The Perpetual Curate · Chapter 14 (2/2)

Miss Dora’s visions were partly realised, for it was quite true that her iron-grey sister was making a round of calls upon Frank’s friends. Miss Leonora Wentworth went out in great state that day. She had her handsomest dress on, and the bonnet which her maid had calculated upon as her own property, because it was much too nice for Miss Leonora. In this impossible attire she went to see Mrs. Hadwin, and was very gracious to that unsuspecting woman, and learned a few things of which she had not the least conception previously. Then she went to the Miss Wodehouses, and made the elder sister there mighty uncomfortable by her keen looks and questions; and what Miss Leonora did after that was not distinctly known to anyone. She got into Prickett’s Lane somehow, and stumbled upon No. 10, much to the surprise of the inhabitants; and before she returned home she had given Mrs. Morgan her advice about the Virginian creeper which was intended to conceal the continual passage of the railway trains. “But I would not trust to trellis-work. I would build up the wall a few feet higher, and then you will have some satisfaction in your work,” said Miss Leonora, and left the Rector’s wife to consider the matter in rather an agreeable state of mind, for that had been Mrs. Morgan’s opinion all along. After this last visit the active aunt returned home, going leisurely along George Street, and down Grange Lane, with meditative steps. Miss Leonora, of course, would not for kingdoms have confessed that any new light had come into her mind, or that some very ordinary people in Carlingford, no one of whom she could have confidently affirmed to be a converted person, had left a certain vivid and novel impression upon her thoughts. She went along much more slowly than usual in this new mood of reflectiveness. She was not thinking of the licensing magistrates of St. Michael’s nor the beautiful faith of the colporteur. Other ideas filled her mind at the moment. Whether perhaps, after all, a man who did his duty by rich and poor, and could encounter all things for love and duty’s sake, was not about the best man for a parish priest, even though he did have choristers in white surplices, and lilies on the Easter altar? Whether it might not be a comfort to know that in the pretty parsonage at Skelmersdale there was someone ready to start at a moment’s notice for the help of a friend or the succour of a soul⁠—brother to Charley who won the Cross for valour, and not unworthy of the race? Some strange moisture came into the corners of Miss Leonora’s eyes. There was Gerald too, whom the Perpetual Curate had declared to be the best man he ever knew; and the Evangelical woman, with all her prejudices, could not in her heart deny it. Various other thoughts of a similar description, but too shadowy to bear expression, came in spite of herself through Miss Leonora’s mind. “We know that God heareth not sinners; but if any man be a worshipper of God and doeth His will, him He heareth;” and it occurred to her vaguely, for the first time, that she was harder to please than her Master. Not that such an idea could get possession of a mind so well fortified, at the first assault; but it was strange how often the thought came back to her that the man who had thrilled through all those people about Prickett’s Lane a kind of vague sense that they were Christians, and not hopeless wretches, forgotten of God; and who had taken in the mysterious lodger at Mrs. Hadwin’s, bearing the penalty of suspicion without complaint, would be true at his post wherever he might be, and was a priest of God’s appointing. Such were the strangely novel ideas which went flashing through Miss Leonora’s mind as she went home to dinner, ejecting summarily the new gin-palaces and her favourite colporteur. If anybody had stated them in words, she would have indignantly scouted such latitudinarian stuff; but they kept flickering in the strangest fluctuations, coming and going, bringing in native Wentworth prejudices and natural affections to overcome all other prepossessions, in the most inveterate, unexplainable way. For it will be apparent that Miss Leonora, being a woman of sense, utterly scorned the Rosa Elsworthy hypothesis, and comprehended as nearly how it happened as it was possible for anyone unaware of the facts to do.

Such were the good and bad angels who fought over the Curate’s fate while he was away. He might have been anxious if he had known anything about them, or had been capable of imagining any such clouds as those which overshadowed his good name in the lively imagination of Carlingford. But Rosa Elsworthy never could have occurred to the unconscious young man as a special danger, any more than the relenting in the heart of his aunt Leonora could have dawned upon him as a possible happiness. To tell the truth, he had left home, so far as he himself was concerned, in rather a happy state of mind than otherwise, with healthful impulses of opposition to the Rector, and confidence in the sympathy of Lucy. To hear that Lucy had given him up, and that Miss Leonora and Mrs. Morgan were the only people who believed in him, would have gone pretty far at this moment to make an end of the Perpetual Curate. But fortunately he knew nothing about it; and while Lucy held her head high with pain, and walked over the burning coals a conscious martyr, and Miss Dora sobbed herself asleep in her darkened room, all on his account, there was plenty of trouble, perplexity, and distress in Wentworth Rectory to occupy to the full all the thoughts and powers of the Curate of St. Roque’s.