The vicar explained things as he went on: “The fact is, Mr. Smith, I didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those d⸺ dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not as an expletive.”
“How very odd!” said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious friendliness.
“Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the churchwardens are—; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk and the sexton as well.”
“How very strange!” said Stephen.
“Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some progress soon.”
“You must trust to circumstances.”
“There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it? But I like it on such days as these.”
The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the forms of the mounds it covered—themselves irregularly shaped, with no eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain that all this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with the effect of a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel. Detached rocks stood upright afar, a collar of foam girding their bases, and repeating in its whiteness the plumage of a countless multitude of gulls that restlessly hovered about.
“Now, Worm!” said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen running up the hill without a bonnet.
Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during dinner. She looked so intensely living and full of movement as she came into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by “the purple light” in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by sending him to measure the height of the tower.
What could she do but come close—so close that a minute arc of her skirt touched his foot—and asked him how he was getting on with his sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a preacher.
Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
“Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?” she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
“Oh no, that I won’t,” said he, staring up.
“Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and to me about what he said in his sermon today, and forgets that I wrote it for him. Isn’t it absurd?”
“How clever you must be!” said Stephen. “I couldn’t write a sermon for the world.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough,” she said, descending from the pulpit and coming close to him to explain more vividly. “You do it like this. Did you ever play a game of forfeits called ‘When is it? where is it? what is it?’ ”
“No, never.”
“Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so on. You put that down under ‘Generally.’ Then you proceed to the First, Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys—says they are all my eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being put in great black brackets, writing opposite, ‘Leave this out if the farmers are falling asleep.’ Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of each page, ‘Keep your voice down’—I mean,” she added, correcting herself, “that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up afield. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!”
Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had the motions, without the motives, of a hoyden; the grace, without the self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow
