XLVII

The dinner-party at the Rectory, to which Mr. Wentworth did not go, was much less interesting and agreeable than it might have been had he been present. As for the Rector and his wife, they could not but feel themselves in a somewhat strange position, having between them a secret unsuspected by the company. It was difficult to refrain from showing a certain flagging of interest in the question of the church’s restoration, about which, to be sure, Mr. Finial was just as much concerned as he had been yesterday; though Mr. Morgan, and even Mrs. Morgan, had suffered a great and unexplainable diminution of enthusiasm. And then Mr. Leeson, who was quite unaware of the turn that things had taken, and who was much too obtuse to understand how the Rector could be anything but exasperated against the Perpetual Curate by the failure of the investigation, did all that he could to make himself disagreeable, which was saying a good deal. When Mrs. Morgan came into the drawing-room, and found this obnoxious individual occupying the most comfortable easy-chair, and turning over at his ease the great book of ferns, nature-printed, which was the pet decoration of the table, her feelings may be conceived by any lady who has gone through a similar trial; for Mr. Leeson’s hands were not of the irreproachable purity which becomes the fingers of a gentleman when he goes out to dinner. “I know some people who always wear gloves when they turn over a portfolio of prints,” Mrs. Morgan said, coming to the Curate’s side to protect her book if possible, “and these require quite as much care;” and she had to endure a discussion upon the subject, which was still more trying to her feelings, for Mr. Leeson pretended to know about ferns on the score of having a Wardian case in his lodgings (which belonged to his landlady), though in reality he could scarcely tell the commonest spleenwort from a lycopodium. While Mrs. Morgan went through this trial, it is not to be wondered at if she hugged to her heart the new idea of leaving Carlingford, and thought to herself that whatever might be the character of the curate (if there was one) at Scarsfield, any change from Mr. Leeson must be for the better. And then the unfortunate man, as if he was not disagreeable enough already, began to entertain his unwilling hostess with the latest news.

“There is quite a commotion in Grange Lane,” said Mr. Leeson. “Such constant disturbances must deteriorate the property, you know. Of course, whatever one’s opinion may be, one must keep it to one’s self, after the result of the investigation; though I can’t say I have unbounded confidence in trial by jury,” said the disagreeable young man.

“I am afraid I am very slow of comprehension,” said the Rector’s wife. “I don’t know in the least what you mean about trial by jury. Perhaps it would be best to put the book back on the table; it is too heavy for you to hold.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Leeson⁠—“I mean about Wentworth, of course. When a man is popular in society, people prefer to shut their eyes. I suppose the matter is settled for the present, but you and I know better than to believe⁠—”

“I beg you will speak for yourself, Mr. Leeson,” said Mrs. Morgan, with dignity. “I have always had the highest respect for Mr. Wentworth.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the disagreeable Curate. “I forgot; almost all the ladies are on Mr. Wentworth’s side. It appears that little girl of Elsworthy’s has disappeared again; that was all I was going to say.”

And, fortunately for the Curate, Colonel Chiley, who entered the room at the moment, diverted from him the attention of the lady of the house; and after that there was no opportunity of broaching the subject again until dinner was almost over. Then it was perhaps the All Souls pudding that warmed Mr. Leeson’s soul; perhaps he had taken a little more wine than usual. He took sudden advantage of that curious little pause which occurs at a well-conducted dinner-table, when the meal is concluded, and the fruit (considered apparently, in orthodox circles, a paradisiacal kind of food which needs no blessing) alone remains to be discussed. As soon as the manner of thanks from the foot of the table was over, the Curate incautiously rushed in before anybody else could break the silence, and delivered his latest information at a high pitch of voice.

“Has anyone heard about the Elsworthys?” said Mr. Leeson; “something fresh has happened there. I hope your verdict yesterday will not be called in question. The fact is, I believe that the girl has been taken away again. They say she has gone and left a letter saying that she is to be made a lady of. I don’t know what we are to understand by that. There was some private service or other going on at St. Roque’s very early in the morning. Marriage is a sacrament, you know. Perhaps Mr. Wentworth or his brother⁠—”

“They are a queer family, the Wentworths,” said old Mr. Western, “and such lots of them, sir⁠—such lots of them. The old ladies seem to have settled down here. I am not of their way of thinking, you know, but they’re very good to the poor.”

“Mr. Frank Wentworth is going to succeed his brother, I suppose,” said Mr. Leeson; “it is very lucky for a man who gets himself talked of to have a family living to fall back upon⁠—”

“No such thing⁠—no such thing,” said Mr. Proctor, hastily. “Mr. Frank Wentworth means to stay here.”

“Dear me!” said the disagreeable Curate, with an elaborate pause of astonishment. “Things must be bad indeed,” added that interesting youth, with solemnity, shaking the devoted head, upon which he did not know that Mrs. Morgan had fixed her eyes, “if his own family give him up, and leave him to starve here. They would never give him up if they had not very good cause. Oh, come; I shouldn’t like to believe that! I know how much a curate has to live on,” said Mr. Leeson, with a smile of engaging candour. “Before they give him up like that, with two livings in the family, they must have very good cause.”

“Very good cause indeed,” said Mrs. Morgan, from the head of the table. The company in general had, to tell the truth, been a little taken aback by the Curate’s observations; and there was almost the entire length of the table between the unhappy man and the Avenger. “So good a reason, that it is strange how it should not have occurred to a brother clergyman. That is the evil of a large parish,” said the Rector’s wife, with beautiful simplicity; “however hard one works, one never can know above half of the poor people; and I suppose you have been occupied in the other districts, and have not heard what a great work Mr. Wentworth is doing. I have reason to know,” said Mrs. Morgan, with considerable state, “that he will remain in Carlingford, in a very different position from that which he has filled hitherto. Mr. Leeson knows how much a curate has to live upon, but I am afraid that is all he does know of such a life as Mr. Wentworth’s.” Mrs. Morgan paused for a moment to get breath, for her excitement was considerable, and she had many wrongs to avenge. “There is a great deal of difference in curates as well as in other things,” said the indignant woman. “I have reason to know that Mr. Wentworth will remain in Carlingford in quite a different position. Now and then, even in this world, things come right like a fairy tale⁠—that is, when the authority is in the right hands;” the Rector’s wife went on, with a smile at her husband, which disarmed that astonished man. “Perhaps if Mr. Leeson had the same inducement as Mr. Wentworth, he too would make up his mind to remain in Carlingford.” Mrs. Morgan got up, as she made this speech, with a rustle and sweep of drapery which seemed all addressed to the unhappy Curate, who stumbled upon his feet like the other gentlemen, but dared not for his life have approached her to open the door. Mr. Leeson felt that he had received his congé, as he sank back into his chair. He was much too stunned to speculate on the subject, or ask himself what was going to happen. Whatever was going to happen, there was an end of him. He had eaten the last All Souls pudding that he ever would have presented to him under that roof. He sank back in the depth of despair upon his seat, and suffered the claret to pass him in the agony of his feelings. Mr. Wentworth and Mrs. Morgan were avenged.

This was how it came to be noised abroad in Carlingford that some great change of a highly favourable character was about to occur in the circumstances and position of the Curate of St. Roque’s. It was discussed next day throughout the town, as soon as people had taken breath after telling each other about Rosa Elsworthy, who had indisputably been carried off from her uncle’s house on the previous night. When the Wentworth family were at dinner, and just as the board was being spread in the Rectory, where Mrs. Morgan was half an hour later than usual, having company, it had been discovered in Elsworthy’s that the prison was vacant, and the poor little bird had flown. Mr. Wentworth was aware of a tumult about the shop when he went to the Miss Wodehouses, but was preoccupied, and paid no attention; but Mr. Leeson, who was not preoccupied, had already heard all about it when he entered the Rectory. That day it was all over the town, as may be supposed. The poor, little, wicked, unfortunate creature had disappeared, no one knew how, at the moment, apparently, when Elsworthy went to the railway for the evening papers, a time when the errand-boys were generally rampant in the well-conducted shop. Mrs. Elsworthy, for her part, had seized that moment to relieve her soul by confiding to Mrs. Hayles next door how she was worrited to death with one thing and another, and did not expect to be alive to tell the tale if things went on like this for another month, but that Elsworthy was infatuated like, and wouldn’t send the hussy away, his wife complained to her sympathetic neighbour. When Elsworthy came back, however, he was struck by the silence in the house, and sent the reluctant woman upstairs⁠—“To see if she’s been and made away with herself, I suppose,” the indignant wife said, as she obeyed, leaving Mrs. Hayles full of curiosity on the steps of the door. Mrs. Elsworthy, however uttered a shriek a moment after, and came down, with a frightened face, carrying a large pincushion, upon which, skewered through and through with the biggest pin she could find, Rosa had deposited her letter of leave-taking. This important document was read over in the shop by an ever-increasing group, as the news got abroad⁠—for Elsworthy, like his wife, lost his head, and rushed about hither and thither, asking wild questions as to who had seen her last. Perhaps, at the bottom, he was not so desperate as he looked, but was rather grateful than angry with Rosa for solving the difficulty. This is what the poor little runaway said:⁠—

Dear Uncle and Aunt⁠—I write a line to let you know that them as can do better for me than any belonging to me has took me away for good. Don’t make no reflections, please, nor blame nobody; for I never could have done no good nor had any ’appiness at Carlingford after all as has happened. I don’t bear no grudge, though aunt has been so unkind; but I forgive her, and uncle also. My love to all friends; and you may tell Bob Hayles as I won’t forget him, but will order all my physic regular at his father’s shop.⁠—Your affectionate niece,

Such was the girl’s letter, with its natural impertinences and natural touch of kindness; and it made a great commotion in the neighbourhood, where a few spasmodic search-parties were made up with no real intentions, and came to nothing, as was to be expected. It was a dreadful thing to be sure, to happen to a respectable family; but when things had gone so far, the neighbours, on the whole, were inclined to believe it was the best thing Rosa could have done; and the Elsworthys, husband and wife, were concluded to be of the same opinion. When Carlingford had exhausted this subject, and had duly discussed the probabilities as to where she had gone, and whether Rosa could be the lady in a veil who had been handed into the express night-train by two gentlemen, of whom a railway porter bore cautious testimony, the other mysterious rumour about Mr. Wentworth had its share of popular attention. It was discussed in Masters’s with a solemnity becoming the occasion, everybody being convinced of the fact, and nobody knowing how it was to be. One prevailing idea was, that Mr. Wentworth’s brother, who had succeeded to his mother’s fortune (which was partly true, like most popular versions of family history, his mother’s fortune being now Gerald’s sole dependence), intended to establish a great brotherhood, upon the Claydon model, in Carlingford, of which the Perpetual Curate was to be the head. This idea pleased the imagination of the town, which already saw itself talked of in all the papers, and anticipated with excitement the sight of English brothers of St. Benedict walking about in the streets, and people from the Illustrated News making drawings of Grange Lane. To be sure, Gerald Wentworth had gone over to the Church of Rome, which was a step too far to be compatible with the English brotherhood; but popular imagination, when puzzled and in a hurry, does not take time to master all details. Then, again, opinion wavered, and it was supposed to be the Miss Wentworths who were the agents of the coming prosperity. They had made up their mind to endow St. Roque’s and apply to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to have it erected into a parochial district, rumour reported; and the senior assistant in Masters’s, who was suspected of Low-Church tendencies, was known to be a supporter of this theory. Other ideas of a vague character floated through the town, of which no one could give any explanation; but Carlingford was unanimous in the conviction that good fortune was coming somehow to the popular favourite, who a week ago had occupied temporarily the position of the popular bête noire and impersonation of evil. “But the real sort always triumphs at the last,” was the verdict of Wharfside, which like every primitive community, believed in poetic justice; and among the bargemen and their wives much greater elevation than that of a district church or the headship of a brotherhood was expected “for the clergyman.” If the Queen had sent for him immediately, and conferred upon him a bishopric, or at least appointed him her private chaplain, such a favour would have excited no surprise in Wharfside, where indeed the public mind was inclined to the opinion that the real use of queens and other such dignitaries was to find out and reward merit. Mr. Wentworth himself laughed when the gossip reached his ears. “My people have given away all they had to give,” he said to somebody who had asked the question; “and I know no prospect I have of being anything but a perpetual curate, unless the Queen sends for me and appoints me to a bishopric, as I understand is expected in Prickett’s Lane. If I come to any advancement,” said the Curate of St. Roque’s, “it must be in social estimation, and not in worldly wealth, which is out of my way;” and he went down to Wharfside rather cheerfully than otherwise, having begun to experience that pertinacity carries the day, and that it might be possible to goad Lucy into the experiment of how much her housekeeping talents were good for, and whether, with a good wife, even a Perpetual Curate might be able to live without any particular bother in respect to the grocer’s bill. Mr. Wentworth being at present warmly engaged in this business of persuasion, and as intent as ever on having his own way, was not much affected by the Carlingford gossip. He went his way to Wharfside all the same, where the service was conducted as of old, and where all the humble uncertain voices were buoyed up and carried on by the steady pure volume of liquid sound which issued from Lucy Wodehouse’s lips into the utterance of such a “Magnificat” as filled Mr. Wentworth’s mind with exultation. It was the woman’s part in the worship⁠—independent, yet in a sweet subordination; and the two had come back⁠—though with the difference that their love was now avowed and certain, and they were known to belong to each other⁠—to much the same state of feeling in which they were before the Miss Wentworths came to Carlingford, or anything uncomfortable had happened. They had learned various little lessons, to be sure, in the interim, but experience had not done much more for them than it does for ordinary human creatures, and the chances are that Mr. Wentworth would have conducted himself exactly in the same manner another time had he been placed in similar circumstances; for the lessons of experience, however valuable, are sometimes very slow of impressing themselves upon a generous and hasty temperament, which has high ideas of honour and consistency, and rather piques itself on a contempt for self-interest and external advantages⁠—which was the weakness of the Curate of St. Roque’s. He returned to the “great work” in Wharfside with undiminished belief in it, and a sense of being able to serve his God and his fellow-creatures, which, though it may seem strange to some people, was a wonderful compensation to him for the loss of Skelmersdale. “After all, I doubt very much whether, under any circumstances, we could have left such a work as is going on here,” he said to Lucy as they came up Prickett’s Lane together, where the poor woman had just died peaceably in No. 10, and got done with it, poor soul; and the Sister of Mercy, in her grey cloak, lifted towards him the blue eyes which were full of tears, and answered with natural emphasis, “Impossible! it would have been deserting our post,” and drew a step closer to him in the twilight with a sense of the sweetness of that plural pronoun which mingled so with the higher sense that it was impossible to disjoin them. And the two went on under the influence of these combined sentiments, taking comfort out of the very hardness of the world around them, in which their ministrations were so much needed, and feeling an exaltation in the “duty,” which was not for one, but for both, and a belief in the possibility of mending matters, in which their love for each other bore a large share; for it was not in human nature thus to begin the ideal existence, without believing in its universal extension, and in the amelioration of life and the world.

“That is all they think of,” said poor Miss Wodehouse, who, between her wondering inspection of the two “young people” and her own moderate and sensible love-affairs, and the directions which it was necessary to give to her Rector about the furnishing of the new house, was more constantly occupied than she had ever been in her life; “but then, if they marry, what are they to live upon? and if they don’t marry⁠—”

“Perhaps something will turn up my dear,” said old Mrs. Western, who had an idea that Providence was bound to provide for two good young people who wanted to marry; and thus the two ladies were forced to leave the matter, where, indeed, the historian of events in Carlingford would willingly leave it also, not having much faith in the rewards of virtue which come convenient in such an emergency. But it is only pure fiction which can keep true to nature, and weave its narrative in analogy with the ordinary course of life⁠—whereas history demands exactness in matters of fact, which are seldom true to nature, or amenable to any general rule of existence.

Before proceeding, however, to the narrative of the unexpected advancement and promotion which awaited the Perpetual Curate, it may be as well to notice that the Miss Wentworths, who during the summer had kindly given their house at Skelmersdale to some friends who had returned in the spring from India, found themselves now in a position to return to their own proper dwelling-place, and made preparations accordingly for leaving Carlingford, in which, indeed, they had no further occupation; for, to be sure, except to the extent of that respect which a man owes to his aunts, they had no special claim upon Frank Wentworth, or right to supervise his actions, save on account of Skelmersdale, which was now fully disposed of and given away. It cannot be said that Miss Leonora had ever fully recovered from the remarkable indisposition which her nephew Jack’s final address had brought upon her. The very next morning she fulfilled her pledges as a woman of honour, and bestowed Skelmersdale positively and finally upon Julia Trench’s curate, who indeed made a creditable enough rector in his way; but after she had accomplished this act, Miss Leonora relapsed into one unceasing watch upon her nephew Frank, which was far from dispelling the tendency to headache which she showed at this period for the first and only time in her life. She watched him with a certain feeling of expiation, as she might have resorted to self-flagellation had she lived a few hundred years before, and perhaps suffered more acute pangs in that act of discipline than could be inflicted by any physical scourge. The longer she studied the matter the more thoroughly was Miss Leonora convinced not only that the Perpetual Curate was bent on doing his duty, but that he did it with all the force of high faculties, and a mind much more thoroughly trained, and of finer material than was possessed by the man whom she had made rector of Skelmersdale. The strong-minded woman bore quietly, with a kind of defiance, the sharp wounds with which her self-esteem was pierced by this sight. She followed up her discovery, and made herself more and more certain of the mistake she had made, not sparing herself any part of her punishment. As she pursued her investigations, too, Miss Leonora became increasingly sensible that it was not his mother’s family whom he resembled, as she had once thought, but that he was out and out a Wentworth, possessed of all the family features; and this was the man whom by her own act she had disinherited of his natural share in the patronage of the family, substituting for her own flesh and blood an individual for whom, to tell the truth, she had little respect! Perhaps if she had been able to sustain herself with the thought that it was entirely a question of “principle,” the retrospect might not have been so hard upon Miss Leonora; but being a woman of very distinct and uncompromising vision, she could not conceal from herself either Julia Trench’s cleverness or her own mixed and doubtful motives. Having this sense of wrong and injustice, and general failure of the duty of kindred towards Frank, it might have been supposed a little comfort to Miss Leonora to perceive that he had entirely recovered from his disappointment, and was no longer in her power, if indeed he had ever been so. But the fact was, that if anything could have aggravated her personal smart, it would have been the fact of Frank’s indifference and cheerfulness, and evident capability of contenting himself with his duty and his favourite district, and his Lucy⁠—whom, to be sure, he could not marry, being only a perpetual curate. The spectacle came to have a certain fascination for Miss Wentworth. She kept watching him with a grim satisfaction, punishing herself, and at the same time comforting herself with the idea that, light as he made of it, he must be suffering too. She could not bear to think that he had escaped clean out of her hands, and that the decision she had come to, which produced so much pain to herself, was innoxious to Frank; and at the same time, though she could not tolerate his composure, and would have preferred to see him angry and revengeful, his evident recovery of spirits and general exhilaration increased Miss Leonora’s respect for the man she had wronged. In this condition of mind the strong-minded aunt lingered over her preparations for removal, scorning much the rumour in Carlingford about her nephew’s advancement, and feeling that she could never forgive him if by any chance promotion should come to him after all. “He will stay where he is. He will be a perpetual curate,” Miss Leonora said, uttering what was in reality a hope under the shape of a taunt; and things were still in this position when Grange Lane in general and Miss Dora in particular (from the window of the summerhouse) were startled much by the sight of the Rector, in terribly correct clerical costume, as if he were going to dine with the bishop, who walked slowly down the road like a man charged with a mission, and, knocking at Mrs. Hadwin’s door, was admitted immediately to a private conference with the Curate of St. Roque’s.