Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  And what great events trivial chances bring about! Chances, as they are called. These “chances” are all in the hands of one Divine Ruler, who is ever shaping them to further His own wise ends. But for my going to London that time and staying there — however, I’ll not let the cat out of the bag.

  He stayed with us at Crabb Cot until the Monday, when we started for London; the Squire and Tod coming to the station to see us off. Mr. Brandon wore a nankeen suit, and had a green veil in readiness. A green veil, if you’ll believe me! The sun was under a cloud just then; had been for the best part of the morning; but if it came out fiercely — Tod threw up his arms behind old Brandon’s back, and gave me a grin and a whisper.

  “I wouldn’t be you for something, Johnny; he’ll be taken for a lunatic.”

  “And mind you take care of yourself, sir,” put in the Squire, to me. “London is a dreadful place; full of temptations; and you are but an inexperienced boy, Johnny. Be cautious and watchful, lad; don’t pick up any strange acquaintances in the streets; sharpers are on the watch to get you into conversation, and then swindle you out of all the money in your pockets. Be sure don’t forget the little hamper for Miss Deveen; and — —”

  The puffing of the engine, as we started, drowned the rest. We reached Paddington, smoothly and safely — and old Brandon did not once put on the veil. He took a cab to the Tavistock Hotel, and I another cab to Miss Deveen’s.

  For she had asked me to stay with her. Hearing of my probable visit to town through a letter of Helen Whitney’s, she, ever kind, wrote at once, saying, if I did go, I must make her house my home for the time, and that it would be a most delightful relief to the stagnation she and Miss Cattledon had been lately enjoying. Of course that was just her pleasant way of putting it.

  The house looked just as it used to look; the clustering trees of the north-western suburb were as green and grateful to the tired eye as of yore; and Miss Deveen, in grey satin, received me with the same glad smile. I knew I was a favourite of hers; she once said there were few people in the world she liked as well as she liked me — which made me feel proud and grateful. “I should leave you a fortune, Johnny,” she said to me that same day, “but that I know you have plenty of your own.” And I begged her not to do anything of the kind; not to think of it: she must know a great many people to whom her money would be a Godsend. She laughed at my earnestness, and told me I should be unselfish to the end.

  We spent a quiet evening. The grey-haired curate, Mr. Lake, who had come in the first evening I ever spent at Miss Deveen’s, years ago, came in again by invitation. “He is so modest,” she had said to me, in those long-past years, “he never comes without being invited:” and he was modest still. His hair had been chestnut-coloured once; it was half grey and half chestnut now; and his face and voice were gentle, and his manners kindly. Cattledon was displaying her most gracious behaviour, and thinnest waist; one of the roses I had brought up with the strawberries was sticking out of the body of her green silk gown. For at least half-a-dozen years she had been setting her cap at the curate — and I think she must have been endowed with supreme patience.

  “If you do not particularly want me this morning, Miss Deveen, I think I will go over to service.”

  It was the next morning, and after breakfast. Cattledon had been downstairs, giving the orders for dinner — and said this on her return. Every morning she went through the ceremony of asking whether she was wanted, before attiring herself for church.

  “Not I,” cried Miss Deveen, with a half-smile. “Go, and welcome, Jemima!”

  I stood at the window listening to the ting-tang: the bell of St. Matthew’s Church could be called nothing else: and watched her pick her way across the road, just deluged by the water-cart. She wore a striped fawn-coloured gown, cut straight up and down, which made her look all the thinner, and a straw bonnet and white veil. The church was on the other side of the wide road, lower down, but within view. Some stragglers went into it with Cattledon; not many.

  “Does it pay to hold the daily morning service?”

  “Pay?” repeated Miss Deveen, looking at me with an arch smile. And I felt ashamed of my inadvertent, hasty word.

  “I mean, is the congregation sufficient to repay the trouble?”

  “The congregation, Johnny, usually consists of some twenty people, a few more, or a few less, as may chance; and they are all young ladies,” she added, the smile deepening to a laugh. “At least, unmarried ones; some are as old as Miss Cattledon. Two of them are widows of thirty-five: they are especially constant in attendance.”

  “They go after the curate,” I said, laughing with Miss Deveen. “One year when Mr. Holland was ill, down with us, he had to take on a curate, and the young ladies ran after him.”

  “Yes, Johnny, the young ladies go after the curates; we have two of them. Mr. Lake is the permanent curate; he has been here, oh, twelve or thirteen years. He does the chief work, in the church and out of it; we have a great many poor, as I think you know. The other curate is changed at least every year, and is generally a young deacon, fresh from college. Our Rector is fond of giving young men their title to orders. The young fellow we have now is a nobleman’s grandson, with more money in his pocket to waste on light gloves and hair-wash than poor Mr. Lake dare spend on all his living.”

  “Mr. Lake seems to be a very good man.”

  “A better man never lived,” returned Miss Deveen warmly, as she got up from the note she was writing, and came to my side. “Self-denying, anxious, painstaking; a true follower of his Master, a Christian to the very depths of his heart. He is one of those unobtrusive men whose merits are kept hidden from the world in general, who are content to work on patiently and silently in their path of duty, looking for no promotion, no reward here, because it seems to lie so very far away from their track.”

  “Is Mr. Lake poor?”

  “Mr. Lake has just one hundred pounds a-year, Johnny. It was what Mr. Selwyn offered him when he first came, and it has never been increased. William Lake told me one day,” added Miss Deveen, “that he thought the hundred a-year riches then. He was not a very young man; turned thirty; but his stipend in the country had been only fifty pounds a-year. To have it doubled all at once, no doubt did seem like riches.”

  “Why does not the Rector raise it?”

  “The Rector says he can’t afford to do it. I believe Mr. Lake once plucked up courage to ask him for a small increase: but it was of no use. The living is worth six hundred a-year, out of which the senior curate’s stipend has to be paid; and Mr. Selwyn’s family is expensive. His two sons are just leaving college. So, poor Mr. Lake has just plodded on with his hundred a-year, and made it do. The Rector wishes he could raise it; he knows his worth. During this prolonged illness of Mr. Selwyn’s he has been most indefatigable.”

  “Is Mr. Selwyn ill?”

  “Not very ill, but ailing. He has been so for two years. He generally preaches on a Sunday morning, but that is about all the duty he has been able to take. Mr. Lake is virtually the incumbent; he does everything, in the church and out of it.”

  “Without the pay,” I remarked.

  “Without the pay, Johnny. His hundred a-year, however, seems to suffice him. He never grumbles at it, never complains, is always contented and cheerful: and no doubt will be contented with it to the end.”

  “But — if he has no more than that, and no expectation of more, how is it that the ladies run after him? They can’t expect him to marry upon a hundred a-year.”

  “My dear Johnny, let a clergyman possess nothing but the white surplice on his back, the ladies would trot at his heels all the same. It comes naturally to them. They trust to future luck, you see; promotion is always possible, and they reckon upon it. I’m sure the way Mr. Lake gets run after is as good as a play. This young lady sends him a pair of slippers, her own work; that one embroiders a cushion for him: Cattledon painted a velvet fire-screen for him last year— ‘Oriental tinting.’ You never saw a screen s
o gorgeous.”

  “Do you think he has — has — any idea of Miss Cattledon?”

  “Just as much as he has of me,” cried Miss Deveen. “He is kind and polite to her; as he is, naturally, to every one; but you may rely upon it he never gave her a word or a look that would be construed into anything warmer.”

  “How silly she must be!”

  “Not more silly than the rest are. It is a mania, Johnny, and they all go in for it. Jemima Cattledon — stupid old thing! — cherishes hopes of Mr. Lake: a dozen others cherish the same. Most of them are worse than she is, for they course about the parish after him all day long. Cattledon never does that: with all her zeal, she does not forget that she is a gentlewoman; she meets him here, at my house, and she goes to church to see and hear him, but she does not race after him.”

  “Do you think he is aware of all this pursuit?”

  “Well, he must be, in a degree; William Lake is not a simpleton. But the very hopelessness of his being able to marry must in his mind act as a counterbalance, and cause him to look upon it as a harmless pastime. How could he think any one of them in earnest, remembering his poor hundred pounds a-year?”

  Thus talking, the time slipped on, until we saw the congregation coming out of church. The service had taken just three-quarters-of-an-hour.

  “Young Chisholm has been reading the prayers to-day; I am sure of that,” remarked Miss Deveen. “He gabbles them over as fast as a parrot.”

  The ladies congregated within the porch, and without: ostensibly to exchange compliments with one another; in reality to wait for the curates. The two appeared together: Mr. Lake quiet and thoughtful; Mr. Chisholm, a very tall, slim, empty-headed young fellow, smiling here, and shaking hands there, and ready to chatter with the lot.

  For full five minutes they remained stationary. Some important subject of conversation had evidently been started, for they stood around Mr. Lake, listening to something he was saying. The pew-opener, a woman in a muslin cap, and the bell-ringer, an old man in a battered hat, halted on the outskirts of the throng.

  “One or other of those damsels is sure to invent some grave question to discuss with him,” laughed Miss Deveen. “Perhaps Betty Smith has been breaking out again. She gives more trouble, with her alternate repentings and her lapsings to the tap-room, than all the rest of the old women put together.”

  Presently the group dispersed; some going one way, some another. Young Chisholm walked off at a smart pace, as if he meant to make a round of morning calls; the elder curate and Miss Cattledon crossed the road together.

  “His way home lies past our house,” remarked Miss Deveen, “so that he often does cross the road with her. He lives at Mrs. Topcroft’s.”

  “Mrs. Topcroft’s! What a curious name.”

  “So it is, Johnny. But she is a curiously good woman — in my opinion; worth her weight in gold. Those young ladies yonder turn up their noses at her, calling her a ‘lodging-letter.’ They are jealous; that’s the truth; jealous of her daughter, Emma Topcroft. Cattledon, I know, thinks the young girl the one chief rival to be feared.”

  Mr. Lake passed the garden with a bow, raising his hat to Miss Deveen; and Cattledon came in.

  I went off, as quick as an omnibus could take me, to the Tavistock, being rather behind time, and preparing for a blowing-up from Mr. Brandon in consequence.

  “Are you Mr. Ludlow, sir?” asked the waiter.

  “Yes.”

  “Then Mr. Brandon left word that he was going down to Lincoln’s Inn, sir; and if he is not back here at one o’clock precisely, I was to say that you needn’t come down again till to-morrow morning at ten.”

  I went into the Strand, and amused myself with looking at the shops, getting back to the hotel a few minutes after one. No; Mr. Brandon had not come in. All I could do was to leave Miss Deveen’s note of invitation to dine with her — that day, or any other day that might be more convenient, or every day — and tell the man to be sure to give it him.

  Then I went into the National Gallery, after getting some Bath buns at a pastrycook’s. It was between five and six when I returned to Miss Deveen’s. Her carriage had just driven up; she and Cattledon were alighting from it.

  “I have a little commission to do yet at one of the shops in the neighbourhood, and I may as well go about it now,” remarked Miss Deveen. “Will you go with me, Johnny?”

  Of course I said I would go; and Miss Cattledon was sent indoors to fetch a small paper parcel that lay on the table in the blue room.

  “It contains the patterns of some sewing silks that I want to get,” she added to me, as we stood waiting on the door-steps. “If — —”

  At that moment, out burst the ting-tang. Miss Deveen suddenly broke off what she was saying, and turned to look at the church.

  “Do they have service at this hour?” I asked.

  “Hush, Johnny! That bell is not going for service. Some one must be dead.”

  In truth, I heard that, even as she spoke. Three times three it struck out, followed by the sharp, quick strokes.

  “That’s the passing-bell!” exclaimed Cattledon, coming quickly from the hall with the little packet in her hand. “Who can be dead? It hardly rings out once in a year.”

  For, it appeared, the bell at St. Matthew’s did not in general toll for the dead: was not expected to do so. Our bell at Church Dykely rang for any one who could pay for it.

  Waiting there on the steps, we saw Mr. Lake coming from the direction of the church. Miss Deveen walked down the broad path of her small front-garden, and stood at the gate to wait for him.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Oh, it is a grievous thing!” he cried, in answer, his gentle face pale, his blue eyes suppressing their tears. “It is no other than my dear Rector; my many years’ friend!”

  “The Rector!” gasped Miss Deveen.

  “Indeed it is. The complaint he suffered from has increased its symptoms lately, but no one thought of attaching to them the slightest danger. At two o’clock to-day he sent for me, saying he felt very ill. I found him so when I got there; ill, and troubled. He had taken a turn for the worse; and death — death,” added Mr. Lake, pausing to command his voice, “was coming on rapidly.”

  Miss Deveen had turned as white as her point-lace collar.

  “He was troubled, you say?” she asked.

  “In such a case as this — meeting death face to face unexpectedly — it is hardly possible not to be troubled, however truly we may have lived in preparation for it,” answered the sad, soft voice of the curate. “Mr. Selwyn’s chief perplexity lay in the fact that he had not settled his worldly affairs.”

  “Do you mean, not made his will?”

  “Just so,” nodded Mr. Lake; “he had meant to do so, he said to me, but had put it off from time to time. We got a lawyer in, and it was soon done; and — and — I stayed on with him afterwards to the end.”

  “Oh dear, it is a piteous tale,” sighed Miss Deveen. “And his wife and daughters are away!”

  “They went to Oxford last Saturday for a week; and the two sons are there, as you know. No one thought seriously of his illness. Even this morning, when I called upon him after breakfast, though he said he was not feeling well, and did not look well, such a thing as danger never occurred to me. And now he is dead!”

  Never did a parson’s death cause such a stir in a parish as poor Mr. Selwyn’s did in this. A lively commotion set in. People flew about to one another’s houses like chips in a gale of wind. Not only was the sorrow to himself to be discussed, but the uncertainty as to what would happen now. Some six months previously a church not far off, St. Peter’s, which had rejoiced in three energetic curates, and as many daily services, suddenly changed its incumbent; the new one proved to be an elderly man with wife and children, who did all the duty himself, and cut off the curates and the week-day prayers. What if the like calamity should happen to St. Matthew’s!

  I was away most of the following day with Mr. Brandon,
so was not in the thick of it, but the loss was made up for in the evening.

  “Of course it is impossible to say who will get the living,” cried Mrs. Jonas, one of the two widows already mentioned, who had been dining with Miss Deveen. “I know who ought to — and that is our dear Mr. Lake.”

  “‘Oughts’ don’t go for much in this world,” growled Dr. Galliard, a sterling man, in spite of his gruffness. He had recently brought Cattledon out of a bilious attack, and ran in this evening to see whether the cure lasted. “They go for nothing in the matter of Church patronage,” continued he. “If Lake had his deserts, he’d be made incumbent of this living to-morrow: but he is as likely to get it as I am to get the Lord Chancellor’s seals.”

  “Who would have done as Mr. Lake has done — given himself up solely and wholly to the duties of the church and the poor, for more years than I can count?” contended Mrs. Jonas, who was rich and positive, and wore this evening a black gauze dress, set off with purple grapes, and a spray of purple grapes in her black hair. “I say the living is due to him, and the Lord Chancellor ought to present him with it.”

  Dr. Galliard gave a short laugh. He was a widower, and immensely popular, nearly as much so as Mr. Lake. “Did you ever know a curate succeed to a living under the circumstances?” he demanded. “The Lord Chancellor has enough friends of his own, waiting to snap up anything that falls; be sure of that, Mrs. Jonas.”

  “Some dean will get it, I shouldn’t wonder,” cried Cattledon. For at this time we were in the prime old days when a Church dignitary might hold half-a-dozen snug things, if he could drop into them.

  “Just so; a dean or some other luminary,” nodded the doctor. “It is the province of great divines to shine like lights in the world, and of curates to toil on in obscurity. Well — God sees all things: and what is wrong in this world may be set right in the next.”

  “You speak of the Lord Chancellor,” quietly put in Miss Deveen: “the living is not in his gift.”

  “Never said it was — was speaking generally,” returned the doctor. “The patron of the living is some other great man, nobleman, or what not, living down in the country.”