Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d’église.
THERE is a little stream which flows through Middleshire which seems to reflect the spirit of that quiet county, so slow is its course, so narrow is its width. Even the roads don’t take the trouble to bridge it. They merely hump themselves slightly when they feel it tickling underneath them, and go on, vouchsafing no further notice of its existence. Yet the Drone is a local celebrity in Middleshire, and, like most local celebrities, is unknown elsewhere. The squire’s sons have lost immense trout in the Drone as it saunters through their lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the best trout rod in England. Middleshire bristles with the “best shots in England,” and the “best preachers in England,” and the cleverest men in England. The apathetic Mother country knows, according to Middleshire, “but little of her greatest men.” At present she associates her loyal county with a breed of small black pigs.
Through this favoured locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns again as if loth to leave the rich low meadow lands and clustering villages upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the gravestones of the little churchyard. On one occasion, after repeated prayers for rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar’s garden, and vindictively carried away his beehives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.
Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms, the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on saints days and G.F.S. gatherings.
About eight o’clock on this particular morning in July the Drone could hear if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley, and to a young thrush which was hurling its person like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his graveclothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river’s edge, and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.
The service ended at last, and after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it beak agape into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the churchyard — with its one melancholy Scotch fir embarrassed by its trouser of ivy — to the little gate which led into their garden.
They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He at least evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses — the maltreated, the travestied name of “gentleman.”
None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which we are told distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank heaven! the “gentleman born” frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value — the right outside.
To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley’s suspicious eye and thin compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it, as a hunted hare against a stone wall. He was unmistakably of those who who only see side issues.
Mrs. Gresley took her husband’s arm as he closed the gate. She was still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a clergyman’s wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always wearing out old finery. Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr. Gresley.
The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden looking fondly at their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small slight figure appeared on the terrace.
“James!” said Mrs. Gresley with decision. “It is your duty to speak to Hester about attending early service. If she can go out in the garden she can come to church.”
“I have spoken to her once,” said Mr. Gresley, frowning, “and though I put it before her very plainly she showed great obstinacy. Fond as I am of Hester, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that she has an arrogant and callous nature. But we must remember, my love, that Aunt Susan was most lax in all her views, and we must make allowance for Hester, who lived with her till last year. It is only natural that Hester, bred up from childhood in that worldly circle — dinner parties all through Lent, and Sunday luncheons — should have fallen through want of solid church teaching into freethinking, and ideas of her own upon religion.”
Mr. Gresley’s voice was of that peculiar metallic note which carries further than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices. Hester’s little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley’s study on the ground floor, but nevertheless she often heard confused anxious parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note which knew no cessation until objection or opposition ceased. As she came towards them, she heard with perfect distinctness what he was saying, but it did not trouble her. Hester was gifted with imagination, and imagination does not find it difficult to read by the short hand of the expressions and habitual opinions and repressions of others what they occasionally say at full length, and to which they fondly believe they are giving utterance for the first time. Mr. Gresley had said all this many times already by his manner, and it had by its vain repetitions lost its novelty. Mr. Gresley was fortunately not aware of this, for unimaginative persons believe themselves to be sealed books, as hermetically sealed as the characters of others are to themselves.
Hester was very like her brother. She had the same nose, slightly too long for her small face, the same short upper lip and light hair, only her brother’s was straight and hers was crimped, as wet sand is crimped by a placid outgoing sea. That she had an equally strong will was obvious. But there the likeness ended. Hester’s figure was slight, and she stooped a little. Hester’s eyes were very gentle, very appealing under their long curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley’s never were, gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of them sometimes, that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its very soul and all its best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester showed her age in her eyes. She was seven and twenty and appeared many years younger, until she looked at you.
Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon, adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.
Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dressmaker informed her had “to be kept down,” made a mental note for the hundredth time that Hester “laced in.”
Hester gave that impression of “finish” and sharpness of edge so rarely found among the blurred vague outlines of Englishwomen. There was nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her delicate pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender feet as she walked, her quick alert movements, everything about her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than the succés fou in black and white of the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.
“Good morning,” she said, turning back with them to the house. “Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet. And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it. Really, James, you ought............