IN THE PARISH CHURCH.
THE Sunday evening service at Little Yafford parish church was as fashionable in its own particular way as an Italian opera in June. Everybody met everybody else there. The psalms were chanted very fairly, the anthem was always a feature, the prettiest hymns were sung, and the sermon, whether preached by the vicar or curate, seemed to have a peculiar life and fervour in it that harmonized with the more exalted feelings of the flock. The cold realism of Sunday morning gave place on Sunday evening to a vague enthusiasm, a spiritualized ardour. Of course there were people for whom that lofty liturgy soared too high—uncultured souls which demanded to be fed on coarser diet,—but these were outside the pale, and generally wore a style of bonnet which would have been a blot on the subdued beauty of the parish church, with its noble nave, long narrow aisles, carved rood screen, and waggon roof. These barbarians worshipped in a queer little chapel in High Street, to which they descended a step or two from the level of the pavement, and in which tabernacle they might be heard singing their own particular hymns with the utmost strength of their untrained voices, as the Church of England people went by, the Dissenters assembling half an hour earlier than their conforming brethren, and generally prolonging their service half an hour later.
It was a pretty scene, that parish church of Little Yafford, in the late October evening. The clusters of wax candles in the brazen branches threw just enough light on column and arch to leave the greater part of the building in shadow. The rich colouring about the altar made a glow of splendour at the end of the gray stone chancel. The old oak pews, with their quaintly carved doors, reflected the light redly on bosses that took every shape, from the graceful fleur-de-lys to the dog-faced demon or blunt-nosed cherub. The font in its distant corner gleamed whitely below a cover of crimson cloth. Crimson cushions in many of the pews, and the dark green and gold adornment of pulpit and reading desk, the old brass lectern, the new brass candelabra, brightened the sombre stone and dark brown oak, and made up in some wise for the loss of the stained glories of the chancel window, dull and dead at this hour.
The people came in quietly by twos and threes, and took their places with the usual hushed and solemn air; then the throng thickened, and the pews began to fill; and then the bells rang more slowly, and there came a plaintive strain of melody from the organ, soft and subdued as a whisper. This swelled presently into a voluntary, and became a triumphant peal as the vestry door opened and the surpliced choir entered the chancel, two and two, the small boys first, and the rather clumsy-looking men bringing up the rear. After these followed Cyril Culverhouse, looking tall in his white raiment and crimson hood, and lastly the Vicar, a broad and dignified figure that seemed to have been intended for lawn sleeves and a bishop’s gown.
A girl in one of the pews directly facing the chancel looked up from her open book as Cyril took his place in the reading desk, and then looked quickly down again, as if the sight were too terrible. That swift shy look, and sudden fall of the eyelids told a secret old as Time himself. Mr. Culverhouse was something more than the curate of Little Yafford to that one member of his congregation. She was a girl of striking appearance, richly but carelessly dressed in velvet and silk, with feathers in her bonnet, according to the fashion for that year made and provided. She had one of those brilliant Southern complexions—that rich mingling of carnation and palest olive—which are alone sufficient for good looks; but in her case this charm was heightened by the splendour of dark Italian eyes, and the warm brown of rippling hair. Her brow was broad but low, her nose nondescript, her lips firmly moulded, her teeth faultless, her eyebrows strongly marked, and of a darker brown than her hair.
‘I am always afraid of Trix’s eyebrows,’ Isabella Scratchell, the young lady’s bosom friend, used to say. ‘They remind me of thundery weather.’
Miss Scratchell was sitting next her friend in the Harefield pew to-night. She was a small slim person, distinguished by a pink and white complexion, and insignificant blunt features of the Dresden china type. There was a Scratchell pew in one of the aisles, but Beatrix liked to have her friend with her, and the Water House pew was in the more aristocratic and fashionable situation, advantages peculiarly agreeable to Isabella Scratchell.
Mr. Harefield assisted at the Sunday morning service half a dozen times or so in a quarter, just often enough to escape the stigma of absolute indifference or infidelity. His handsome Italian wife had been a Roman Catholic, and there was a feeling among the more bigoted section of society in Little Yafford that Mr. Harefield was generally lax in his ideas, like the Romans when they began to import foreign gods, and that he would not have minded worshipping Isis and Osiris if those deities had come in his way.
‘He has travelled so much, you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Piper, of the Park, to Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘and having married a foreigner, you see, one can hardly expect him to be quite correct in his ideas. A sad education for that poor girl. I am told he has taught her Greek, and hasn’t allowed her to learn music. But I think that can hardly be true.’
‘It is actually true about the music,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, reflecting her friend’s look of horror. ‘He hates the piano, and he had Mrs. Harefield’s old-fashioned Broadwood sent up to the lumber-room in the tower. But there is no use in thwarting a natural gift. That poor child has taught herself by ear, and plays and sings very sweetly. She spends hours up in that old turret room—in the coldest weather—wrapped in a shawl, picking out our church music. Mrs. Harefield had an extraordinary gift, you know.’
‘I never saw Mrs. Harefield. She died before Ebenezer took the Park.’
‘Yes, of course. I ought to have remembered. She was a lovely woman; and I believe that Christian Harefield was passionately fond of her, in his way; but it was not a happy marriage; there were quarrels. I did my best, but not successfully. There is an unconquerable severity and coldness in that man’s nature; and his wife had one of those ardent, impetuous dispositions,—you know what I mean.’
‘Exactly,’ chimed in the visitor, whose mind had wandered a little, and who was wondering when the Dulcimers would have a new drawing-room carpet. The present one was threadbare, and had been ingeniously turned and pieced, like a puzzle, odd bits of brighter colour fitting in here and there rather too obviously. That foolish Mr. Dulcimer spent all his money on books, and never improved his furniture, whereas in Mrs. Piper’s ideal house there was no litter of books and pamphlets, but the last fashion in carpets and tapestry table-covers, cabriole chairs and sofas, and the newest kinds of antimacassars.
Although Mr. Harefield was not often to be seen in the parish church himself, he had no objection to his daughter’s frequent attendance there; and the church and the vicarage afforded the only variety in the dullest life that a well-born heiress ever led. The music was a delight to her sensitive ear; for the organist was a fine musician, and the organ was a noble instrument, which had been presented to Little Yafford in the reign of William the Third, by a city merchant who had been born in the village, and who came back there to die after having made his fortune in hides and tallow. His monument, in coloured and gilded marbles, after the florid style of the period, adorned the chancel, and recorded his public and private virtues, and his munificent gift of the organ, in a long Latin epitaph, with a great many adjectives ending in issimus.
The Scratchells had a comfortable old house in the village, but Miss Harefield was not allowed to visit there, although Isabella was her only friend and companion. Isabella might come to the Water House as often as she liked, but it was an understood thing that Beatrix was not to go to Mr. Scratchell’s, a distinction which Mrs. Scratchell and Isabella’s brothers and sisters resented as invidious.
‘We are not good enough for the heiress,’ said Clementina Scratchell, sarcastically.
‘She’s the most stuck-up young woman I ever saw,’ said Bertie, the eldest son, a sandy-complexioned, pug-nosed youth, who had been christened Herbert, but who had more the air of a Samuel or a Thomas.
Such remarks as these, if overheard, always brought down the paternal wrath upon the utterer. Even Mrs. Scratchell would remark mildly that poor people must not quarrel with their bread and butter, and that Mr. Harefield was a very good client to father, and that it was very kind of Miss Harefield to be so fond of Bella, although she did look down upon the others, which might be a little wounding to one’s feelings, but poor people must not be proud.
This fact of their poverty had always been kept before the eyes of the young Scratchells. It encountered them at every turn. If the boys tore the knees of their trousers in forbidden climbing of trees, they were reminded mournfully by a desponding mother that their parents were hard-working people, and that these destructive habits were a direct wrong to those toil-worn bread-winners.
‘It isn’t as if your father began life with a fortune, Bertie,’ Mrs. Scratchell would say. ‘He has to work for every sixpence, and you ought to have thought of that before you climbed the mulberry tree.’
It was in all things alike. The Scratchells were never permitted to make any mistake as to their place in the social scale. It was to be a subordinate place always. They were to work for their bread, as their father had done before them, as their mother worked daily, from sunrise to sunset, in homely drudgery that made no effect or impression upon the world, and left nothing behind when life was done, not so much as an embroidered chair cover, or a thin volume of indifferent verses, to be admired by the next generation. They were to work, these young Scratchells. Their education was not given to them for its own sake—on the sweetness and light principle—but as a preparation for a laborious career. Herbert was to be apprenticed to Mr. Pontorson, the surveyor at Great Yafford. Adolphus—poor Mrs. Scratchell had insisted upon giving her children the cheap luxury of fine names—was promised a clerkship in a factory. Isabella was already earning a salary as morning governess to the little Pipers at Yafford Park. It was not an onerous engagement, and left her afternoons free. Mr. Scratchell thought she ought to get another engagement to fill up her afternoons, but as yet Isabella had contrived to avoid this double labour. She was her father’s favourite, and was believed to have great influence over him. It was she who was always charged with the task of imparting any disagreeable intelligence to him, such as the kitchen boiler having cracked, the supply of coals being nearly run out, or Adolphus having broken ‘another window.’ The previous fracture on this wretched youth’s part was always so recent as to exaggerate the iniquity of the present offence.
It was scarcely strange, perhaps, if from this Spartan training the little Scratchells grew up with the idea that poverty was life’s chief evil. Just as the Stoics believed virtue to be the only good, the young Scratchells believed want of money to be the only ill.
‘Ah, my dears, a fat sorrow is better than a lean sorrow,’ Mrs. Scratchell remarked, plaintively, when she heard of the afflictions of her wealthier neighbours.
She could not bring herself even to pity her husband’s patron, Mr. Harefield, who was supposed to have had his heart broken by the untimely death of his handsome wife. It seemed to her impossible that so rich a man, surrounded with all the good things of this life, could be an object for compassion.
This close acquaintance with necessity had not endeared that stern goddess’s countenance to Isabella. She had a secret hankering after the good things of this life; and to her mind Beatrix Harefield, whose solitary existence was for most people a subject of pity, was a person to be envied. Had she not a fine old house to live in, every room in which was like a picture, horses and carriages at her disposal, servants to wait upon her, and an unlimited supply of pocket-money? It was a dull life, of course, but Mr. Harefield would die before very long, no doubt, and take his gloominess to a more appropriate habitation, and then Beatrix would be the richest woman in the neighbourhood, free to drain the cup of pleasure to the lees.
Ten years ago, when Beatrix was a tall, thin-legged child in a short black frock, recovering slowly from a severe attack of whooping-cough, the family doctor ventured to call attention to the exceeding solitariness of her life, and to suggest that some juvenile companionship should be procured for her. It was less than a year after Mrs. Harefield’s death, and the master of the Water House wore an air of settled gloom which made him, in the minds of his fellow-men, somewhat unapproachable. The doctor made his suggestion timidly. He was only the family practitioner of Little Yafford, and was much humbler in his manners and pretensions than the bakers and butchers of that settlement; for those traders knew that people must have bread and meat always, while epidemics, accidents, and chronic diseases were subject to periods of dulness, sorely depressing to the faculty. If he had been Dr. Fawcus, the consulting physician of Great Yafford, he would have ordered playfellows for Miss Harefield with as off-hand an air as he ordered boiled chicken and barley water. But Mr. Namby made the suggestion tentatively, quite prepared to withdraw it if it were ill received.
‘The child seems dull, certainly,’ said Mr. Harefield. ‘She doesn’t run, or skip, or scream, like the general run of children. I have thought it an advantage; but I suppose, as you say, it is a sign of feebleness of constitution.’
‘I think that anything which would enliven her spirits might conduce to her recovery,’ replied the doctor. ‘She doesn’t gain strength as fast as I should wish.’
‘Really!’ said Mr. Harefield, with a far-off look, as if he were talking of somebody at the Antipodes. ‘Well, if you think it wise, we must get her a playfellow. I have received no visitors, as you know, since my wife’s death. In my best days I always considered society more or less a bore, and I could not endure to have people about me now. But we must get a playfellow for the child. Have you a girl that would do?’
The surgeon blushed. What an opening it might have been for his daughter, had she been old enough! Unhappily she was still in her cradle. He explained this to Mr. Harefield.
‘My agent, Scratchell, has a little girl, I believe.’
‘He has several.’
‘One is quite enough,’ said Mr. Harefield. ‘I’ll tell him to send one of his girls to play with Beatrix.’
Writing to his agent on some business matter that evening, Christian Harefield added this postscript,—
‘Oblige me by sending the quietest of your girls to play with my daughter every afternoon at three.’
The request was somewhat curtly put, but the Scratchells saw in it the opening of a shining path that led to the temple of fortune. From that hour Isabella was exalted above all her sisters and brothers. She was like Joseph with his coat of many colours. All the other sheaves bowed down to her sheaf. She had better raiment than the others, that she might be presentable at the Water House. She never had her boots mended more than once. After the second mending they were passed on to Clementina, whether they fitted or not. Clementina protested piteously.
Beatrix received her new companion, and absolutely her first playfellow, with open arms, and a heart overflowing with love that had run more or less to waste hitherto, or had been squandered on ponies, dogs, and guinea-pigs. Miss Scales, the governess, was not lovable. One might as well have tried to love the Druid stones on the moor above Little Yafford. Christian Harefield wrapped himself in gloom as in a mantle, and lived apart from all the world. So Isabella’s coming was like the beginning of a new life for Beatrix. She was enraptured with this little fair-haired girl, who knew how to play at all manner of nice games which Beatrix had never heard of, and which Miss Scales condemned as vulgar. Happily Isabella had been so well drilled in the needy, careful home, that she behaved with a propriety in which even Miss Scales could find no flaw. When questioned by Mr. Harefield, the governess reported favourably, though with a certain condescending reserve, of the young guest, and, from coming for an hour or two every afternoon, Isabella came almost to live at the Water House, and to receive a share of Miss Scales valuable instructions, that lady’s acquirements being of a solid and unornamental character which Mr. Harefield approved.
‘I shall have your girl carefully educated,’ said Christian Harefield to his man of business. ‘I am bound to make some return for her services as my daughter’s companion. But if you want her taught music and dancing, you’ll have to get that done elsewhere. My girl learns neither.’
As well as these educational advantages Isabella received other benefits which her youthful mind better appreciated, in the occasional gift of a silk frock or a warm winter jacket, purchased for her by Miss Scales at Mr. Harefield’s desire; and when Beatrix grew up and had plenty of pocket-money, she was always giving Bella presents.
‘It’s like having a fairy godmother,’ said Flora, the third of the Scratchell daughters, with a pang of envy.
There sat the two girls in the Water House pew this October evening, everybody in the parish church knowing their history, and thinking it a very pretty trait of character in Mr. Harefield’s daughter that she should be so fond of her humble friend Bella; for it must be understood that Mr. Scratchell, never having been able to struggle out of the morass of poverty or to keep more than one maid-servant, hardly took his full professional rank in the village, or was even regarded as a gentleman by Act of Parliament.
It was a recognised fact that without Mr. Harefield’s business, the collection of rents, and drawing up of leases, and ejection of troublesome tenants, and so on, the Scratchells could hardly have gone on existing, outside the workhouse, the solicitor’s practice, over and above this agency, being of the pettiest and most desultory order.
Bella’s pretty little Dresden china face was bent over her book as the choir and clergy came filing in. But though Bella’s head was gracefully bent, she gave a little upward glance under her auburn eyelashes, and contrived to see that look in Beatrix’s face which was in itself the beginning of a history. And then the service began, and both girls seemed absorbed in their devotions, while Mrs. Dulcimer, contemplating them benignantly from the vicarage pew, thought what a pretty pair they made, and wondered whom she could pitch upon as a husband for Bella. The poor little thing ought to be married. She was not a great heiress like Beatrix, but it was not the less incumbent upon some good-natured friend to find her a husband—nay, it was a Christian duty to do so. Matrimony would be the poor child’s only escape from straitened circumstances and a life of toil. Everybody knew what a struggle these poor Scratchells had to make for the bare privilege of living.
‘She’s rather pretty, and certainly graceful,’ mused Mrs. Dulcimer, while one of the wicked kings of Israel was misconducting himself.
Even a clergyman’s wife’s mind will occasionally wander, though her husband may be reading the lesson.
‘I wish I could think of some one to suit her,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer to herself.
And then it chanced that her glance roamed absently to the reading-desk, where Cyril’s crisp brown hair and strongly marked brow showed above the open Prayer-book.
‘The very man!’ Mrs. Dulcimer ejaculated inwardly, in an ecstasy of good nature.
It is so delightful to feel one’s self the providence of one’s neighbours. Poor Mrs. Dulcimer’s mind was distracted during the rest of the service. This notion about Cyril was one of those splendid ideas which take hold of the female mind with over-mastering power, like a brilliant scheme for turning a silk dress, or making up last year’s exploded bonnet into the latest fashionable shape for this year. Vainly did the busy soul try to pin her mind to the Prayer-book. She could not get her thoughts away from the suitability of a match between Cyril and Bella. There was a remarkable fitness about it. Neither of them had any money of their own. That made it so nice. They couldn’t feel under any obligation to each other. Cyril would, of course, get on well in the church. People always did who were as earnest and well connected as Cyril Culverhouse. And then what an admirable wife Bella would make for a poor man—a girl who had been brought up to pinch, and contrive, and deny herself, and make sixpence do the work of a shilling! It never occurred to Mrs. Dulcimer that this long apprenticeship to self-denial might have induced in Bella a craving for the good things of this life, and an ardent desire for the opportunity of self-indulgence.
By the time Cyril went up into the pulpit to preach his sermon, Mrs. Dulcimer had married him to Isabella, and settled them in a modest but comfortable living, with the prettiest and most rustic of vicarages, where the housemaid’s pantry would afford ample scope for Isabella’s domestic talents, while the ignorance of an agricultural parish would give full play to Cyril’s energy and earnestness.
Cyril Culverhouse preached an admirable sermon. He had that gift of clear and concise language, short sentences, bold and distinct expression, appropriate metaphor, and strong colouring, which makes certain books in the English language stand out from all other writing with a force and power that command the admiration alike of the cultured and uncultured reader. He had not the subtlety, finesse, and erudition of his Vicar, who preached for the most part to please his own fancy, and very often over the heads of his congregation. Cyril’s earnestness made every sermon an exhortation, a call to repentance and holy living. It was hardly possible to hear him and not be moved by him. It would have been sheer stony-heartedness in his hearers to sit there and listen to him and make no resolve to live better, and be touched by no pang of compunction for past errors.
Beatrix listened with all her soul in her eyes. Once and once only Cyril’s large gaze, sweeping the mass of faces, caught that upward look of the dark eyes. It seemed to him to take away his breath for a moment, and checked the progress of a vigorous peroration. He faltered, substituted a word, recovered himself in an instant, and went on; and no one knew how that one little look had moved him.
The clock struck eight as the congregation came trooping out of the church, with much greeting of neighbours in the darkness just outside the old stone porch. Mrs. Dulcimer seized upon the two girls, as they were going away, with a sober-looking man-servant, in a dark livery, in attendance on the heiress.
‘You are not going home, Trix,’ cried the Vicar’s wife. ‘You and Bella must come to the Vicarage to supper. It’s an age since I’ve seen you.’
‘Dear Mrs. Dulcimer, I spent the day with you only last Tuesday! I am quite ashamed of coming so often!’
‘You foolish child, you know it is my delight to have you. And Bella must come to-night. I insist on Bella’s coming too.’
This was said with unconscious condescension. It was, of course, a grand thing for Miss Scratchell to be asked to supper at the Vicarage.
‘Papa expects me to go straight home,’ said Beatrix, evidently anxious to accept the invitation.
‘My love, you know your papa never expects anything from you. You are quite your own mistress. Parker,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, wheeling suddenly and addressing herself to the footman, ‘you will be good enough to tell your master, with my compliments, that I am taking Miss Harefield to the Vicarage for supper, and that you are to come for her at ten o’clock. You understand, Parker, at ten; and you can take a glass of ale in the Vicarage kitchen while Miss Harefield puts on her bonnet.’
Mrs. Dulcimer always went into details, and overflowed in small acts of good nature to the inferior classes.