The Perpetual Curate

Curate’s note. While he scribbled it, little Rosa stood apart watching him with admiring eyes. He had said she was too pretty to be sent across Grange Lane by herself at this hour, though it was still no more than twilight; and he looked up at her for an instant as he said the words⁠—quite enough to set Rosa’s poor little heart beating with childish romantical excitement. If she could but have peeped into the note to see what he said!⁠—for perhaps, after all, there might not be anything “between” him and Miss Lucy⁠—and perhaps⁠—The poor little thing stood watching, deaf to her aunt’s call, looking at the strange ease with which that small epistle was written, and thinking it half divine to have such mastery of words and pen. Mr. Wentworth threw it to Sam as if it were a trifle; but Rosa’s lively imagination could already conceive the possibility of living upon such trifles and making existence out of them; so the child stood with her pretty curls about her ears, and her bright eyes gleaming dewy over the fair, flushed, rosebud cheeks, in a flutter of roused and innocent imagination anticipating her fate. As for Mr. Wentworth, it is doubtful whether he saw Rosa, as he swung himself round upon the stool he was seated on, and turned his face towards the door. Somehow he was comforted in his mind by the conviction that it was his duty to call at Mr. Wodehouse’s as he came back. The evening brightened up and looked less dismal. The illness of the respected father of the house did not oppress the young man. He thought not of the sickroom, but of the low chair in one corner, beside the worktable where Lucy had always basketfuls of sewing in hand. He could fancy he saw the work drop on her knee, and the blue eyes raised. It was a pretty picture that he framed for himself as he looked out with a half smile into the blue twilight through the open door of Elsworthy’s shop. And it was clearly his duty to call. He grew almost jocular in the exhilaration of his spirits.

“The Miss Wentworths don’t approve of memorial windows, Elsworthy,” he said; “and, indeed, if you think it necessary to cut off one of the chief people in Carlingford by way of supplying St. Roque’s with a little painted glass⁠—”

“No, sir⁠—no, no, sir; you’re too hard upon me⁠—there wasn’t no such meaning in my mind; but I don’t make no question the ladies were pleased with the church,” said Elsworthy, with the satisfaction of a man who had helped to produce an entirely triumphant effect. “I don’t pretend to be a judge myself of what you call ’igh art, Mr. Wentworth; but if I might venture an opinion, the altar was beautiful; and we won’t say nothing about the service, considering, sir⁠—if you won’t be offended at putting them together, as one is so far inferior⁠—that both you and me⁠—”

Mr. Wentworth laughed and moved off his chair. “We were not appreciated in this instance,” he said, with an odd comic look, and then went off into a burst of laughter, which Mr. Elsworthy saw no particular occasion for. Then he took up his glove, which he had taken off to write the note, and, nodding a kindly good night to little Rosa, who stood gazing after him with all her eyes, went away to the Blue Boar. The idea, however, of his own joint performance with Mr. Elsworthy not only tickled the Curate, but gave him a half-ashamed sense of the aspect in which he might himself appear to the eyes of matter-of-fact people who differed with him. The joke had a slight sting, which brought his laughter to an end. He went up through the lighted street to the inn, wishing the dinner over, and himself on his way back again to call at Mr. Wodehouse’s. For, to tell the truth, by this time he had almost exhausted Skelmersdale, and, feeling in himself not much different now from what he was when his hopes were still green, had begun to look upon life itself with a less troubled eye, and to believe in other chances which might make Lucy’s society practicable once more. It was in this altered state of mind that he presented himself before his aunts. He was less self-conscious, less watchful, more ready to amuse them, if that might happen to be possible, and in reality much more able to cope with Miss Leonora than when he had been more anxious about her opinion. He had not been two minutes in the room before all the three ladies perceived this revolution, and each in her own mind attempted to account for it. They were experienced women in their way, and found a variety of reasons; but as none of them were young, and as people will forget how youth feels, not one of them divined the fact that there was no reason, but that this improvement of spirits arose solely from the fact that the Perpetual Curate had been for two whole days miserable about Skelmersdale, and had exhausted all his powers of misery⁠—and that now youth had turned the tables, and he was still to see Lucy tonight.

VII

“Your Rector is angry at some of your proceedings,” said Miss Leonora. “I did not think a man of your views would have cared for missionary work. I should have supposed that you would think that vulgar, and Low-Church, and Evangelical. Indeed, I thought I heard you say you didn’t believe in preaching, Frank?⁠—neither do I, when a man preaches the Tracts for the Times. I was surprised to hear what you were doing at the place they call Wharfside.”

“First let me correct you in two little inaccuracies,” said Mr. Wentworth, blandly, as he peeled his orange. “The Rector of Carlingford is not my rector, and I don’t preach the Tracts for the