small living had been given him through the interest of an old friend who had some claim on the gratitude of the Oldinport family; and it was a satisfaction both to Maynard and Sir Christopher that a home to which he might take Caterina had thus readily presented itself at a distance from Cheverel Manor. For it had never yet been thought safe that she should revisit the scene of her sufferings, her health continuing too delicate to encourage the slightest risk of painful excitement. In a year or two, perhaps, by the time old Mr. Crichley, the rector of Cumbermoor, should have left a world of gout, and when Caterina would very likely be a happy mother, Maynard might safely take up his abode at Cumbermoor, and Tina would feel nothing but content at seeing a new ‘little black-eyed monkey’ running up and down the gallery and gardens of the Manor. A mother dreads no memories—those shadows have all melted away in the dawn of baby’s smile.
In these hopes, and in the enjoyment of Tina’s nestling affection, Mr. Gilfil tasted a few months of perfect happiness. She had come to lean entirely on his love, and to find life sweet for his sake. Her continual languor and want of active interest was a natural consequence of bodily feebleness, and the prospect of her becoming a mother was a new ground for hoping the best. But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died.
Tina died, and Maynard Gilfil’s love went with her into deep silence for evermore.
Epilogue.
This was Mr. Gilfil’s love-story, which lay far back from the time when he sat, worn and grey, by his lonely fireside in Shepperton Vicarage. Rich brown locks, passionate love, and deep early sorrow, strangely different as they seem from the scanty white hairs, the apathetic content, and the unexpectant quiescence of old age, are but part of the same life’s journey; as the bright Italian plains, with the sweet Addio of their beckoning maidens, are part of the same day’s travel that brings us to the other side of the mountain, between the sombre rocky walls and among the guttural voices of the Valais.
To those who were familiar only with the grey-haired Vicar, jogging leisurely along on his old chestnut cob, it would perhaps have been hard to believe that he had ever been the Maynard Gilfil who, with a heart full of passion and tenderness, had urged his black Kitty to her swiftest gallop on the way to Callam, or that the old gentleman of caustic tongue, and bucolic tastes, and sparing habits, had known all the deep secrets of devoted love, had struggled through its days and nights of anguish, and trembled under its unspeakable joys.
And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.
And so the dear old Vicar, though he had something of the knotted whimsical character of the poor lopped oak, had yet been sketched out by nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest; and in the grey-haired man who filled his pocket with sugar-plums for the little children, whose most biting words were directed against the evil doing of the rich man, and who, with all his social pipes and slipshod talk, never sank below the highest level of his parishioners’ respect, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first and only love—the love of Tina.
Janet’s Repentance.
Chapter I.
‘No!’ said lawyer Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, ‘as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction for half a century.’
It was very warm everywhere that evening, but especially in the bar of the Red Lion at Milby, where Mr. Dempster was seated mixing his third glass of brandy-and-water. He was a tall and rather massive man, and the front half of his large surface was so well dredged’ with snuff, that the cat, having inadvertently come near him, had been seized with a severe fit of sneezing—an accident which, being cruelly misunderstood, had caused her to be driven contumeliously from the bar. Mr. Dempster habitually held his chin tucked in, and his head hanging forward, weighed down, perhaps, by a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between which his closely-clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and new-mown table-land. The only other observable features were puffy cheeks and a protruding yet lipless mouth. Of his nose I can only say that it was snuffy; and as Mr. Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at anything in particular, it would have been difficult to swear to the colour of his eyes.
‘Well! I’ll not stick at giving myself trouble to put down such hypocritical cant,’ said Mr. Tomlinson, the rich miller. ‘I know well enough what your Sunday evening lectures are good for—for wenches to meet their sweethearts, and brew mischief. There’s work enough with the servant-maids as it is—such as I never heard the like of in my mother’s time, and it’s all along o’ your schooling and newfangled plans. Give me a servant as can nayther read nor write, I say, and doesn’t know the year o’ the Lord as she was born in. I should like to know what good those Sunday schools have done, now. Why, the boys used to go a birds-nesting of a Sunday morning; and a capital thing too—ask any farmer; and very pretty it was to see the strings o’ heggs hanging up in poor people’s houses. You’ll not see ’em nowhere now.’
‘Pooh!’ said Mr. Luke Byles, who piqued himself on his reading, and was in the habit of asking casual acquaintances if they knew anything of Hobbes; ‘it is right enough that the lower orders should be instructed. But this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down. In point of fact, these Evangelicals are not Churchmen at all; they’re no better than Presbyterians.’
‘Presbyterians? what are they?’ inquired Mr. Tomlinson, who often said his father had given him ‘no eddication, and he didn’t care who knowed it; he could buy up most o’ th’ eddicated men he’d ever come across.’
‘The Presbyterians,’ said Mr. Dempster, in rather a louder tone than before, holding that every appeal for information must naturally be addressed to him, ‘are a sect founded in the reign of Charles I., by a man named John Presbyter, who hatched all the brood of Dissenting vermin that crawl about in dirty alleys, and circumvent the lord of the manor in order to get a few yards of ground for their pigeon-house conventicles.’
‘No, no, Dempster,’ said Mr. Luke Byles, ‘you’re out there. Presbyterianism is derived from the word presbyter, meaning an elder.’
‘Don’t contradict me, sir!’ stormed Dempster. ‘I say the word presbyterian is derived from John Presbyter, a miserable fanatic who wore a suit of leather, and went about from town to village, and from village to hamlet, inoculating the vulgar with the asinine virus of dissent.’
‘Come, Byles, that seems a deal more likely,’ said Mr. Tomlinson, in a conciliatory tone, apparently of opinion that history was a process of ingenious guessing.
‘It’s not a question of likelihood; it’s a known fact. I could fetch you my Encyclopædia, and show it you this moment.’
‘I don’t care a straw, sir, either for you or your Encyclopædia,’ said Mr. Dempster; ‘a