“Them days and ours isn’t the same, Mr. Fenwick, and you can’t make ’em the same. And Our Saviour isn’t here now to say who is to be a Mary Magdalen and who isn’t. As for Carry Brattle, she has made her bed and she must lie upon it. We shan’t interfere.”
Fenwick was determined, however, that he would make his proposition. It was almost certain now that he could do no good to Carry by making it; but he felt that it would be a pleasure to him to make this self-righteous woman know what he conceived to be her duty in the matter. “My idea was this—that you should take her in here, and endeavour to preserve her from future evil courses.”
“Take her in here?” shrieked the woman.
“Yes; here. Who is nearer to her than a brother?”
“Not if I know it, Mr. Fenwick; and if that is what you have been saying to Brattle, I must tell you that you’ve come on a very bad errand. People, Mr. Fenwick, knows how to manage things such as that for themselves in their own houses. Strangers don’t usually talk about such things, Mr. Fenwick. Perhaps, Mr. Fenwick, you didn’t know as how we have got girls of our own coming up. Have her in here—at Startup? I think I see her here!”
“But, Mrs. Brattle—”
“Don’t Mrs. Brattle me, Mr. Fenwick, for I won’t be so treated. And I must tell you that I don’t think it over decent of you—a clergyman, and a young man, too, in a way—to come talking of such a one in a house like this.”
“Would you have her starve, or die in a ditch?”
“There ain’t no question of starving. Such as her don’t starve. As long as it lasts, they’ve the best of eating and drinking—only too much of it. There’s prisons; let ’em go there if they means repentance. But they never does—never, till there ain’t nobody to notice ’em any longer; and by that time they’re mostly thieves and pickpockets.”
“And you would do nothing to save your own husband’s sister from such a fate?”
“What business had she to be sister to any honest man? Think of what she’s been and done to my children, who wouldn’t else have had nobody to be ashamed of. There never wasn’t one of the Hugginses who didn’t behave herself;—that is of the women,” added Mrs. George, remembering the misdeeds of a certain drunken uncle of her own, who had come to great trouble in a matter of horseflesh. “And now, Mr. Fenwick, let me beg that there mayn’t be another word about her. I don’t know nothing of such women, nor what is their ways, and I don’t want. I never didn’t speak a word to such a one in my life, and I certainly won’t begin under my own roof. People knows well enough what’s good for them to do and what isn’t without being dictated to by a clergyman. You’ll excuse me, Mr. Fenwick; but I’ll just make bold to say as much as that. Good morning, Mr. Fenwick.”
In the yard, standing close by the gig, he met the farmer again.
“You didn’t find she’d be of your way of thinking, Muster Fenwick?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Brattle.”
“I know’d she wouldn’t. The truth is, Muster Fenwick, that young women as goes astray after that fashion is just like any sick animal, as all the animals as ain’t comes and sets upon immediately. It’s just as well, too. They knows it beforehand, and it keeps ’em straight.”
“It didn’t keep poor Carry straight.”
“And, by the same token, she must suffer, and so must we all. But, Muster Fenwick, as far as ten or fifteen pounds goes, if it can be of use—”
But the Vicar, in his indignation, repudiated the offer of money, and drove himself back to Salisbury with his heart full of sorrow at the hardness of the world. What this woman had been saying to him was only what the world had said to her—the world that knows so much better how to treat an erring sinner than did Our Saviour when on earth.
He went with his sad news to Mrs. Stiggs’s house, and then made terms for Carry’s board and lodging, at any rate, for a fortnight. And he said much to the girl as to the disposition of her time. He would send her books, and she was to be diligent in needlework on behalf of the Stiggs family. And then he begged her to go to the daily service in the cathedral—not so much because he thought that the public worship was necessary for her, as that thus she would be provided with a salutary employment for a portion of her day. Carry, as she bade him farewell, said very little. Yes; she would stay with Mrs. Stiggs. That was all that she did say.
XLII
Mr. Quickenham, Q.C.
On the Thursday in Passion week, which fell on the 6th of April, Mr. and Mrs. Quickenham came to Bullhampton Vicarage. The lawyer intended to take a long holiday—four entire days—and to return to London on the following Tuesday; and Mrs. Quickenham meant to be very happy with her sister.
“It is such a comfort to get him out of town, if it’s only for two days,” said Mrs. Quickenham; “and I do believe he has run away this time without any papers in his portmanteau.”
Mrs. Fenwick, with something of apology in her tone, explained to her sister that she was especially desirous of getting a legal opinion on this occasion from her brother-in-law.
“That’s mere holiday work,” said the barrister’s anxious wife. “There’s nothing he likes so much as that; but it is the reading of those horrible long papers by gaslight. I wouldn’t mind how much he had to talk, nor yet how much he had to write, if it wasn’t for all that weary reading. Of course he does
