Part 8 (1/2)
On reaching the church, I found myself to be in good time, but had not proceeded far in the service, when I discovered the clerk to be in such a state of drunkenness, as would have appeared to the least fastidious, blasphemous and repulsive. In this dilemma, I knew it would be useless to tell a noisy boisterous fellow to hold his tongue, so at once, quietly but quickly, reaching his book, I placed it in my reading-desk, and the fellow, without a murmur, resigned himself to his fate and went fast asleep. In spite of the check which my wet clothes might have occasioned, I was rapidly gaining strength, and, to my surprise, got easily through the duty.
At the conclusion of the service, a labourer's wife came up to me with the usual fee between her finger and thumb, the price of being grateful to her G.o.d for safe deliverance in child-birth. She apparently deemed me out of my senses, and I had to tell her twice to keep back the s.h.i.+lling gained by the sweat of her husband's brow.
I had next to visit a dying man, and I had a dread of it. The poor fellow had been for many years an open and avowed infidel, and entertained an invincible hatred towards clergymen. He had, at last, consented to send for me, in compliance with the entreaties of his wife. Being an industrious man, he had realized sufficient to enable him to rent a very comfortable cottage, a cyder orchard, to keep a couple of cows, besides having by him a sum of ready money. A few years back, in a.s.sisting at the harvest, he had strained himself internally, and induced an atrophy. On asking the wife whether they were badly off, her sole reply was to take a cup from the chimney-piece, and show me, in heart-breaking silence, a sixpence and three half-pennies! Cows, money, and orchard--all had disappeared during a lingering illness,--and the poor old woman's inevitable fate was now to await the fast approaching death of a good husband, and then retire, for her few remaining and widowed years, to the workhouse of a distant paris.h.!.+
On speaking to him, I could not but admire his really gentlemanly self-possession, accompanied by a tone of respect and kindness. After I had finished the prayers for the visitation of the sick, I read a few others which I had copied out from some authors, selected by Paley, and beautiful compositions they are; the poor fellow sunk into an agony of grief, and I wish I had not read them. Was I wrong or not?
I fear that I was, and am sorry for it; but we shall both know by and bye.
On returning in the evening through my own church-yard, never was I so struck with its air of wretchedness. It was placed in the bottom of a swampy moor, confined on one side by the little decrepit old church, with its boarded steeple looking like a dog-hutch, and just small enough to hold three parts of a cracked bell, if I might judge from the tinkling of it. On another side, it was protected from the bitter blast by the poor-house, thus judiciously placed for the benefit of the invalided paupers. It was a dreary evening in February, and everything was looking chilly and black, except, by the bye, an early primrose peering out from the side of a crumbling tomb in the very darkest corner of the whole--that looked fresh and bright enough.
I suspect the sort of humour I was now in, to have been occasioned either by my illness, the death-bed I had just witnessed, or the separation for a whole week to come from a person for whom I had lately found that I felt ”a deep and tender friends.h.i.+p.”
About thirty miles from my parish, lived my nearest neighbours, and with whom I had become rather intimate. So much was this the case, that this place gradually a.s.sumed the character of what I recollect ”home” once used to have for me, many years ago. To this house I used frequently to canter over on a Sunday's evening with all the delight of a school-boy returning from a detested school.
Until now I had thought that my benevolent host had here been my greatest friend; but there was another for whom, to my infinite surprise, I found that I felt far more intensely. Yet it was odd that, in her presence, I was apparently cold and inattentive, and thus, perhaps, it might have ever been, had she not unguardedly attracted my attention by what she meant for a severe rebuke. I happened to be walking with her and a gentleman whose wife had lately experienced, on some occasion, a narrow escape of her life; ”and so Miss Ba.s.sett I had nearly become a gentleman free of inc.u.mbrance, and then I should have come and proposed to you.”
”But then I should have tried to thwart you, for the mere sake of opposition,” was my rather too free and easy reply.
”Oh, Mr. Graham,” she answered, ”you might have set your mind quite at rest on the subject, for I should have preferred Mr. Goodriche a thousand times before you.”
”For what possible reason, Miss Ba.s.sett?” I asked, in sober earnest.
”Because I could have led a quiet, happy life with him--now perhaps I might have liked you, and then you would have immediately behaved like a wretch, and broken my heart.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] One who kills game exclusively to lessen his butcher's bill.
CHAPTER III.
It was on my way to London, in company with her father, that, as the sun rose, I caught a glimpse in the horizon of the hill, on the other side of which the abode of my family was situated--I may not call it home, for it is too true, that ”without hearts there is no home.”
Still, how I must have loved the spot! its woods, its lawns, and its valleys! No sooner had the steamer touched at a port, than I left my luggage to go on with it as it might, and jumped out, in order to take one more peep at a place which set at defiance every recollection that I could force to rise up in judgment against it.
Having walked twenty miles, I stopped at a public-house within a mile and a half of the place, for some refreshment, as well as to await the darkness of night. At ten o'clock I sallied forth, and the first of the paternal estate on which I trespa.s.sed was a large wood, every tree of which, I might say, was an old acquaintance.
Here, then, what a contrast was I conscious of! Some years back, I used to range this very wood, the sworn friend of the keeper, in order to detect the poacher; and now I was listening to every rustle, and peering along the gloomy paths, lest I myself should be detected by my former ally. So much did my fears on this point increase on me, that I took to the open fields, and gained the park.
Here at once, in spite of everything, I felt myself to be on my own property,--roaming about in ecstacy--visiting every tree that I had planted and fenced round years ago. Each of these I pruned, and even had the temerity to steal into the green-house, which was close to the library, and procure the gardener's saw, with which I climbed up into an old Scotch fir, and dismembered a large limb which over-hung and injured a lime-tree I had planted in the dell below. Having sawed the limb into portable pieces, I concealed the whole in an adjoining plantation.
Notwithstanding the lights in the windows evinced that the inmates had not yet retired to rest, I sauntered over every part of the lawn, and at last walked directly up to the drawing-room window. The blind was down, but the shutters unclosed. By stooping close to the ground, and peeping beneath the blind, I could survey the whole room.
Here were two daughters and their father. The eldest was fast asleep in an arm-chair; the younger one working, and their father, as usual reading a volume of Sir Walter Scott, the well known binding of which I at once recognised. I could not get a sight of his face, for the book he held before him; but I saw his forehead and thin silvery hair.
What was now my surprise, to hear a carriage, at this time of the night, driving towards the house! I instantly placed myself behind a tree, close to the road-side. Curious to state, at that very spot the carriage suddenly stopped, and I might have touched it with my hand.
The horses had gibbed, owing to the steepness of the ascent; and on her inquiring into the cause, I immediately recognised the voice of another daughter, who, with her husband, was coming on a visit to her father from a distant county.