Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr. Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gatepost to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St. Peter’s. Next day, Holy Innocents’, he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.
To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs. Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.
“A cold afternoon, Mrs. Bowater,” he intoned. “The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers.”
My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively tête-à-tête over her seed cake and thin bread and butter.
But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.
“Are you long with us?” he inquired, stirring his tea.
“I am quite, quite happy here,” I replied, with a sigh.
“Ah!” he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, “how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism—of a mechanical, a scientific age—which we have chiefly to contend against. We don’t often see you at St. Peter’s, I think?”
“You wouldn’t see very much of me, if I did come,” I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his “we” that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. “On the other hand,” I added, “wouldn’t there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?”
Mr. Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. “I wish,” he said, with a gallant little bow, “there were more like you.”
“More like me, Mr. Crimble?”
“I mean,” he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, “I mean that—that you—that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear.”
We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs. Bowater’s black currant jam.
“But then, I have plenty of time,” I said agreeably. “And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater’s brains.”
A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.
“Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a—a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion should be the great solvent. At least, that is my view.”
He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.
“Mixing people must be very wearisome,” I suggested, examining his face.
“ ‘Wearisome,’ ” he repeated blandly. “I am sometimes at my wits’ end. No. A curate’s life is not a happy one.” Yet he confessed it almost with joy.
“And the visiting!” I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr. Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.
“I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough.”
“But I assure you,” he replied, politely but firmly, “a true religion is exceedingly difficult. ‘The eye of a needle’—we mustn’t forget that.”
“Ah, yes,” said I warmly; “that ‘eye’ will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother’s cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother.”
Mr. Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.
“I remember, too,” I went on, “one summer’s day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing—bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window.”
“Jumped out of the window!” cried my visitor in consternation.
“Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn’t hurt myself. The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it—the air
