Part 19 (1/2)

For the first four weeks that the Vicar lay paralyzed, the neighbouring clergymen had done his duty; but now arose a new difficulty at Drumston. Who was to do the duty while the poor Vicar lay there on his back speechless?

”How,” asked Miss Thornton of Tom Troubridge, ”are we to make head against the dissenters now? Let the duty lapse but one single week, my dear friend, and you will see the chapels overflowing once more. My brother has always had a hard fight to keep them to church, for they have a natural tendency to dissent here. And a great number don't care what the denominations are, so long as there is noise enough.”

”If that is the case,” answered Tom, ”old Mark Hook's place of wors.h.i.+p should pay best. I'd back them against Bedlam any day.”

”They certainly make the loudest noise at a Revival,” said Miss Thornton. ”But what are we to do?”

”That I am sure I don't know, my dearest auntie,” said Troubridge, ”but I am here, and my horse too, ready to go any amount of errands.”

”I see no way,” said Miss Thornton, ”but to write to the Bishop.”

”And I see no way else,” said Tom, ”unless you like to dress me up as a parson, and see if I would do.”

Miss Thornton wrote to the Bishop, with whom she had some acquaintance, and told him how her brother had been struck down with paralysis, and that the parish was unprovided for; that if he would send any gentleman he approved of, she would gladly receive him at Drumston.

Armed with this letter, Tom found himself, for the first time in his life, in an episcopal palace. A sleek servant in black opened the door with cat-like tread, and admitted him into a dark, warm hall; and on Tom's saying, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, as if he was in church, that he had brought a note of importance, and would wait for an answer, the man glided away, and disappeared through a spring-door, which swung to behind him. Tom thought it would have banged, but it didn't. Bishops'

doors never bang.

Tom had a great awe for your peers spiritual. He could get on well enough with a peer temporal, particularly if that proud aristocrat happened to be in want of a horse; but a bishop was quite another matter.

So he sat rather uncomfortable in the dark, warm hall, listening to such dull sounds as could be heard in the gloomy mansion. A broad oak staircase led up from the hall into lighter regions, and there stood, on a landing above, a lean, wheezy old clock, all over bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, which, as he looked on it, choked, and sneezed four.

But now there was a new sound in the house. An indecent, secular sound.

A door near the top of the house was burst violently open, and there was a scuffle. A loud voice shouted twice unmistakeably and distinctly, ”So--o, good b.i.t.c.h!” And then the astounded Tom heard the worrying of a terrier, and the squeak of a dying rat. There was no mistake about it; he heard the bones crack. Then he made out that a dog was induced to go into a room on false pretences, and deftly shut up there, and then he heard a heavy step descending the stairs towards him.

But, before there was time for the perpetrator of these sacrileges to come in sight, a side door opened, and the Bishop himself came forth with a letter in his hand (a mild, clever, gentlemanly-looking man he was too, Tom remarked) and said,--

”Pray is there not a messenger from Drumston here?”

Tom replied that he had brought a letter from his cousin the Vicar. He had rather expected to hear it demanded, ”Where is the audacious man who has dared to penetrate these sacred shades?” and was agreeably relieved to find that the Bishop wasn't angry with him.

”Dear me,” said the Bishop; ”I beg a thousand pardons for keeping you in the hall; pray walk into my study.”

So in he went and sat down. The Bishop resumed,--

”You are Mr. Thornton's cousin, sir?”

Tom bowed. ”I am about the nearest relation he has besides his sister, my lord.”

”Indeed,” said the Bishop. ”I have written to Miss Thornton to say that there is a gentleman, a relation of my own, now living in the house with me, who will undertake Mr. Thornton's duties, and I dare say, also, without remuneration. He has nothing to do at present.--Oh, here is the gentleman I spoke of!”

Here was the gentleman he spoke of, holding a dead rat by the tail, and crying out,--

”Look here, uncle; what did I tell you? I might have been devoured alive, had it not been for my faithful Fly, your enemy.”

He was about six feet or nearly so in height, with a highly intellectual though not a handsome face. His brown hair, carelessly brushed, fell over a forehead both broad and lofty, beneath which shone a pair of bold, clear grey eyes. The moment Troubridge saw him he set him down in his own mind as a ”goer,” by which he meant a man who had go, or energy, in him. A man, he thought, who is thrown away as a parson.

The Bishop, ringing the bell, began again, ”This is my nephew, Mr.

Frank Maberly.”