time, the Bishop’s carriage had been seen driving through the High Street on its way to Lord Trufford’s, where he was to dine. The question of the lecture was decided, then?
The nature of the decision may be gathered from the following conversation which took place in the bar of the Red Lion that evening.
‘So you’re done, eh, Dempster?’ was Mr. Pilgrim’s observation, uttered with some gusto. He was not glad Mr. Tryan had gained his point, but he was not sorry Dempster was disappointed.
‘Done, sir? Not at all. It is what I anticipated. I knew we had nothing else to expect in these days, when the Church is infested by a set of men who are only fit to give out hymns from an empty cask, to tunes set by a journeyman cobbler. But I was not the less to exert myself in the cause of sound Churchmanship for the good of the town. Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing. That’s my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat, as Mr. Tryan shall learn to his cost.’
‘He must be a poor shuperannyated sort of a bishop, that’s my opinion,’ said Mr. Tomlinson, ‘to go along with a sneaking Methodist like Tryan. And, for my part, I think we should be as well wi’out bishops, if they’re no wiser than that. Where’s the use o’ havin’ thousands a-year an’ livin’ in a pallis, if they don’t stick to the Church?’
‘No. There you’re going out of your depth, Tomlinson,’ said Mr. Dempster. ‘No one shall hear me say a word against Episcopacy—it is a safeguard of the Church; we must have ranks and dignities there as well as everywhere else. No, sir! Episcopacy is a good thing; but it may happen that a bishop is not a good thing. Just as brandy is a good thing, though this particular brandy is British, and tastes like sugared rain-water caught down the chimney. Here, Ratcliffe, let me have something to drink, a little less like a decoction of sugar and soot.’
‘I said nothing again’ Episcopacy,’ returned Mr. Tomlinson. ‘I only said I thought we should do as well wi’out bishops; an’ I’ll say it again for the matter o’ that. Bishops never brought any grist to my mill.’
‘Do you know when the lectures are to begin?’ said Mr. Pilgrim.
‘They are to begin on Sunday next,’ said Mr. Dempster, in a significant tone; ‘but I think it will not take a long-sighted prophet to foresee the end of them. It strikes me Mr. Tryan will be looking out for another curacy shortly.’
‘He’ll not get many Milby people to go and hear his lectures after a while, I’ll bet a guinea,’ observed Mr. Budd. ‘I know I’ll not keep a single workman on my ground who either goes to the lecture himself or lets anybody belonging to him go.’
‘Nor me nayther,’ said Mr. Tomlinson. ‘No Tryanite shall touch a sack or drive a waggon o’ mine, that you may depend on. An’ I know more besides me as are o’ the same mind.’
‘Tryan has a good many friends in the town, though, and friends that are likely to stand by him too,’ said Mr. Pilgrim. ‘I should say it would be as well to let him and his lectures alone. If he goes on preaching as he does, with such a constitution as his, he’ll get a relaxed throat by-and-by, and you’ll be rid of him without any trouble.’
‘We’ll not allow him to do himself that injury,’ said Mr. Dempster. ‘Since his health is not good, we’ll persuade him to try change of air. Depend upon it, he’ll find the climate of Milby too hot for him.’
Chapter VII.
Mr. Dempster did not stay long at the Red Lion that evening. He was summoned home to meet Mr. Armstrong, a wealthy client, and as he was kept in consultation till a late hour, it happened that this was one of the nights on which Mr. Dempster went to bed tolerably sober. Thus the day, which had been one of Janets happiest, because it had been spent by her in helping her dear old friend Mrs. Crewe, ended for her with unusual quietude; and as a bright sunset promises a fair morning, so a calm lying down is a good augury for a calm waking. Mr. Dempster, on the Thursday morning, was in one of his best humours, and though perhaps some of the good-humour might result from the prospect of a lucrative and exciting bit of business in Mr. Armstrong’s probable lawsuit, the greater part of it was doubtless due to those stirrings of the more kindly, healthy sap of human feeling, by which goodness tries to get the upper hand in us whenever it seems to have the slightest chance—on Sunday mornings, perhaps, when we are set free from the grinding hurry of the week, and take the little three-year old on our knee at breakfast to share our egg and muffin; in moments of trouble, when death visits our roof or illness makes us dependent on the tending hand of a slighted wife; in quiet talks with an aged mother, of the days when we stood at her knee with our first picture-book, or wrote her loving letters from school. In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues, and Mr. Dempster, whom you have hitherto seen only as the orator of the Red Lion, and the drunken tyrant of a dreary midnight home, was the first-born darling son of a fair little mother. That mother was living still, and her own large black easy-chair, where she sat knitting through the livelong day, was now set ready for her at the breakfast-table, by her son’s side, a sleek tortoise-shell cat acting as provisional incumbent.
‘Good morning, Mamsey! why, you’re looking as fresh as a daisy this morning. You’re getting young again’, said Mr. Dempster, looking up from his newspaper when the little old lady entered. A very little old lady she was, with a pale, scarcely wrinkled face, hair of that peculiar white which tells that the locks have once been blond, a natty pure white cap on her head, and a white shawl pinned over her shoulders. You saw at a glance that she had been a mignonne blonde, strangely unlike her tall, ugly, dingy-complexioned son; unlike her daughter-in-law, too, whose large-featured brunette beauty seemed always thrown into higher relief by the white presence of little Mamsey. The unlikeness between Janet and her mother-in-law went deeper than outline and complexion, and indeed there was little sympathy between them, for old Mrs. Dempster had not yet learned to believe that her son, Robert, would have gone wrong if he had married the right woman—a meek woman like herself, who would have borne him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper. In spite of Janet’s tenderness and attention to her, she had had little love for her daughter-in-law from the first, and had witnessed the sad growth of home-misery through long years, always with a disposition to lay the blame on the wife rather than on the husband, and to reproach Mrs. Raynor for encouraging her daughter’s faults by a too exclusive sympathy. But old Mrs. Dempster had that rare gift of silence and passivity which often supplies the absence of mental strength; and, whatever were her thoughts, she said no word to aggravate the domestic discord. Patient and mute she sat at her knitting through many a scene of quarrel and anguish; resolutely she appeared unconscious of the sounds that reached her ears, and the facts she divined after she had retired to her bed; mutely she witnessed poor Janet’s faults, only registering them as a balance of excuse on the side of her son. The hard, astute, domineering attorney was still that little old woman’s pet, as he had been when she watched with triumphant pride his first tumbling effort to march alone across the nursery floor. ‘See what a good son he is to me!’ she often thought. ‘Never gave me a harsh word. And so he might have been a good husband.’
O it is piteous—that sorrow of aged women! In early youth, perhaps, they said to themselves, ‘I shall be happy when I have a husband to love me best of all’; then, when the husband was too careless, ‘My child will comfort me’; then, through the mother’s watching and toil, ‘My child will repay me all when it grows up.’ And at last, after the long journey of years has been wearily travelled through, the mother’s heart is weighed down by a heavier burthen, and no hope remains but the grave.
But this morning old Mrs. Dempster sat down in her easy-chair without any painful, suppressed remembrance of the pre-ceding night.
‘I declare mammy looks younger than Mrs. Crewe, who is only sixty-five,’ said Janet. ‘Mrs. Crewe will come to see you today, mammy, and tell you all about her troubles