THE vicarage was stilled in the quiet of the evening, the children in bed, the house at rest. It was not the beautiful and dignified old house which in England is the ideal dwelling of the gentleman parson, the ecclesiastical squire of the parish. And indeed Mr. Pennithorne was not of that order. Though there had been many jokes when he first entered upon the cure as to the resemblance between his name and that of the parish, Pennithorne of Penninghame was a purely accidental coincidence. Mr. Musgrave was the patron, but the living was not wealthy enough or important enough to form that appropriate provision for a second son which, according to the curious subordination and adaptation of public wants to family interests, has become the rule in England, unique, as are so many others. Randolph Musgrave had his rectory in one of the midland counties, in the district which was influenced by his mother’s family, where there was something more worth his acceptance; and his old tutor had got the family living. Mr. Pennithorne was not a distinguished scholar with chances of preferment through his college, and it had been considered a great thing for him when, after dragging the young Musgraves through a certain proportion of schooling and colleging, he had subsided into this quiet provision for the rest of his life. He was a clergyman’s son, with no prospects, and whatsoever glimmerings of young ambition there might have been in him, there was no coming down involved when he accepted the small rural vicarage where his heart was. We have already said that in his wildest hopes a vision of the possibility of bringing Mary Musgrave to the vicarage to share his humble circumstances with him had never entered into Mr. Pennithorne’s mind; but to be near her was something, and to be her trusted and confidential friend seemed the best that life could give him. Here he had remained ever since, being of some use to her, as he hoped, from time to time, and some comfort at least, if nothing more, in the convulsions of the family. During the first years of his incumbency, Mr. Pennithorne’s own mind had been subject to many convulsions as one suitor after another came to the Castle; but as they had all ridden away again with what grace they could after their rejection, comfort had come back. It was a curious passion, and one which we do not pretend to explain. After a while, impelled by friends, by convenience, and by the soft looks of Emily Coniston, the daughter of the clergyman in his native place, to which he had gone on a visit, he had himself found it possible to marry, without any failure of his allegiance to his visionary love; but still to this day though he had been Emily’s husband for ten years, it troubled the good vicar when any stranger came to the Castle whose society seemed specially pleasant to Miss Musgrave. He would hang about the place at such times like an alarmed hen when something threatens the brood, nor ceased to cluck and flutter his wings till the danger was over. Did he not wish her happiness? Ah, yes, and would, he thought, have given his life to procure it; but was it necessary that happiness should always be got in that one vulgar way? Marriage was well enough for the vulgar, but not for Mary. It would have been a descent from her maiden dignity, a lowering of her position. He was willing that everybody should love her and place her on a pedestal above all women; but it wounded his finest feelings to think that she too, in her turn, might love. There was no man good enough or great enough to be worthy of awakening such a sentiment in Mary Musgrave’s breast.
As is not unusual in such cases, Mr. Pennithorne, the chief inspiration of whose life was a visionary passion of the most exalted and exalting kind for a woman, had married a woman for whom no one could entertain any very exalted or impassioned feelings. Perhaps the household drudge is a natural double or attendant of the goddess. They “got on” very well together, people said, and Mr. Pen put up with his wife’s little foolishnesses and fretfulnesses, as perhaps a man could not have done whose heart was fortified by no ideal passion. Emily was a good housekeeper of the narrow sort, caring very little for comfort, and very proud of her economy; and she was a good mother of the troublesome kind, whose children are always in the foreground, always wanting something, always claiming her attention. Mr. Pen adored them, and yet he was glad when they were got to bed, when his wife could be spoken to without one child clinging to her skirts, or another breaking in upon everything with plaintive appeals to mamma. But he took it for granted that this was how it must be, and that a more lovely course of life was impracticable. One woman excepted, all women, he thought, were like this; it is thus that the dogmatisms of common opinion are formed and kept up; and what could be done but to shrug his shoulders at the inevitable, escaping from it into his study, or with a sigh into that world of the ideal where imagination is never ruffled by the incidents of common life. The children were in bed on this October night, and everything was still. The vicarage was not a handsome house, nor was it old, but merely modern, badly built, and common-place, redeemed by nothing but its garden, which was large, and gave a pretty surrounding to the place in summer. But the night had become stormy, and the wind was raving in the trees, making their close neighbourhood anything but an advantage. Mrs. Pennithorne thought it extravagant to use two sitting-rooms, so the family ate and lived in the dining-room—a dark room papered and furnished as, in the days when Mr. Pen was married, it was thought right to decorate such places, with a red flock paper of a large pattern, which relieved the black horsehair of the furniture. The room was not very large. It had a black marble mantel-shelf, with a clock upon it, and some vases of Bohemian glass, and a red and blue table-cover upon the table, about which there lingered always a certain odour of food, especially in cold weather, when the windows were closed. Mrs. Pennithorne sat between the fire and the table. She had some dressmaking in hand, which made a litter about—dark winter stuff for little Mary’s frock; and as she had no genius for this work, it was a lingering and confusing business with her, and made her less amiable than usual. The reason why her husband was there at all instead of being in his study was that the evening was cold; but it had not yet become, according to Mrs. Pen’s code, time for fires. There was one in the dining-room, for she had not been well; but to light a second so early in October was against all her traditions, and Mr. Pen had been driven out of his study, where he had been sitting in his great-coat, and now stood with his back to the fire, warming himself, poor man, in preparation for another spell of work at his sermon. He was thin, and felt the cold. It was this, she had just been saying, that had brought him, and not any regard for her loneliness—which indeed was quite true.
“No, Emily,” he said, meekly, “for I have my work to do, you know; but while I am here, I hope you are not sorry to see me. The children were rather late to-night.”
“I am glad to keep them up a little for company,” she said. “It is not so cheerful sitting here all alone, hearing the wind roaring in the trees; and my nerves are quite gone. I never used to fear anything when I was a young girl, but now I start at every sound. I don’t mean to blame you—but it is lonely sitting by one’s self after being one of a large family.”
“No doubt—no doubt,” he said, soothingly. “I suppose we gain something as years go on, but we do lose something. That must be taken for granted in life.”
“I don’t like your philosophy, Mr. Pennithorne,” said Emily; “the way you have of always making out that things have to be! I don’t see it, for my part. I think a married woman should have a great deal to cheer her up that a girl can’t have—— ”
“My dear,” he said, “perhaps I am not much—and you know the parish is my first duty; but have you not the children?—dear children they are. I do not think there can be any greater pleasure than one’s children—— ”
“You have nothing to do but enjoy them,” said Mrs Pennithorne, slightly softened; “but if you had to work and slave like me! There is never a day that I have not something to do for them; mending, or making, or darning, or something. Fathers have an easy time of it; they play with the baby now and then, take out the elder ones for a walk, and that is all. That is nothing but pleasure; but to sit for days and work one’s fingers to the bone—— ”
“I wish you would not, Emily. I have heard you say that Miss Price in the village was a very good dressmaker—— ”
“For those who can afford her,” said Mrs. Pennithorne. “But,” she added, with a better inspiration, “you make me look as if I were complaining, and I don’t want to complain. Though it is dull, William, you must allow, sitting all the evening by one’s self—— ”
“But I have to do the same,” he said, with gentle hypocrisy. “You know, Emily, if I wrote my sermon here, we should fall to talking, which no doubt is far pleasanter—but it is not duty, and duty must come before all—— ”
“There is more than one kind of duty,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, who was tearing her fingers with pins putting together two sides of Mary’s frock. While she was bending over this, the maid came into the room with a note. There was something in the “Ah!” with which he took it which made his wife raise her head. She was not jealous of Miss Musgrave, who was nearly ten years older than herself, an old maid, and beneath consideration; but she did think that William thought a great deal too much of the Castle. “What is it now?” she said pettishly. Perhaps once more—they had done it several times already—it was an invitation to dinner for Mr. Pennithorne alone. But he was so much interested in what he was reading that he did not even hear her. She sat with her scissors in her hand, and looked at him while he read the note, his face changing, his whole mind absorbed. He did not look like that when their common affairs were discussed, or the education of his children, which ought to be more interesting to him than anything else. This was other people’s business—and how it took him up! Mrs. Pennithorne was a good woman, and did her duty to her neighbours when it was very clearly indicated; but still, of course, nothing could be of such consequence as your own family, and your duty to them. And to see how he was taken up, smiling, looking as if he might be going to cry! Nothing about Johnny or Mary ever excited him so. Mrs. Pennithorne was not only vexed on her own account, but felt it to be wrong.
“Well, life is a wonderful thing,” he said suddenly. “I went to the Castle this afternoon—— ”
“You are always going to the Castle,” she said, in a fretful voice.
“—Expressly to tell Miss Musgrave how much my mind had been occupied about her brother John. You never knew him, Emily; but he was my pupil, and I was very fond of him—— ”
“You are very fond of all the family, I think,” she said, half-interested, half-aggrieved.
“Perhaps I was,” he said, with a little sigh, which, however, she did not notice; “but John particularly. He was a fine fellow, though he was so hot-headed. The other night I kept dreaming of him, all night long—over and over again.”
“That was what made you so restless, I suppose,” Mrs. Pennithorne put in, in a parenthesis. “I am sure you have plenty belonging to yourself to dream of, if you want to dream.”
“—And I went to ask if they had heard anything, smiling at myself—as she did, for being superstitious. But here is the wonderful thing: I had scarcely left, when the thing I had foreseen arrived. A carriage drew up containing John Musgrave’s children—— ”
“Did you know John Musgrave’s children? I never knew he had any children—— ”
“Nor did I, or any one!—that is the wonder of it. I felt sure something was happening to him or about him—and lo! the children arrived. It was no cleverness of mine,” said Mr. Pennithorne with gentle complacency, “but still I must say it was a wonderful coincidence. The very day!”
Mrs. Pennithorne did not make any reply. She was not interested in a coincidence which had nothing to do with her own family. If Mr. Pen had divined when Johnny was to break his arm, so that they might have been prepared for that accident! but the Musgraves had plenty of people to take care of them, and there seemed no need for a new providential agency to give them warning of unsuspected arrivals. She put some more pins into little Mary’s frock—the two sides of the little bodice never would come the same. She pulled at them, measured them, repinned them, but could not get them right.
“I have heard a great deal about John Musgrave,” she said with a pin in her mouth. “What was it he did that he had to run away?”
“My dear Emily! don’t do that, for heaven’s sake—you frighten me; and besides, it is not—pretty—it is not becoming—— ”
“I think I am old enough by this time to know what is becoming,” said Mrs. Pennithorne with some wrath, yet growing red as she took out the pins. She was conscious that it was not ladylike, and felt that this was the word her husband meant to use. “If you knew the trouble it is to get both sides the same!” she added, forgetting her resentment in vexation.
It was a troublesome job. There are some people in whose hands everything goes wrong. Mrs. Pen shed a tear or two over the refractory frock.
“My dear! I hope it is not my innocent remark—— ”
“Oh no, it is not any innocent remark. It is so troublesome. Just when I thought I had got it quite straight! But what do you know about such things? You have nothing to say to Mary’s frock. You never would notice, I believe, if she had not one to her back, or wore the same old rag year after year—— ”
“Yes, Emily, I should notice,” said Mr. Pen with some compunction; “and I am very sorry that you should have so much trouble. Send for Miss Price to-morrow, and I will pay her out of my own money. You must not take it off the house.”
“Oh, William! William!” said his wife, “who is it that will suffer if your own money, as you call it, runs out? Do you think I am so inconsiderate as only to think of what I have for the house! Isn’t it all one purse, and will it not be the children that will suffer eventually whoever pays? No, your money shall not be spent to save me trouble. What is the good of us but to take trouble?” said Mrs. Pen with heroic fortitude.
Mr. Pen sighed. Perhaps he was more conscious of the litter of dressmaking than of this fine sentiment. But anyhow he did not give any applause to the heroine. He left indeed this family subject altogether, and after a momentary pause, said, half to himself, “John Musgrave’s children! Who could have thought it! And how strange it all is—— ”
“Really, Mr. Pennithorne,” said his wife, offended, “this is too much. I don’t believe you think one half so much of your own children as of those Musgraves. What did they ever do for us?”
“They did this for us, my dear, that but for them I should not have had a home to offer you—nor a family at all,” said the vicar with a little warmth. “I might have been still travelling with boys about the world—— ”
“Oh, William, not with your talents,” said his wife, looking at him with admiration. With all her fretfulness and insensibility to those fine points of internal arrangement for which he had a half-developed, half-subdued taste, Emily had still a great admiration for her husband. Now Mary Musgrave, who was, unknown to either, her spiritual rival, had no admiration for good Mr. Pen at all. This gave the partner of his life an infinite advantage. His voice softened as he replied, shaking his head:
“Unfortunately, my love, other people do not appreciate my talents as you do.”
“That is because they don’t know you so well,” she said with flattering promptitude. Mr. Pennithorne drew a chair to the fire and sat down. It was but rarely that he received this domestic adulation; but it warmed him, and did him good.
“Ah, my dear, I fear I must not lay that flattering unction to my soul,” he said.
“You are too modest, William; I have always said you were too modest,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, returning good for evil. How little notice he had taken of her fine heroic feeling and self-abnegation! Women are more generous; she behaved very differently to him. And the fact was, he very soon began to think that old Mr. Musgrave had made use of him, and given him a very poor return. The vicarage was not much—and the Squire had never attempted to do anything more. It is sweet to be told that you are above your fate—that Providence owes you something better. He roused himself up, however, after a time out of that unwholesome state of self-complacency. “What a strange state of affairs it is, Emily,” he said. He was not in the habit of making his wife his confidant on matters that concerned the Musgraves, but in a moment of weakness his resolution was overcome. “What a painful state of affairs! Mr. Musgrave knows of the coming of these children, but he takes no notice, and whether she is to be allowed to keep them or not—— ”
“Dear me, think of having to get permission from your father at her time of life,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, with a naïve pity. “And whom did he marry, William, and what sort of person was their mother? I don’t think you ever told me that.”
“Their mother was—John’s wife; I must have told you of her. She was not the person his family wished. But that often happens, my dear. It is no sign that a man is a bad man because he may make what you may call a mistaken choice.”
“My dear William,” said Mrs. Pen, with authority, “there is nothing that shows a man’s character so much as the wife he chooses; my mother always said so. It is the best test if he is a nice feeling man or not,” the vicar’s wife said blandly, with a little conscious smile upon her face.
Mr. Pennithorne made no reply. There was something humorous in this innocent little speech, considering who the speaker was, to any one who knew. But then nobody knew; scarcely even Mr. Pennithorne himself, who at this moment was so soothed by his wife’s “appreciation,” that he felt himself the most devoted of husbands. He shook his head a little, deprecating the implied condemnation of his old pupil; for the moment he did not think of himself.
“Now that we are sitting together, and really comfortable for once in a way,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, dropping Mary’s bodice with all the pins, and drawing her chair a little nearer to the fire—“it does not happen very often—tell me, William, what it is all about, and what John Musgrave has done.”
Again the vicar shook his head. “It’s a long story,” he said, reluctantly.
“You tell things so nicely, William, I sha’n’t think it long; and think how strange it is, knowing so much about people, and yet not knowing anything. And of course I shall have to see the children. Poor little things, not to be sure of shelter in their grandfather’s house! but they will always have a friend in you.”
“They will have Mary; what can they want more if they have her?” he said suddenly, with a fervour which surprised his wife; then blushed and faltered as he caught her eye. What right had he to speak of Miss Musgrave so? Mrs. Pennithorne stared a little, but the slip did not otherwise trouble her, for she saw no reason for the exaggerated respect with which the Squire’s daughter was treated. Why should not she be called Mary—was it not her name?
“Mary, indeed! what does she know about children? But, William, I am waiting, and this is the question—What did John Musgrave do?”