The church-bells made a pleasant music
in Hey-don Hay on Sunday mornings, and were naturally
at their best upon a summer Sunday, when the sunshine
had thrown itself broadly down to sleep about the
tranquil fields. Heydon Hay was undisturbed by
the presence of a single conventicle in opposition
to the parish church, and the leisurely figures in
the fields and lanes and in the village street were
all bent one way. In fine weather the worshippers
were for the most part a little in advance of time,
and thereby found opportunity to gather in knots about
the lich-gate, or between it and the porch, where they
exchanged observations on secular affairs with a tone
and manner dimly tempered by the presence of the church.
Half a dozen people in voluminous
broadcloth were already gathered about the lich-gate
when Fuller appeared, carrying his portly waistcoat
with a waddle of good-humored dignity, and mopping
at his forehead. He was followed by a small boy,
who with some difficulty carried the ’cello in
a big green baize bag. One or two of the loungers
at the gate carried smaller green bags, and while
they and Fuller exchanged greetings, Sennacherib and
Isaiah appeared in different directions, each with
a baize-clothed fiddle tucked beneath his arm.
The church of Heydon Hay boasted a string band of
such excellence that on special occasions people flocked
from all the surrounding parishes to listen to its
performances. The members of the band and choir
held themselves rather apart from other church-goers,
like men who had special dignities and special interests.
They had their fringe of lay admirers, who listened
to their discussions on “that theer hef sharp,”
which ought to have sounded, or ought not to have
sounded, in last Sunday’s anthem.
Whether his lordship made a point
of it or not, the Barfield carriage was always a little
late, and Ferdinand certainly approved of the habit;
but on this particular morning the young gentleman
was earlier than common and arrived on foot.
The male villagers took off their hats as he walked
leisurely along, the female villagers bobbed courtesies
at him, and the children raced before him to do him
a sort of processional reverence. This simple
incense was pleasant enough, for he had spent most
of his time in larger places than Heydon Hay, and had
experienced but little of the sweets of the territorial
sentiment. He walked along in high good-humor,
and enjoyed his triumphal progress, though he made
himself believe that it was only the quaint, rural,
and Old-world smack of it which pleased him.
Here and there he paused, and was
affable with a county elector, but when he reached
the lich-gate he was altogether friendly with Fuller
and Sennacherib, and shook hands with Isaiah with
actual warmth.
“Mr. Hales was dining at the
Hall last night,” he said. “He told
us that some of the local people were in favor of
an organ for the church, and had talked about getting
up a subscription, but he wouldn’t listen to
the idea.”
“Should think not,” said
Sennacherib. “Parson knows when he’s
well off.”
“Indeed he does,” returned
Ferdinand; “he looks on the band as being quite
a part of the church, and says that he would hardly
know the place without it.”
“A horgin!” grunted Sennacherib,
scornfully. “An’ when they’d
got it, theer’s some on ’em as ’ud
niver be content till they’d got a monkey in
a scarlit coat to sit atop on it.”
“I hardly think they want that
kind of organ, Mr. Eld,” said Ferdinand, smoothly.
“I do’ know why they shouldn’t,”
returned Sennacherib. “It’s nothin’
but their Christian humbleness as could mek ’em
want it at all. The Lord’s made ’em
a bit better off than their neighbors, an’ they
feel it undeserved. It’s castin’
pearls afore swine to play for half on ’em about
here.”
Fuller, with both hands posed on the
baize-clad head of the ’cello, which the small
boy had surrendered to him some moments before, shook
his fat ribs at this so heartily that Sennacherib himself
re laxed into a surly grin, and then Ferdinand felt
him self at liberty to laugh also.
“You are rather severe upon
your audience, Mr. Eld,” he said.
“A tongue like a file, our Sennacherib’s
got,” said the mild Isaiah. “Touches
nothin’ but what he rasps clean through it.”
Ferdinand raised his hat at this moment
and made a forward step, with his delicately gloved
right hand extended.
“Good-morning, Miss Fuller.”
Mr. De Blacquaire prided himself,
and not without reason, on his own aplomb and
self-possession, but he felt now a curious fluttering
sensation to which he had hitherto been an entire stranger.
Ruth accepted his proffered hand and
responded to his salute, and then shook hands with
the two brethren. Ferdinand, with a jealousy at
which he shortly found time to be surprised, noticed
that her manner in shaking hands with these two stout
and spectacled old vulgarians differed in no way from
her manner in shaking hands with him. This in
itself was a renewal of that calm, inexplicable disdain
with which the girl had treated him from the first.
If rustic beauty had been fluttered at his magnificent
pressure, he could have gone his way and thought no
more about it; but when rustic beauty was just as cool
and unmoved by his appearance as if their social positions
had been reversed, the thing became naturally moving,
and had in it a lasting astonishment for leisure moments.
And there was no denying that the
girl was surprisingly pretty. Prettier than ever
this Sunday morning, in a remarkably neat dress of
dove color, a demurely coquettish hat, and a bit of
cherry-colored ribbon. Rustic beauty was not
altogether disdainful of town-grown aids, it would
seem, for Ferdinand’s eye, trained to be critical
in such matters, noted that the girl was finely gloved
and booted.
Her dress was like a part of her,
but that, though the young gentleman could not be
supposed to know it, was a charm she owed to her own
good taste and her own supple fingers. The young
gentleman might have been supposed to know, perhaps,
that her greatest charm of all was her unconsciousness
of charming, and it was certainly this which touched
him more than anything else about her.
There was no outer sign of the young
Ferdinand’s inward disturbance.
“I am afraid,” he said,
resolute to draw her into talk with himself if he
could, though it were only for a moment, “I am
afraid that I have made Mr. Eld very angry.”
Ruth’s brown eyes took a half-smiling
charge of Sennacherib’s surly figure.
“Seems,” said Sennacherib,
“the young gentleman was a-dinin’ last
night along with the vicar, and it appears as some
o’ the fools he knows want to rob the parish
church o’ the band, and build a horgin.”
“The vicar won’t listen
to the idea,” said Ferdinand. “There
was only one opinion about it.”
“It would be a great shame to
break up the band,” Ruth answered, speaking
with vivacity, and addressing Ferdinand. “Everybody
would miss it so. We would rather have the band
than the finest organ in the world.”
It happened, as such things will happen
for the disturbance of lovers, that just as Ruth turned
to address Ferdinand, Reuben Gold marched under the
lich-gate and caught sight of the group. The girl,
her father, the two Elds, and the young gentleman
were standing by this time opposite the church porch,
but as far away from it as the width of the pathway
would allow. Various knots of villagers, observing
that his lordship’s guest had stayed to talk,
stood respectfully apart to look on, and, if it might
be, to listen. Now Reuben, for reasons already
hinted at, disliked Mr. De Blacquaire. He was
not, perhaps, quite so conscious as Mr. De Blacquaire
himself that all the advantage of the differences
between them rested on the young gentleman’s
side. Reuben was not the sort of youngster who
says to himself, “I am a handsome fellow,”
or “I am a clever fellow,” or “I
am a fellow of a good heart,” but in face of
Ferdinand’s obvious admiration of Ruth and his
evident desire to stand well in her graces he had
sprung up at once to self-measurement, and had set
himself shoulder to shoulder with the intruder for
purposes of comparison. With all the good the
love for a good woman does us, with all the wheat
and oil and wine it brings for the nourishment of the
loftier half of us, it must needs bring a foolish bitter
weed or two, which being eaten disturb the stomach
and summon singular apparitions. And when Reuben
saw the girl of his heart in vivacious public talk
with a young man of another social sphere he was quite
naturally a great deal more perturbed than he need
have been. The gentleman admired her, and it
was not outside the nature of things that she might
admire the gentleman. He came up, therefore,
mighty serious, and shook hands with Fuller and the
brethren, and then with Ruth, with an air of severity
which was by no means usual with him. He carried
his violin case tucked beneath his arm-a
fact which of itself gave him an unworthy aspect in
Ferdinand’s eyes-and he had shaken
hands with Ruth without raising his hat. A denizen
of Heydon Hay who had taken off his hat in the open
air to a woman would have been scoffed by his neighbors,
and would probably have startled the woman herself
as much as his own sense of propriety. But all
the same Reuben’s salute seemed mutilated and
boorish to the man of more finished breeding, and
helped to mark him as unworthy to be the suitor of
so charming a creature as the rustic beauty.
“Mr. De Blacquaire’s a-tellin’
us, Reuben,” said old Fuller, “as theer’s
been some talk o’ breaking up the church band
and starting a horgin i’ the place on it.”
“That will end in talk,”
said Reuben, with a half-defiant, half-scrutinizing
look at Ferdinand, as if he charged him in his own
mind with having suggested the barbarism.
“There is no danger that it
will go further in the vicar’s time,”
returned Ferdinand. “Besides, his lordship
is as strongly opposed to the change as anybody.”
“It’s time we was movin’
inside, lads,” said Fuller, glancing up at the
church clock. Ruth inclined her head to Ferdinand,
gave a nod and a smile to Reuben (who nodded back
rather gloomily), and passed like a sunbeam into the
shadow of the porch. Fuller took up his ’cello
in a big armful, and followed, with the brethren in
his rear. Ferdinand, feeling Reuben’s company
to be distasteful, lingered in it with a perverse hope
that the young man might address him, and Reuben stood
rather sullenly by to mark his own sense of social
contrast by allowing the gentleman to enter first.
Each being disappointed by the other’s
immobility and quiet, a gradual sense of awkwardness
grew up between them, and this was becoming acute
when Ezra appeared, and afforded a diversion.
Under cover of his uncle’s arrival Reuben escaped
into the church.
In the course of centuries the church-yard
had grown so high about the building that grass waved
on a level with the sills of the lower windows, and
the church was entered by a small flight of downward
steps. The band and choir had a little bare back
gallery to themselves, and approached it by a narrow
spiral stone staircase. There were no side galleries,
and band and choir had therefore an uninterrupted survey
of the building. Reuben valued his place because
it gave him a constant sight of Ruth, and perhaps,
though the fancy is certain of condemnation at the
hands of some of the severer sort, the visible presence
of the maiden, for whose sake he hoped for all possible
excellences in himself, was no bad aid to devotion.
She sat in a broad band of tinted sunlight with her
profile towards her lover, looking to his natural fancy
as if she caused the sunlight, and were its heart
and centre. Opposite to her and with his
profile towards the music gallery also, sat Ferdinand,
and Reuben saw the young gentleman cast many glances
across the church in Ruth’s direction.
This spectacle afforded no aid to devotion, and not
even his music could draw the mind or eyes of the lover
from Ferdinand, whom he began to regard as being an
open rival.
There was enough in this reflection
to spur the most laggard of admirers into definite
action, and before the service was over Reuben had
made up his mind. He would speak to Ruth after
church, and at least decide his own chances.
The vicar’s sermon was brief, for the good man
had no rival, and could afford to please himself;
but its duration, short as it was, gave Reuben ample
time to be rejected and accepted a score of times
over, and to gild the future with the rosiest or cloud
it with the most tempestuous of colors. The Earl
of Barfield, according to his custom, had arrived
late, and it comforted Reuben a little to think that
in his presence, at all events, the young gentleman
could make no progress with his love affairs.
It comforted him further to see that Ruth took no
notice of the glances of her admirer, and that she
was to all appearance unconscious of them and of him.
But when once he had made up his mind
to instant action, the vicar’s brief discourse
began to drag itself into supernatural length.
Facing the preacher, and immediately beneath Reuben’s
feet, was a clock of old-fashioned and clumsy structure,
and the measured tick, tick of its machinery communicated
a faintly perceptible jar to a square foot or so of
the gallery flooring. The mechanical rhythm got
into Reuben’s brain and nerves until every second
seemed to hang fire for a phenomenal time, and the
twenty minutes’ discourse dragged into an age.
Even when the vicar at last lifted his eyes from the
neatly ranged papers which lay on the pulpit cushion
before him, laid down his glasses, and without pause
or change of voice passed on to the benediction, and
even when after the customary decent pause the outward
movement of the congregation began, Reuben’s
impatience had still to be controlled, for it was the
duty of the band to play a solemn selection from the
works of some old master while the people filed away.
Reuben led, and since the others must needs follow
at the pace he set, the old master was led to a giddier
step than he had ever danced to in a church before.
Sennacherib was scandalized, and even the mild Fuller
was conscious of an inward rebellion. The taste
in Heydon Hay was rather in favor of drawl than chatter,
and the old masters in their serious moods were accustomed
to be taken with something more than leisure.
“Why, Reuben, lad,” began
Sennacherib, “how didst come to let your hand
run away with your elber i’ that way?”
But Reuben, sticking his hat on anyhow,
was gone before the old man had finished his question,
thrusting his violin into its case as he made his
way down the corkscrew stairs. A single glance
assured him that Ruth was no longer in the churchyard.
The Earl of Barfield’s carriage blocked the
way at the lich-gate, and the young fellow waited in
high impatience until the obstacle should disappear.
His lordship, in view of the approaching election,
was much more amiable and talkative than common, and
he and his protege stood exchanging talk upon indifferent
topics with a little crowd of church-goers, but in
a while the earl climbed slowly into the carriage.
Ferdinand skipped nimbly after him and the two were
driven away. Reuben, with hasty nods and good-mornings
at one or two who would have detained him, strode
into the highway just in time to see the dove-colored
dress turn at a distant corner. He hurried after
it at his swiftest walk, and reaching the corner in
the most evident violent hurry, narrowly escaped walking
over the object of the chase, who had halted in talk
with Aunt Rachel at the place where their homeward
ways divided.
He had expected to find her still
far ahead, and this sudden encounter was amazingly
disconcerting to him. To begin with, apart from
his real purpose he had no business whatsoever round
that particular corner. Then to pause suddenly
in the midst of so violent a hurry was in itself a
plain proclamation of his intent, and his hot courage
had so rapidly gone cold that the change of inward
temperature carried a shock with it. Nevertheless,
he stopped and stammered a disjointed greeting to Rachel,
who returned for sole answer an icy little nod, pinching
her lips together somewhat superciliously as she gave
it.
Ruth, who would have been burdened
by a shyness equalling Reuben’s own had he succeeded
in catching her by herself, was bold enough in the
presence of one of her own sex, and observed the situation
with a delighted mischief. But this was changed,
as swiftly as Reuben’s emotions themselves,
to a state of freezing discomfort when Aunt Rachel
bolt upright, and with a mincing precision in her speech,
demanded to know if this young-ahem!-this
person had any communication to make.
“My dear aunt,” said the
poor girl, blushing scarlet, and casting an appealing
glance at Reuben.
“You appeared to be in a hurry,
Mr. Gold,” said the terrible old lady.
“My niece and I will not detain you.”
“Thank you,” responded
Reuben, shaken back into self-possession. “I
am not in a hurry any longer.”
Aunt Rachel turned right about face
with an almost military precision, and passing her
arm through Ruth’s led the girl away, leaving
Reuben shaken back into internal chaos. Ruth’s
blushing face and humid brown eyes were turned towards
him in momentary but keen apology, and he was left
standing alone on the cobbled pavement with a feeling
of perfect wreck.
“Aunt Rachel!” said the
girl, as she suffered herself thus ignominiously to
be towed away. “How could you make me behave
so rudely?”
“Have nothing to do with those
people,” replied Aunt Rachel, frigidly.
“They are bad, root and branch. I know them,
my dear. That young man has the audacity to admire
you. You must not encourage him.”
“I am sure,” said Ruth,
guiltily, only half knowing what she said, “he
has never spoken a word-”
“It is not necessary to wait
for words,” returned the old lady. “I
can see quite clearly. I am experienced.
I know the Golds. I have been familiar with the
method of their villany for many years.”
“How can you speak so?”
the girl asked, recovering something of her native
spirit. “I am sure that there is no better
man in the world than Mr. Ezra Gold. Everybody
speaks well of him.”
“It is not quite accurate, my
dear,” said Aunt Rachel, “to say that
everybody speaks well of him, when a person even so
inconsiderable as myself is in the act of speaking
ill of him.” The quaint veneer of fashion
with which for many years she had overlaid her speech
and manner was more apparent in this address than
common, but suddenly she broke through it and spoke
with an approach to passion. “I know them;
they are villains. Have nothing to do with any
member of that family, my dear, as you value your
happiness.” She pinched her niece’s
arm tightly as she spoke, and for a little time they
walked on in silence, Ruth not knowing what to say
in answer to this outburst, but by no means convinced
as yet of the villany either of Ezra or Reuben.
“Now, my dear,” Aunt Rachel began again,
with a return to her customary mincing tones, “you
are not far from your own residence. I observe,”
with a swift glance over her shoulder, “that
the person still lingers at the corner. But if
he should attempt to follow you may rely upon me to
intercept him. My niece must act like my niece.
You must show your detestation of his odious advances
in a proper manner.”
“But, Aunt Rachel!” protested
Ruth, “he has never made any advances, and I-I
haven’t any detestation.”
“All in good time, my dear,”
responded the old lady. “In the mean time,
rely upon my protection.” With this she
stood up birdlike, and pecked affectionately at Ruth’s
rosy cheek. The girl was well-nigh crying, but
restrained herself, and answered Rachel’s “God
bless you” with some self-possession.
“Good-morning, dear aunt.
But you are quite, oh, quite mistaken.”
“Indeed, my dear,” said
Aunt Rachel, with a glitter in her youthful eyes,
and a compression of her mobile lips, “I am nothing
of the kind.” Ruth’s eyes sank, and
she blushed before the old lady’s keen and triumphant
smile. She moved away downcast, while Aunt Rachel
took the opposite direction. The old lady wore
a determined air which changed to a sparkling triumph
as she saw Reuben cross the road with an inelastic
step, and continue his homeward way with a head bent
either in thought or dejection.