“I am sure she never meant it,” said the younger sister. “She was only just flattered for a moment, weren’t you, Lizzie? and pleased to think of someone new.”
“That’s about the fact, that is,” said the old woman. “Something new; them lasses would just give their souls for something new.”
“But Lizzie must know,” said Miss Warrender, “that her old customers would never stand it. I was going to talk about some work, and of coming up two days next week to the Warren. But if there is any idea of the—other place—”
“For goodness’ sake speak up and say, No, miss, there ain’t no thought of it, Lizzie!”
“Now I know you’re so strong against it, of course I can’t, and there’s an end,” said Lizzie; but she looked more angry than convinced.
X
The girls went round by the rectory on their way home. It was a large red brick house, taller almost than the church, which was a very old church, credibly dating from the thirteenth century, with a Norman arch to the chancel, which tourists came to see. The rectory was of the days of Anne, three stories high, with many twinkling windows in framework of white, and a great deal of ivy and some livelier climbing plants covering the walls, with the old mellow red bricks looking through the interstices of all this greenery. The two Miss Warrenders did not stop to knock or ring, but opened the door from the outside, and went straight through the house, across the hall and a passage at the other end, to the garden beyond, where Mrs. Wilberforce sat under some great limes, with her little tea-table beside her. She was alone; that is, as near alone as she ever was, with only two of the little ones playing at her feet, and the little Skye comfortably disposed on the cushions of a low wickerwork chair. The two sisters kissed her, and disturbed the children’s game to kiss them, and displaced the little Skye, who did not like it at all. Mrs. Wilberforce was a little roundabout woman, with fair hair and a permanent pucker in her forehead. She was very well off—she and all her belongings; the living was good, the parish small, the work not overpowering: but she never was able to shake off a visionary anxiety, the burden of some ancestral trouble, or the premonition of something to come. She was always afraid that something was going to happen: her husband to break down from overwork (which for clergymen, as for most other people in this generation, is the fashionable complaint), the parish to be invaded with dissent and socialism, the country to go to destruction. This latter, as being the greatest, and at the same time the most distant, a thing even which might happen without disturbing one’s individual comfort, was most certain; and she waited till it should happen, with always an anxious outlook for the first symptoms. She received Minnie and Chatty, who were her nearest neighbours, and whom she saw almost daily, with a tone of interest and attachment beyond the ordinary, as she had done ever since their father’s death. Indeed, they had found this everywhere, a sort of natural compensation for their “great loss.” They were surrounded by the respect and reawakened interest of all the people who were so familiar with them. A bereaved family have always this little advantage after a death.
“How are you, dears,” Mrs. Wilberforce said, “and how is your dear mother?” Ordinarily Mrs. Warrender was spoken of as their mother, tout court, without any endearing adjective.
“Mamma is quite wonderful,” said Minnie. “She thinks of everything and looks after everything almost as if—nothing had ever happened.”
“She keeps up on our account,” said Chatty, “and for Theo’s sake. It is so important, you know, to keep home a little bright—oh, I mean as little miserable as possible for him.”
“Bright, poor child!” said Mrs. Wilberforce pathetically. “You have not realised as yet what it is. When the excitement is all over, and you have settled down in your mourning, then is the time when you will feel it. I always tell people the first six weeks is nothing; you are so supported by the excitement. But afterwards, when everything falls into the old routine. I suppose, however, you are going away.”
“Mamma said something about it: but we all preferred, you know—”
“You had much better go away. I told you so the moment I heard it. And as Theo has all the summer to himself before he requires to go back to Oxford, what is there to stop you?” Mrs. Wilberforce took great pleasure in settling other people’s plans for them, and deciding what they were to do.
“That wasn’t what we came to talk about,” said the elder Miss Warrender, who was quite able to hold her own. “Mrs. Wilberforce, we have just come from old Mrs. Bagley’s at the shop, and there we made quite a painful discovery. We said what we could, but perhaps it would be well if you would interfere. I think, indeed, you ought to interfere with authority, or even, perhaps, the rector.”
“What is it? I always thought that old body had a turn for Dissent. She will have got one of those people from Highcombe to come out and hold a meeting: that is how they always begin.”
“Oh no—a great deal worse than that.”
“Minnie means worse in our way of thinking,” the younger sister explained.
“I don’t know anything worse,” said the clergyman’s wife, “than the bringing in of Dissent to a united parish such as ours has been. But I know it will come. I am always expecting to hear of it every day; things go so fast nowadays. What with radicalism, and the poor people all having votes, and what you call progress, one never knows
