocket-handkerchiefs and linen, when we are talking of such a man. And at
this moment, too, when he is perhaps having to bear a heavy blow. We have
more need to help him by prayer, as Aaron and Hur held up the hands of
Moses. We don’t know but wickedness may have triumphed, and Mr.
Prendergast may have consented to forbid the lecture. There have been
dispensations quite as mysterious, and Satan is evidently putting forth
all his strength to resist the entrance of the Gospel into Milby Church.’
‘You niver spoke a truer word than that, my dear,’ said Mrs. Linnet, who
accepted all religious phrases, but was extremely rationalistic in her
interpretation; ‘for if iver Old Harry appeared in a human form, it’s
that Dempster. It was all through him as we got cheated out o’ Pye’s
Croft, making out as the title wasn’t good. Such lawyer’s villany! As if
paying good money wasn’t title enough to anything. If your father as is
dead and gone had been worthy to know it! But he’ll have a fall some day,
Dempster will. Mark my words.’
‘Ah, out of his carriage, you mean,’ said Miss Pratt, who, in the
movement occasioned by the clearing of the table, had lost the first part
of Mrs. Linnet’s speech. ‘It certainly is alarming to see him driving
home from Rotherby, flogging his galloping horse like a madman. My
brother has often said he expected every Thursday evening to be called in
to set some of Dempster’s bones; but I suppose he may drop that
expectation now, for we are given to understand from good authority that
he has forbidden his wife to call my brother in again either to herself
or her mother. He swears no Tryanite doctor shall attend his family. I
have reason to believe that Pilgrim was called in to Mrs. Dempster’s
mother the other day.’
‘Poor Mrs. Raynor! she’s glad to do anything for the sake of peace and
quietness,’ said Mrs. Pettifer; ‘but it’s no trifle at her time of life
to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.’
‘What trouble that poor woman has to bear in her old age!’ said Mary
Linnet, ‘to see her daughter leading such a life!--an only daughter, too,
that she doats on.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘We, of course, know more about it than
most people, my brother having attended the family so many years. For my
part, I never thought well of the marriage; and I endeavoured to dissuade
my brother when Mrs. Raynor asked him to give Janet away at the wedding.
‘If you will take my advice, Richard,’ I said, ‘you will have nothing to
do with that marriage.’ And he has seen the justice of my opinion since.
Mrs. Raynor herself was against the connection at first; but she always
spoiled Janet, and I fear, too, she was won over by a foolish pride in
having her daughter marry a professional man. I fear it was so. No one
but myself, I think, foresaw the extent of the evil.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘Janet had nothing to look forward to but
being a governess; and it was hard for Mrs. Raynor to have to work at
millinering--a woman well brought up, and her husband a man who held his
head as high as any man in Thurston. And it isn’t everybody that sees
everything fifteen years beforehand. Robert Dempster was the cleverest
man in Milby; and there weren’t many young men fit to talk to Janet.’
‘It is a thousand pities,’ said Miss Pratt, choosing to ignore Mrs.
Pettifer’s slight sarcasm, ‘for I certainly did consider Janet Raynor the
most promising young woman of my acquaintance;--a little too much lifted
up, perhaps, by her superior education, and too much given to satire, but
able to express herself very well indeed about any book I recommended to
her perusal. There is no young woman in Milby now who can be compared
with what Janet was when she was married, either in mind or person. I
consider Miss Landor far, far below her. Indeed, I cannot say much for
the mental superiority of the young ladies in our first families. They
are superficial--very superficial.’
‘She made the handsomest bride that ever came out of Milby church, too,’
said Mrs. Pettifer. ‘Such a very fine figure! And it showed off her white
poplin so well. And what a pretty smile Janet always had! Poor thing, she
keeps that now for all her old friends. I never see her but she has
something pretty to say to me--living in the same street, you know, I
can’t help seeing her often, though I’ve never been to the house since
Dempster broke out on me in one of his drunken fits. She comes to me
sometimes, poor thing, looking so strange, anybody passing her in the
street may see plain enough what’s the matter; but she’s always got some
little good-natured plan in her head for all that. Only last night I met
her, I saw five yards off she wasn’t fit to be out; but she had a basin
in her hand, full of something she was carrying to Sally Martin, the
deformed girl that’s in a consumption.’
‘But she is just as bitter against Mr. Tryan as her husband is, I
understand,’ said Rebecca. ‘Her heart is very much set against the truth,
for I understand she bought Mr. Tryan’s sermons on purpose to ridicule
them to Mrs. Crewe.’
‘Well, poor thing,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘you know she stands up for
everything her husband says and does. She never will admit to anybody
that he is not a good husband.’
‘That is her pride,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘She married him in opposition to
the advice of her best friends, and now she is not willing to admit that
she was wrong. Why, even to my brother--and a medical attendant, you
know, can hardly fail to be acquainted with family secrets--she has
always pretended to have the highest respect for her husband’s qualities.
Poor Mrs. Raynor, however, is very well aware that every one knows the
real state of things. Latterly, she has not even avoided the subject with
me. The very last time I called on her she said, “Have you been to see my
poor daughter?” and burst into tears.’
‘Pride or no pride,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘I shall always stand up for
Janet Dempster. She sat up with me night after night when I had that
attack of rheumatic fever six years ago. There’s great excuses for her.
When a woman can’t think of her husband coming home without trembling,
it’s enough to make her drink something to blunt her feelings--and no
children either, to keep her from it. You and me might do the same, if we
were in her place.’
‘Speak for yourself, Mrs. Pettifer,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘Under no
circumstances can I imagine myself resorting to a practice so degrading.
A woman should find support in her own strength of mind.’
‘I think,’ said Rebecca, who considered Miss Pratt still very blind in
spiritual things, notwithstanding her assumption of enlightenment, ‘she
will find poor support if she trusts only to her own strength. She must
seek aid elsewhere than in herself.’
Happily the removal of the tea-things just then created a little
confusion, which aided Miss Pratt to repress her resentment at
Rebecca’s presumption in correcting her--a person like Rebecca Linnet!
who six months ago was as flighty and vain a woman as Miss Pratt had
ever known--so very unconscious of her unfortunate person!
The ladies had scarcely been seated at their work another hour, when the
sun was sinking, and the clouds that flecked the sky to the very zenith
were every moment taking on a brighter gold. The gate of the little
garden opened, and Miss Linnet, seated at her small table near the
window, saw Mr. Tryan enter.
‘There is Mr. Tryan,’ she said, and her pale cheek was lighted up with a
little blush that would have made her look more attractive to almost any
one except Miss Eliza Pratt, whose fine grey eyes allowed few things to
escape her silent observation. ‘Mary Linnet gets more and more in love
with Mr. Tryan,’ thought Miss Eliza; ‘it is really pitiable to see such
feelings in a woman of her age, with those old-maidish little ringlets. I
daresay she flatters herself Mr. Tryan may fall in love with her, because
he makes her useful among the poor.’ At the same time, Miss Eliza, as she
bent her handsome head and large cannon curls with apparent calmness over
her work, felt a considerable internal flutter when she heard the knock
at the door. Rebecca had less self-command. She felt too much agitated to
go on with her pasting, and clutched the leg of the table to counteract
the trembling in her hands.
Poor women’s hearts! Heaven forbid that I should laugh at you, and make
cheap jests on your susceptibility towards the clerical sex, as if it had
nothing deeper or more lovely in it than the mere vulgar angling for a
husband. Even in these enlightened days, many a curate who, considered
abstractedly, is nothing more than a sleek bimanous animal in a white
neckcloth, with views more or less Anglican, and furtively addicted to
the flute, is adored by a girl who has coarse brothers, or by a solitary
woman who would like to be a helpmate in good works beyond her own means,
simply because he seems to them the model of refinement and of public
usefulness. What wonder, then, that in Milby society, such as I have told
you it was a very long while ago, a zealous evangelical clergyman, aged
thirty-three, called forth all the little agitations that belong to the
divine necessity of loving, implanted in the Miss Linnets, with their
seven or eight lustrums and their unfashionable ringlets, no less than in
Miss Eliza Pratt, with her youthful bloom and her ample cannon curls.
But Mr. Tryan has entered the room, and the strange light from the golden
sky falling on his light-brown hair, which is brushed high up round his
head, makes it look almost like an aureole. His grey eyes, too, shine
with unwonted brilliancy this evening. They were not remarkable eyes, but
they accorded completely in their changing light with the changing
expression of his person, which indicated the paradoxical character often
observable in a large-limbed sanguine blond; at once mild and irritable,
gentle and overbearing, indolent and resolute, self-conscious and dreamy.
Except that the well-filled lips had something of the artificially
compressed look which is often the sign of a struggle to keep the dragon
undermost, and that the complexion was rather pallid, giving the idea of
imperfect health, Mr. Tryan’s face in repose was that of an ordinary
whiskerless blond, and it seemed difficult to refer a certain air of
distinction about him to anything in particular, unless it were his
delicate hands and well-shapen feet.
It was a great anomaly to the Milby mind that a canting evangelical
parson, who would take tea with tradespeople, and make friends of vulgar
women like the Linnets, should have so much the air of a gentleman, and
be so little like the splay-footed Mr. Stickney of Salem, to whom he
approximated so closely in doctrine. And this want of correspondence
between the physique and the creed had excited no less surprise in the
larger town of Laxeter, where Mr. Tryan had formerly held a curacy; for
of the two other Low Church clergymen in the neighbourhood, one was a
Welshman of globose figure and unctuous complexion, and the other a man
of atrabiliar aspect, with lank black hair, and a redundance of limp
cravat--in fact, the sort of thing you might expect in men who
distributed the publications of the Religious Tract Society, and
introduced Dissenting hymns into the Church.
Mr. Tryan shook hands with Mrs. Linnet, bowed with rather a preoccupied
air to the other ladies, and seated himself in the large horse-hair
easy-chair which had been drawn forward for him, while the ladies ceased
from their work, and fixed their eyes on him, awaiting the news he had
to tell them.
‘It seems,’ he began, in a low and silvery tone, ‘I need a lesson of
patience; there has been something wrong in my thought or action about
this evening lecture. I have been too much bent on doing good to Milby
after my own plan--too reliant on my own wisdom.’
Mr. Tryan paused. He was struggling against inward irritation.
‘The delegates are come back, then?’ ‘Has Mr. Prendergast given way?’
‘Has Dempster succeeded?’--were the eager questions of three ladies at
once.
‘Yes; the town is in an uproar. As we were sitting in Mr. Landor’s
drawing-room we heard a loud cheering, and presently Mr. Thrupp, the
clerk at the bank, who had been waiting at the Red Lion to hear the
result, came to let us know. He said Dempster had been making a speech to
the mob out the window. They were distributing drink to the people, and
hoisting placards in great letters,--“Down with the Tryanites!” “Down
with cant!” They had a hideous caricature of me being tripped-up and
pitched head-foremost out of the pulpit. Good old Mr. Landor would insist
on sending me round in the carriage; he thought I should not be safe from
the mob; but I got down at the Crossways. The row was evidently
preconcerted by Dempster before he set out. He made sure of succeeding.’
Mr. Tryan’s utterance had been getting rather louder and more rapid in
the course of this speech, and he now added, in the energetic
chest-voice, which, both in and out of the pulpit, alternated
continually with his more silvery notes,--‘But his triumph will be a
short one. If he thinks he can intimidate me by obloquy or threats, he
has mistaken the man he has to deal with. Mr. Dempster and his
colleagues will find themselves checkmated after all. Mr. Prendergast
has been false to his own conscience in this business. He knows as well
as I do that he is throwing away the souls of the people by leaving
things as they are in the parish. But I shall appeal to the Bishop--I am
confident of his sympathy.’
‘The Bishop will be coming shortly, I suppose,’ said Miss Pratt, ‘to hold
a confirmation?’
‘Yes; but I shall write to him at once, and lay the case before him.
Indeed, I must hurry away now, for I have many matters to attend to. You,
ladies, have been kindly helping me with your labours, I see,’ continued
Mr. Tryan, politely, glancing at the canvass-covered books as he rose
from his seat. Then, turning to Mary Linnet: ‘Our library is really
getting on, I think. You and your sister have quite a heavy task of
distribution now.’
Poor Rebecca felt it very hard to bear that Mr. Tryan did not turn
towards her too. If he knew how much she entered into his feelings about
the lecture, and the interest she took in the library. Well! perhaps it
was her lot to be overlooked--and it might be a token of mercy. Even a
good man might not always know the heart that was most with him. But the
next moment poor Mary had a pang, when Mr. Tryan turned to Miss Eliza
Pratt, and the preoccupied expression of his face melted into that
beaming timidity with which a man almost always addresses a pretty woman.
‘I have to thank you, too, Miss Eliza, for seconding me so well in your
visits to Joseph Mercer. The old man tells me how precious he finds your
reading to him, now he is no longer able to go to church.’
Miss Eliza only answered by a blush, which made her look all the
handsomer, but her aunt said,--‘Yes, Mr. Tryan, I have ever inculcated on
my dear Eliza the importance of spending her leisure in being useful to
her fellow-creatures. Your example and instruction have been quite in the
spirit of the system which I have always pursued, though we are indebted
to you for a clearer view of the motives that should actuate us in our
pursuit of good works. Not that I can accuse myself of having ever had a
self-righteous spirit, but my humility was rather instinctive than based
on a firm ground of doctrinal knowledge, such as you so admirably impart
to us.’
Mrs. Linnet’s usual entreaty that Mr. Tryan would ‘have something--some
wine and water and a biscuit’, was just here a welcome relief from the
necessity of answering Miss Pratt’s oration.
‘Not anything, my dear Mrs. Linnet, thank you. You forget what a
Rechabite I am. By the by, when I went this morning to see a poor girl in
Butcher’s Lane, whom I had heard of as being in a consumption, I found
Mrs. Dempster there. I had often met her in the street, but did not know
it was Mrs. Dempster. It seems she goes among the poor a good deal. She
is really an interesting-looking woman. I was quite surprised, for I have
heard the worst account of her habits--that she is almost as bad as her
husband. She went out hastily as soon as I entered. But’ (apologetically)
‘I am keeping you all standing, and I must really hurry away. Mrs.
Pettifer, I have not had the pleasure of calling on you for some time; I
shall take an early opportunity of going your way. Good evening, good
evening.’