The breakfast-table was spread in the smaller dining-room, a room
furnished with quaint old furniture like the hall, which looked out upon
nothing but the grass and trees of the garden, bounded by an old mossy
wall, as old as the house. The windows were all open, the last ray of
the morning sun slanting off the shining panes, the scent of the flowers
coming in, and all the morning freshness. Miss Susan came downstairs
full of unusual energy, notwithstanding her sleepless night. She had
decided upon something to do, which is always satisfactory to an active
mind; and though she was beyond the age at which people generally plan
long journeys with pleasure, the prick of something new inspired her and
made a stir in her veins. “People live more when they stir about,” she
said to herself, when, with a little wonder and partial amusement at
herself, she became conscious of this sensation, and took her seat at
the breakfast-table with a sense of stimulated energy which was very
pleasant.
Miss Augustine came in after her sister, with her hands folded in her
long sleeves, looking more than ever like a saint out of a painted
window. She crossed herself as she sat down. Her blue eyes seemed veiled
so far as external life went. She was the ideal nun of romance and
poetry, not the ruddy-faced, active personage who is generally to be
found under that guise in actual life. This was one of her
fast-days--and indeed most days were fast-days with her. She was her own
rule, which is always a harsher kind of restraint than any rule adapted
to common use. Her breakfast consisted of a cup of milk and a small cake
of bread. She gave her sister an abstracted kiss, but took no notice of
her lively looks. When she withdrew her hands from her sleeves a roll of
paper became visible in one of them, which she slowly opened out.
“These are the plans for the chantry, finished at last,” she said.
“Everything is ready now. You must take them to the vicar, I suppose,
Susan. I cannot argue with a worldly-minded man. I will go to the
almshouses while you are talking to him, and pray.”
“The vicar has no power in the matter,” said Miss Susan. “So long as we
are the lay rectors we can build as we please; at the chancel end at
least.”
Augustine put up her thin hands, just appearing out of the wide sleeves,
to her ears. “Susan, Susan! do not use those words, which have all our
guilt in them! Lay rectors! Lay robbers! Oh! will you ever learn that
this thought is the misery of my life?”
“My dear, we must be reasonable,” said Miss Susan. “If you like to throw
away--no, I mean to employ your money in building a chantry, I don’t
object; but we have our rights.”
“Our rights are nothing but wrongs,” said the other, shaking her head,
“unless my poor work may be accepted as an expiation. Ours is not the
guilt, and therefore, being innocent, we may make the amends.”
“I wonder where you got your doctrines from?” said Miss Susan. “They are
not Popish either, so far as I can make out; and in some things,
Austine, you are not even High Church.”
Augustine made no reply. Her attention had failed. She held the drawings
before her, which at last, after many difficulties, she had managed to
bring into existence--on paper at least. I do not think she had very
clear notions in point of doctrine. She had taken up with a visionary
mediævalism which she did not very well understand, and which she
combined unawares with many of the ordinary principles of a moderate
English Church-woman. She liked to cross herself, without meaning very
much by it, and the idea of an Austin Chantry, where service should be
said every day, “to the intention of” the Austin family, had been for
years her cherished fancy, though she would have been shocked had any
advanced Ritualists or others suggested to her that what she meant was a
daily mass for the dead. She did not mean this at all, nor did she know
very clearly what she meant, except to build a chantry, in which daily
service should be maintained forever, always with a reference to the
Austins, and making some sort of expiation, she could not have told
what, for the fundamentals in the family. Perhaps it was merely
inability of reasoning, or perhaps a disinclination to entangle herself
in doctrine at all, that made her prefer to remain in this vagueness and
confusion. She knew very well what she wanted to do, but not exactly
why.
While her sister looked at her drawings Miss Susan thought it a good
moment to reveal her own plans, with, I suppose, that yearning for some
sort of sympathy which survives even in the minds of those who have had
full experience of the difficulty or even impossibility of obtaining it.
She knew Augustine would not, probably could not, enter into her
thoughts, and I am not sure that she desired it--but yet she longed to
awaken some little interest.
“I am thinking,” she said, “of going away--for a few days.”
Augustine took no notice. She examined first the front elevation, then
the interior of the chantry. “They say it is against the law,” she
remarked after awhile, “to have a second altar; but every old chantry
has it, and without an altar the service would be imperfect. Remember
this Susan; for the vicar, they tell me, will object.”
“You don’t hear what I say, then? I am thinking of--leaving home.”
“Yes, I heard--so long as you settle this for me before you go, that it
may be begun at once. Think, Susan! it is the work of my life.”
“I will see to it,” said Miss Susan with a sigh. “You shall not be
crossed, dear, if I can manage it. But you don’t ask where I am going or
why I am going.”
“No,” said Augustine calmly; “it is no doubt about business, and
business has no share in my thoughts.”
“If it had not a share in my thoughts things would go badly with us,”
said Miss Susan, coloring with momentary impatience and self-assertion.
Then she fell back into her former tone. “I am going abroad, Austine;
does not that rouse you? I have not been abroad since we were quite
young, how many years ago?--when we went to Italy with my father--when
we were all happy together. Ah me! what a difference! Austine, you
recollect that?”
“Happy, were we?” said Augustine looking up, with a faint tinge of
color on her paleness; “no, I was never happy till I saw once for all
how wicked we were, how we deserved our troubles, and how something
might be done to make up for them. I have never really cared for
anything else.”
This she said with a slight raising of her head and an air of reality
which seldom appeared in her visionary face. It was true, though it was
so strange. Miss Susan was a much more reasonable, much more weighty
personage, but she perceived this change with a little suspicion, and
did not understand the fanciful, foolish sister whom she had loved and
petted all her life.
“My dear, we had no troubles then,” she said, with a wondering look.
“Always, always,” said Augustine, “and I never knew the reason, till I
found it out.” Then this gleam of something more than intelligence faded
all at once from her face. “I hope you will settle everything before you
go,” she said, almost querulously; “to be put off now and have to wait
would surely break my heart.”
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it, Austine. I am going--on family business.”
“If you see poor Herbert,” said Augustine, calmly, “tell him we pray for
him in the almshouses night and day. That may do him good. If I had got
my work done sooner he might have lived. Indeed, the devil sometimes
tempts me to think it is hard that just when my chantry is beginning and
continual prayer going on Herbert should die. It seems to take away the
meaning! But what am I, one poor creature, to make up, against so many
that have done wrong?”
“I am not going to Herbert, I am going to Flanders--to Bruges,” said
Miss Susan, carried away by a sense of the importance of her mission,
and always awaiting, as her right, some spark of curiosity, at least.
Augustine returned to her drawings; the waning light died out of her
face; she became again the conventional visionary, the recluse of
romance, abstracted and indifferent. “The vicar is always against me,”
she said; “you must talk to him, Susan. He wants the Browns to come into
the vacant cottage. He says they have been honest and all that; but they
are not praying people. I cannot take them in; it is praying people I
want.”
“In short, you want something for your money,” said her sister; “a
percentage, such as it is. You are more a woman of business, my dear,
than you think.”
Augustine looked at her, vaguely, startled. “I try to do for the best,”
she said. “I do not understand why people should always wish to thwart
me; what I want is their good.”
“They like their own way better than their good, or rather than what you
think is for their good,” said Miss Susan. “We all like our own way.”
“Not me, not me!” said the other, with a sigh; and she rose and crossed
herself once more. “Will you come to prayers at the almshouse, Susan?
The bell will ring presently, and it would do you good.”
“My dear, I have no time,” said the elder sister, “I have a hundred
things to do.”
Augustine turned away with a soft shake of the head. She folded her arms
into her sleeves, and glided away like a ghost. Presently her sister saw
her crossing the lawn, her gray hood thrown lightly over her head, her
long robes falling in straight, soft lines, her slim figure moving along
noiselessly. Miss Susan was the practical member of the family, and but
for her probably the Austins of Whiteladies would have died out ere now,
by sheer carelessness of their substance, and indifference to what was
going on around them; but as she watched her sister crossing the lawn, a
sense of inferiority crossed her mind. She felt herself worldly, a
pitiful creature of the earth, and wished she was as good as Augustine.
“But the house, and the farm, and the world must be kept going,” she
said, by way of relieving herself, with a mingling of humor and
compunction. It was not much her small affairs could do to make or mar
the going on of the world, but yet in small ways and great the world has
to be kept going. She went off at once to the bailiff, who was waiting
for her, feeling a pleasure in proving to herself that she was busy and
had no time, which is perhaps a more usual process of thought with the
Marthas of this world than the other plan of finding fault with the
Marys, for in their hearts most women have a feeling that the prayer is
the best.
The intimation of Miss Susan’s intended absence excited the rest of the
household much more than it had excited her sister. “Wherever are you
going to, miss?” said cook, who was as old as her mistress, and had
never changed her style of addressing her since the days when she was
young Miss Susan and played at house-keeping.
“I am going abroad,” she answered, with a little innocent pride; for to
people who live all their lives at home there is a certain grandeur in
going abroad. “You will take great care of my sister, and see that she
does not fast too much.”
It was a patriarchal household, with such a tinge of familiarity in its
dealings with its mistress, as--with servants who have passed their
lives in a house--it is seldom possible, even if desirable, to avoid.
Stevens the butler stopped open-mouthed, with a towel in his hand, to
listen, and Martha approached from the other end of the kitchen, where
she had been busy tying up and labelling cook’s newly-made preserves.
“Going abroad!” they all echoed in different keys.
“I expect you all to be doubly careful and attentive,” said Miss Susan,
“though indeed I am not going very far, and probably won’t be more than
a few days gone. But in the meantime Miss Augustine will require your
utmost care. Stevens, I am very much displeased with the way you took it
upon you to speak at dinner yesterday. It annoyed my sister extremely,
and you had no right to use so much freedom. Never let it happen again.”
Stevens was taken entirely by surprise, and stood gazing at her with the
bewildered air of a man who, seeking innocent amusement in the hearing
of news, is suddenly transfixed by an unexpected thunderbolt. “Me, mum!”
said Stevens bewildered, “I--I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It
was an unfair advantage to take.
“Precisely, you,” said Miss Susan; “what have you to do with the people
at the almshouses? Nobody expects you to be answerable for what they do
or don’t do. Never let me hear anything of the kind again.”
“Oh,” said Stevens, with a snort of suppressed offence, “it’s them! Miss
Austin, I can’t promise at no price! if I hears that old ’ag a praised
up to the skies--”
“You will simply hold your tongue,” said Miss Susan peremptorily. “What
is it to you? My sister knows her own people best.”
Upon this the two women in attendance shook their heads, and Stevens,
encouraged by this tacit support, took courage.
“She don’t, mum, she don’t,” he said; “if you heard the things they’ll
say behind her back! It makes me sick, it does, being a faithful
servant. If I don’t dare to speak up, who can? She’s imposed upon to
that degree, and made game of as your blood would run cold to see it;
and if I ain’t to say a word when I haves a chance, who can? The women
sees it even--and it’s nat’ral as I should see further than the women.”
“Then you’ll please set the women a good example by holding your
tongue,” said Miss Susan. “Once for all, recollect, all of you, Miss
Augustine shall never be crossed while I am mistress of the house. When
it goes into other hands you can do as you please.”
“Oh, laws!” said the cook, “when it comes to that, mum, none of us has
nothing to do here.”
“That is as you please, and as Mr.--as the heir pleases,” Miss Susan
said, making a pause before the last words. Her cheek colored, her blue
eyes grew warm with the new life and energy in her. She went out of the
kitchen with a certain swell of anticipated triumph in her whole person.
Mr. Farrel-Austin should soon discover that he was not to have
everything his own way. Probably she would find he had deceived the old
man at Bruges, that these poor people knew nothing about the true value
of what they were relinquishing. Curiously enough, it never occurred to
her, to lessen her exhilaration, that to leave the house of her fathers
to an old linen-draper from the Low-Countries would be little more
agreeable than to leave it to Farrel-Austin--nay, even as Everard had
suggested to her, that Farrel-Austin, as being an English gentleman, was
much more likely to do honor to the old house than a foreigner of
inferior position, and ideas altogether different from her own. She
thought nothing of this; she ignored herself, indeed, in the matter,
which was a thing she was pleased to think of afterward, and which gave
her a little consolation--that is, she thought of herself only through
Farrel-Austin, as the person most interested in, and most likely to be
gratified by, his downfall.
As the day wore on and the sun got round and blazed on the south front
of the house, she withdrew to the porch, as on the former day, and sat
there enjoying the coolness, the movement of the leaves, the soft,
almost imperceptible breeze. She was more light-hearted than on the
previous day when poor Herbert was in her mind, and when nothing but the
success of her adversary seemed possible. Now it seemed to her that a
new leaf was turned, a new chapter commenced.
Thus the day went on. In the afternoon she had one visitor, and only
one, the vicar, Mr. Gerard, who came by the north gate, as her visitors
yesterday had done, and crossed the lawn to the porch with much less
satisfaction of mind than Miss Susan had to see him coming.
“Of course you know what has brought me,” he said at once, seating
himself in a garden-chair which had been standing outside on the lawn,
and which he brought in after his first greeting. “This chantry of your
sister’s is a thing I don’t understand, and I don’t know how I can
consent to it. It is alien to all the customs of the time. It is a thing
that ought to have been built three hundred years ago, if at all. It
will be a bit of bran new Gothic, a thing I detest; and in short I don’t
understand it, nor what possible meaning a chantry can have in these
days.”
“Neither do I,” said Miss Susan smiling, “not the least in the world.”
“If it is meant for masses for the dead,” said Mr. Gerard--“some people
I know have gone as far as that--but I could not consent to it, Miss
Austin. It should have been built three hundred years ago, if at all.”
“Augustine could not have built it three hundred years ago,” said Miss
Susan, “for the best of reasons. My own opinion is, between ourselves,
that had she been born three hundred years ago she would have been a
happier woman; but neither she nor I can change that.”
“That is not the question,” said the vicar. He was a man with a fine
faculty for being annoyed. There was a longitudinal line in his forehead
between his eyes, which was continually moving, marking the passing
irritations which went and came, and his voice had a querulous tone. He
was in the way of thinking that everything that happened out of the
natural course was done to annoy him specially, and he felt it a
personal grievance that the Austin chantry had not been built in the
sixteenth century. “There might have been some sense in it then,” he
added, “and though art was low about that time, still it would have got
toned down, and been probably an ornament to the church; but a white,
staring, new thing with spick and span pinnacles! I do not see how I can
consent.”
“At all events,” said Miss Susan, showing the faintest edge of claw
under the velvet of her touch, “no one can blame you at least, which I
think is always a consolation. I have just been going over the accounts
for the restoration of the chancel, and I think you may congratulate
yourself that you have not got to pay them. Austine would kill me if she
heard me, but that is one good of a lay rector. I hope you won’t oppose
her, seriously, Mr. Gerard. It is not masses for the dead she is
thinking of. You know her crotchets. My sister has a very fine mind when
she is roused to exert it,” Miss Susan said with a little dignity, “but
it is nonsense to deny that she has crotchets, and I hope you are too
wise and kind to oppose her. The endowment will be good, and the chantry
pretty. Why, it is by Sir Gilbert Scott.”
“No, no, not Sir Gilbert himself; at least, I fear not,” said Mr.
Gerard, melting.
“One of his favorite pupils, and he has looked at it and approved. We
shall have people coming to see it from all parts of the country; and it
is Augustine’s favorite crotchet. I am sure, Mr. Gerard, you will not
seriously oppose.”
Thus it was that the vicar was taken over. He reflected afterward that
there was consolation in the view of the subject which she introduced so
cunningly, and that he could no more be found fault with for the new
chantry which the lay rector had a right to connect with his part of the
church if he chose--than he could be made to pay the bills for the
restoration of the chancel. And Miss Susan had put it to him so
delicately about her sister’s crotchets that what could a gentleman do
but yield? The longitudinal line on his forehead smoothed out
accordingly, and his tone ceased to be querulous. Yes, there was no
doubt she had crotchets, poor soul; indeed, she was half crazy, perhaps,
as the village people thought, but a good religious creature, fond of
prayers and church services, and not clever enough to go far astray in
point of doctrine. As Mr. Gerard went home, indeed, having committed
himself, he discovered a number of admirable reasons for tolerating
Augustine and her crotchets. If she sank money enough to secure an
endowment of sixty pounds a year, in order to have prayers said daily in
her chantry, as she called it, it was clear that thirty or forty from
Mr. Gerard instead of the eighty he now paid, would be quite enough for
his curate’s salary. For what could a curate want with more than, or
even so much as, a hundred pounds a year? And then the almshouses
disposed of the old people of the parish in the most comfortable way,
and on the whole, Augustine did more good than harm. Poor thing! It
would be a pity, he thought, to cross this innocent and pious creature,
who was “deficient,” but too gentle and good to be interfered with in
her crotchets. Poor Augustine, whom they all disposed of so calmly!
Perhaps it was foolish enough of her to stay alone in the little
almshouse chapel all the time that this interview was going on, praying
that God would touch the heart of His servant and render it favorable
toward her, while Miss Susan managed it all so deftly by mere sleight of
hand; but on the whole, Augustine’s idea of the world as a place where
God did move hearts for small matters as well as great, was a more
elevated one than the others. She felt quite sure when she glided
through the Summer fields, still and gray in her strange dress, that
God’s servants’ hearts had been moved to favor her, and that she might
begin her work at once.