CHAPTER XV
The world's life is shorter by a fortnight than it was on that last day I told you of, and during that fortnight the ordinary amount of things have happened. The usual number of people have had their bodies knocked to atoms and their souls into eternity by express trains; the usual number of men and maids have come together in the Times column in holy matrimony; and the usual number of unwelcome babies have been consigned to the canals. A great many players have laid down their cards, risen up, and gone away from the game of life; but whether winners or losers, they tell us not, neither shall we know awhile; and other players have taken their places, and have sat down with the zest of ignorance.
"Nature takes no notice of those that are coming or going."
She is briskly occupied at her old business – the business that seems to us so purposeless, progressless, bootless – the making only to unmake; the beautifying only to make hideous; the magnifying only to debase. Oh life! life! Oh clueless labyrinth! Oh answerless riddle!
September is waning mellowly into death, like a holy man to whom an easy passage has been vouchsafed; the land has been noisy with guns, and many partridges have been turned into small bundles of ruffled feathers – little round, brown corpses. Bob Brandon walks stoutly up the furzy hill sides and along the stony levels after the shy, scarce birds; he is out and about all day, but you do not hear him whistling or humming so often as you used to do. "He goeth heavily, as one that mourneth." The fortnight is past, and yet another week, and still Esther holds no speech of returning; her letters have waxed fewer, shorter, colder. Since that first one, mention of Gerard's name is there in them none. Bob is not of a suspicious nature, but he can add two and two together. He has been doing that little dreary sum all the last ten days, till his head aches. But though he can do this sum himself, he will not suffer any one else to do it – at least in his presence.
One day at dinner, when Bessy was beginning a little sour adaptation of the text, "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye," &c., to Esther, he interrupted her with downright outspoken anger and rebuke; and, though he apologised to her afterwards, and begged her pardon for having spoken rudely to her, yet she felt that that theme must not be dealt with again. He had promised to love her always in all loyalty, and whether she were loyal or disloyal to him made no difference. He will let no man, woman, or child speak evil of her in his hearing:
"… love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."
Jack Craven, too, is beginning to wonder a little when Esther is going to return to the old farmhouse – beginning to feel rather lonely as he sits by himself on the window-ledge of an evening, smoking his pipe, with no one to take it out of his mouth now, and thinking on his unpaid for steam ploughs and sterile mountain-fields, with no one to speak comfortably to him, or console him with sweet illogical logic.
"All is not gold that glitters." Care gets up behind the man, however fine a horse he may be riding. Care is sitting en croupe behind Miss Craven, and she cannot unseat him. It strikes her sometimes with a shock of fear that she is succeeding too well; that the admiration and liking and love she had hankered so greedily after, had striven unfairly for, had made wicked lightnings from her eyes to obtain, was ready to be poured out lavishly, eagerly, honestly at her feet, and she dare not put out a finger to take them up. She had been walking miles and miles of nights, up and down her bedroom, from door to window, from window to door, when all the rest of the house are abed and asleep.
"What shall I do? – what shall I do?" she cries out to her own heart, while her hands clasp one another hotly, and the candles, so tall at dressing time, burn short and low. "Oh! if I had some one to advise me! – not that I would take their advice, if it were to give up St. John! Give him up! How can I give up what I have not got? Oh Bob, Bob, if you only knew how I hate you! – Only less than I hate myself! Oh! why was not my tongue cut out before that unlucky day when I said I would try to like you? Try, indeed! If there is need for trying, one may know how the trial will end. Shall I tell St. John? What! volunteer an unasked confession? Warn him off Robert's territory when he is not thinking of trespassing? And if I were to tell him – oh Heaven! I had sooner put my hand into a lion's mouth – what would he think of me? He, with his fastidious, strict ideas of what a woman should be and do and look? Shall I write and ask Bob to let me off? It would not break his heart; he is too good; only bad people ever break their hearts, as I shall do some day, I dare say. Oh! poor Bob, how badly I am treating you! Poor Bob! and his yellow roses that St. John made such fun of! How I wish that the thoughts of your long legs and your little sour Puritan sisters did not make me feel so sick! Oh! if you would but be good enough to jilt me! What shall I do? – what shall I do? Wait, wait, go on waiting for what will never come, probably, and when I have degraded myself by waiting till hope is quite dead, go back whence I came, and jig-jog through life alongside of Bob in a poke bonnet like his mamma's. Ah Jack, Jack! why did I ever leave you? How I wish that all Bobs and St. Johns and other worries were at the bottom of the Red Sea, and you and I king and queen of some desert island, where there was nothing nearer humanity than monkeys and macaws, and where there was no rent nor workmen's wages nor lovers to torment us!"
One must go to bed at some time or other, however puzzled and pondering one may be; and in furtherance of this end, Esther, having reached this turn in her reflections, begins to undress. In so doing she misses a locket containing Jack's picture, which she always wears round her neck. She must have dropped it downstairs, where perhaps some housemaid's clumsy foot may tread upon it, and mar the dear, ugly young face within. She must go and look for it, though the clock is striking one. She takes up her candle, and runs lightly downstairs. The gas is out. Great shadows from behind come up alongside, and then stretch ahead of her; the statues glimmer ghostly chill from their dark pedestals. With a shock of frightened surprise she sees a stream of light issuing through the half-open door of the morning-room. Is it burglars, or are the flowers giving a ball, as in Andersen's fair, fanciful tale? She creeps gently up, and peeps in. The lamp still burns on the centre table, and pacing up and down, up and down, as she has been doing overhead, is a man buried in deepest thought. Fear gives place to a great, pleasant shyness. "I – I – I have lost my locket," she stammers.
He gives a tremendous start. "You up still!" he says, in astonishment. "Lost your locket, have you? Oh! by-the-by, I found it just now; here it is. Do you know (with a smile) I could not resist the temptation of looking to see who you had got inside it. Are you very angry?"
"Very!" she answers, drooping her eyes under his. She could sit and stare into Bob's eyes by the hour together, if she liked, only that it would be rather a dull amusement; with St. John it is different.
"Don't go; stay and talk a minute. It is so pleasant to think that we are the only conscious, sentient beings in the house – all the others sleeping like so many pigs," he says, coming over to her with an excited look on his face, such as calm, slow-pulsed English gentlemen are not wont to wear.
"No, no, I cannot – I must not."
She has taken the bracelets off her arms, and the rose from her hair: there she stands in her ripe, fresh beauty, with only the night and St. John to look at her.
"Five minutes," he says, with pleading humility, but putting his back against the door as he speaks.
"If you prevent my going, of course I cannot help myself," she answers, putting on a little air of offended dignity to hide her tremulous embarrassment.
"Don't be offended! Do you know" (leaving his post of defence to follow her) – "do you know what I have been doing ever since you went —not to bed apparently?"
"Drinking brandy and soda-water, probably" (looking rather surly, and affecting to yawn).
"That would have been hardly worth mentioning. I have been wondering whether my luck is on the turn. I have been da – I mean very unlucky all my life. I never put any money on a horse that he was not sure to be nowhere. Luck does turn, sometimes, doesn't it? Do you think mine is turning?"
"How can I tell?"
"You don't ask in what way I have been so unlucky. Why don't you? Have you no curiosity?"
"I never like to seem inquisitive," answers Esther, coldly, hoping that he does not notice how the white hands that lie on her lap are trembling.
"Do you recollect my telling you that I had made a great fool of myself once?"
"Yes."
"Do you care to hear about it, or do you not?" pulling at his drooping moustache, in some irritation at her feigned indifference.
"Yes, I care," she answers, lighting up an eager, mobile face – fear, shyness, and the sense of the impropriety of the situation all ceding to strong curiosity.
"Well, it was about a woman, of course. Cela va sans dire; a man never can get into a scrape without a woman to help him, any more than he can be born, or learn his A B C."
"Was she handsome?" looking up, and speaking quickly.
That is always the first question a woman asks about a rival. I do not know why, I am sure, as many of the greatest mischiefs that have been done on earth have been done by ugly women. Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot squinted ferociously.
"Pretty well. She had a thundering good figure, and knew how to use her eyes. By-the-by" (with an anxious discontent in his tone), "so do you. I often wish you did not; I hate being able to trace one point of resemblance between you and her."
"Did she refuse you?" asks Esther, hastily, too anxious for the sequel of the story to think of resenting the accusation made against her eyes.
"Not she! I should not have been the one to blame her if she had; one cannot quarrel with people for their tastes. She swore she liked me better than any one else in the world; that she would go down to Erebus with me, be flayed alive for me – all the protestations usual in such cases, in fact, I suppose," he ends bitterly.
"And threw you over?" says Essie, leaning forward with lips half apart, and her breast rising and falling in short, quick undulations.
"Exactly; had meant nothing else all along. I filled only the pleasant and honourable situation of decoy duck to lure on shyer game, and when the bird was limed – such a bird, too! a great, heavy, haw-haw brute in the Carabineers, with a face like a horse – she pitched me away as coolly as you would pitch an old shoe – or as you would pitch me, I dare say, if you had the chance."
"And what did you do?" asks Essie, breathlessly, her great eyes, black as death, fastened on his face.
St. John smiles – a smile half fierce, half amused.
"Run him through the body, do you suppose? – spitted him like a lark or a woodcock? – cut out his heart and made her eat it, as the man did to his wife in that fine old Norman story? No; I could have done any of them with pleasure if I had had the chance; with all our veneering and French polish, I think the tiger is only half dead in any of us; but I did not; I did none of them: I – prepare for bathos, please – I went out hunting; it was in winter, and, as misfortunes never come singly, I staked one of the best horses I ever was outside of: that diverted the current of my grief a little, I think."
He speaks in a jeering, bantering tone, scourging himself with the rod of his own ridicule, as men are apt to do when they are conscious of having made signal asses of themselves in order to be beforehand with the world.
"And she told you she was fond of you?" ejaculates Essie, raising her sweet face, sympathetic, indignant, glowing, towards him.
"Scores of times – swore it. I suppose it is no harder to tell a lie a hundred times than once; ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. Tell me," he says, vehemently, leaning over her, and taking hold of her hand, as if hardly conscious of what he was doing – "you are a woman, you must know – tell me, is there no difference between truth and lies? have they both exactly the same face? How is a man to tell them apart?"
They are both speaking in a low key, almost under their breath, for fear of drawing down upon themselves the apparition of Sir Thomas in déshabille and a blunderbuss. Their faces are close together; she can see the lines that climate and grief and passion have drawn about his eyes and mouth – can see the wild, honest anxiety looking through his soul's clear windows.
"I – I – don't know," she answers, stammering, and shivering a little, half with fear at his vehemence, half with the strong contagion of his passion.
"Do you ever tell untruths?" he asks, hurriedly, scanning her face with anxious eyes, that try to look through the mask of fair, white flesh, and see the heart underneath. "Don't be angry with me, but I sometimes fancy that you might."
"I! what do you mean?" snatching away her hand, and the angry blood rushing headlong to her cheeks.
"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Hazael was only the first of a long string who have asked that virtuously irate question.
His countenance clears a little. "You must forgive me," he says, repentantly. "I suppose it is my own unlucky experience that has made me so suspicious; because my own day has been cloudy, I have wisely concluded upon the non-existence of the sun. But, come" (smiling a little), "one good turn deserves another: have you nothing to tell me in return for the long list of successes I have been confiding to you?"
He watches her changing, flushing, paling face, with a keen solicitude which surprises himself. What can this downy, baby-faced rustic have to confess? Now for Bob! Now is the time – now or never! Sing, oh goddess, the destructive wrath of St. John, the son of Thomas! What time, place, situation, can be suitabler for such a tale? It is an hour and a half past midnight; they love one another madly, and they are alone.
Are they alone, though? Is this one of the statues stepped down from its pedestal in the hall that is coming in at the door, severely, chilly, fair, with a candle in its hand?
"Miss Craven!" ejaculates Constance (for it is she), stopping suddenly short, while a look of surprised displeasure ripples over her calm, smooth face.
Silence for a second on the part of everybody.
"It is a pity, St. John," says Miss Blessington, drawing herself up, and looking an impersonation of rigid, aggressive, pitiless virtue, "that you and Miss Craven should choose such a very unseasonable time for your interviews; it is not a very good example for the servants, if any of them should happen to find you here."
"The servants have something better to do than to come prying and eavesdropping upon their betters," retorts St. John, flushing angry-red to the roots of his hair, and not taking the most conciliatory line of defence.
"You are mistaken if you think I have been eavesdropping," says Constance, with dignified composure, her grave face looking out chastely cold from the down-fallen veil of her yellow hair. "I could not sleep, and came down to look for a book. Pray don't let me disturb your tête-à-tête!" making a movement towards going.
"Don't be a fool, Conny!" cries St. John, hastily, in bitter fear of having compromised Esther by his ill-advised detention of her: "it is the purest accident your having found Miss Craven and me together here!"
"I am well aware of that," she answers, with a little smiling sneer.
"You know what I mean, perfectly well: it is the purest accident our being here. Miss Craven lost her locket, and – "
"And" (smiling still) – "and you have been helping her to look for it. Yes, I see. Well, I – hope you will find it. Good-night!" going out and closing the door behind her.
"What did she say? – what does she mean?" cries Essie, panting, and with a face hardly less white than her dress.
"What does it matter what she means? She's a fool!" answers St. John, wrathfully. "Go to bed, and don't think about her; who cares?"
But he looks as if he did care a good deal.
CHAPTER XVI
The weekly clearance of mundane books has been made at Plas Berwyn; the skimp drab gowns, and the ill-made frock coat, whose flaps lap over one another so painfully behind, have been endured by the Misses Brandon and their brother respectively. At church has been all the Brandon household: son and daughters, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and sheep, camel and ass. I need hardly say that the last quartette have been introduced merely for the sake of euphony, and to give a fuller rhythm to the close of the sentence. The Misses Brandon always stand as stiff as pokers during the creed, with their backs to the altar. It amuses them, and it does not do anybody else any harm, so why should not they, poor women? Bob truckles to the Scarlet Woman; he bows, and turns his honest, serious face to the east. The service is in Welsh, of which he does not understand a word. He can pick his way pretty well through the prayers, however, by the help of a Welsh and English prayer book. There are several landmarks that he knows, whose friendly faces beam upon him now and again when he is beginning to flounder hopelessly among uncouth words of seven consonants and a vowel. These are his chief finger-posts: "Gogoniant ir Tad, ac ir Mab, ac ir Yspryd Glan;" that is, "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." "Gwared ni, Arglywd daionus!" "Good Lord, deliver us!" "Na Ladratta!" "Thou shalt not steal!"
Jack Craven has been to church too, and has, as he always does, been reading the inscriptions on the coffin-plates, nailed up, Welsh fashion, against the dilapidated, whitewashed walls, in lieu of monumental tablets. Esther has also been to church; has been in state in a great, close carriage, in company with Sir Thomas, Miladi, and Miss Blessington. Sir Thomas has been storming the whole way about a gap he detected in a hedge that they passed, through which some cattle have broken, so that they all arrive at the church door in that calmly devout state of quietude which is the fittest frame of mind for the reception of Divine truth.
The Gerard pew in Felton church is as large as a moderate-sized room, and is furnished with arm-chairs and a fire-place. In winter, Sir Thomas spends fully half the service time in poking the fire noisily and raking out the ashes. There is no fire now, and he misses it. A high red curtain runs round the sacred enclosure, and through it the farmers' wives and daughters strain their eyes to catch a glimpse of Miladi's marabout feathers, and Miss Blessington's big, golden chignon, and little green aerophane bonnet. St. John generally pulls the brass rings of his bit of curtain aside along the brass rods, to make a peep-hole for himself over the congregation. The shape and size of the pew do away with the necessity for any wearisome conformity of attitude among the inmates. During the prayers, Sir Thomas stands bolt upright, with one bent knee resting on his chair; his bristling grey head, shaggy brows, and fierce spectacles looming above the red curtain, to the admiration and terror of the row of little charity girls beneath. Constance kneels forward on a hassock, with a large, ivory prayer book, gold-crossed, red-edged, in one hand, and a turquoise and gold-topped double scent-bottle and cobweb cambric handkerchief in the other. She confesses in confidence to her pale lavender gloves that she has done that which she ought not to have done, and has left undone that which she ought to have done; making graceful little salaams and undulations of head and body every two minutes. Miladi confesses that she has gone to sleep. St. John makes no pretence of kneeling at all: he leans, elbow on knee and head on hand, and looks broken-hearted, as men have a way of doing in church.
In the afternoon, no one at Felton thinks of attending Divine service. It is a fiat of Sir Thomas's that no carriage, horses, or servants are to be taken out more than once a day, and the two miles' walk is an insuperable impediment to Lady Gerard, and hardly less so to Constance.
After luncheon the three ladies are sitting in the garden, with the prospect of four unbroken hours of each other's companionship before them. Masses of calceolarias, geraniums, lobelias, are flaring and flaunting around them – masses in which the perverted eye of modern horticulture sees its ideal of beauty. Nature, in her gardening, never plants great, gaudy squares and ovals and rounds of red and blue and yellow, without many shades of tenderest grey and green to soften and relieve them. Across the grass St. John comes lounging; his Sunday frock coat sitting creaseless to his spare, sinewy figure. Esther hates the sight of that coat: it reminds her so painfully, by its very unlikeness, of the singular garment that forms the head and crown of her betrothed's scant wardrobe.
"Do you know, I have half a mind to go to Radley church this afternoon. Will any one come with me? – will you, Conny?" turning, mindful of last night, with a conciliatory smile to Miss Blessington.
"How far is it?" she asks, indolently, divided between her hatred of walking and her desire to frustrate the tête-à-tête she sees impending between St. John and Esther.
"Three or four miles; four, I suppose."
She lifts her large blue eyes languidly, "Four miles there, and four miles back! Are you mad, St. John? What do you suppose one is made of?"
"Will you take pity on me then, Miss Craven?" turning eagerly to Esther.
She tilts her hat low down over her little, straight, Greek nose, looks up at him with shy coquetry under the brim, but answers not.
"A man who delights in solitude must be either a wild beast or a god, don't you know? I have no pretence to be either: I hate my own society cordially. Come" (with a persuasive ring in his pleasant voice); "you had much better."
"Don't be so absurd, St. John!" cries Miss Blessington, pettishly. "Miss Craven would far rather be left in peace."
"Would you?" (appealing to her.)
"No – o; that is – I mean – I think I should like the walk, if I may. May I, Lady Gerard? do you mind?" (turning sweet red cheeks and quick eyes towards her hostess.)
"I, my dear! Why should I mind?" responds Miladi, leaning back and fanning herself with a large fan (I believe that fat women often suffer a foretaste of the torments of the damned in the matter of heat) – "so as you don't ask me to go with you (with a fat smile). And, St. John, be sure that you are back in time for dinner, there's a good boy! You know what a fuss Sir Thomas is always in on Sunday evening?"
"I know that Sir Thomas is digging his grave with his teeth as fast as he can," answers St. John disrespectfully.
"Shall not we be rather late for church if we have four miles to go?" asks Esther, as she steps out briskly beside her companion, while heart and conscience keep up a quarrelsome dialogue within her.
"It is not four miles; it is only three."
"You told Miss Blessington four?"
"So I did; but I drew for the extra mile upon the rich stores of my imagination."
"Why did you?" she asks, turning a wondering rosy face set in the frame of a minute white bonnet towards him.
"Did you ever hear of the invitations that the Chinese give one another?" he asks, laughing, and switching off a fern-head with a baby umbrella – "which, however pressing they may be, are always expected by the giver to be declined. My invitation to Conny was a Chinese one: I was not quite sure that she would understand it as such, and I was so afraid that she would yield to my importunities, that I had to embroider a little in the matter of distance; do you see?"
There has been rain in the morning; now the clouds have rent themselves asunder, and broken up into great glistering rocks, peaks, and spires, such as no fuller on earth could white:
"Blue isles of heaven laugh between."
The breeze comes more freshly over the wet grasses and flowers, and blows in little fickle puffs against St. John's bronzed cheeks and Esther's carnation ones. The girl's heart is pulsing with a keen, sharp joy; all the keener, as the heaven's blue is deeper for the clouds that hover about it.
"I shall have him all to myself for three hours," she is saying inwardly; "he will speak to no one but me; he will hear no one else's voice (she forgets the parson and the clerk). Surely Bob may spare me these three hours, and just a few more, out of the great long life during which I shall tramp-tramp at his side! Three hours:
"Then let come what come may
No matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day."
"Let me carry your prayer book?"
"No, thanks; it is not heavy" (retaining it, mindful of a certain inscription in the fly-leaf).
"I am like a retriever; I like to have something to carry" (taking it from her with gentle violence).
"'Esther Craven from Robert Brandon.' Who is Robert Brandon when he is at home?" (speaking rather shortly.)
Esther's heart leaps into her mouth. Shall she tell him now, this minute, without giving herself time for second thoughts, which are not by any means always best? Shall she lift off the weight of compunction, anxiety, shame, that has been pressing upon her for the last fortnight? – let it fall down, as the dead albatross fell from the Ancient Mariner's neck —
"Like lead into the sea?"
The subject has introduced itself naturally, easily, without any of the dragging in by the head and shoulders of the officiously-volunteered confessions that she had salved her conscience by deprecating. Shall she, with strong, brave hand, push away all hope of the fine house and the broad lands, of the carriages and horses, the roses and pine-apples, the down pillows and fragrances of life? Shall she courageously, nobly, and yet in mere bare duty, turn away from the fairy prince and return to her hovel and scullionship? Shall she, or shall she not?
"Who is Robert Brandon?" repeats St. John, rather crossly.
In the second that follows Esther's life destiny is settled. She refuses the good and chooses the evil. ("He is the man I am engaged to," that is what she ought to have said.)
"He is in the – th foot." This is what she does say, blushing till the tears come into her eyes, turning away her head, and feeling stabbed through and through with shame.
"An ally of yours?" (quickly.)
"I have known him all my life," she answers, evasively.
"I thought he was a very young child, from this specimen of his caligraphy," remarks Gerard, superciliously, examining Bob's sprawly, slanty characters. "He would be none the worse for a few writing lessons."
Esther is a mean young woman: she feels ashamed of her poor lover, and his pothooks and hangers, and yet vexed with St. John for sneering at them.
"It was a fact worth inscribing, I must say," continues he, ironically – "the making of such a very handsome present," holding the poor little volume between his lavender kid finger and thumb, and surveying it with a disparaging smile. "He must have had a great deal of change out of sixpence, I should think."
"If you have nothing better to do than abuse my property," cries Esther, impulsively, snatching it out of his hand, "you may give it me back," looking half disposed to whimper.
"I apologise," responds St. John, gravely. "I did not mean to offend you; I give you carte blanche to insult mine" (holding out a very minute Russia leather one). "But may I ask, is Mr. Robert Blandon, or Brandon, or what's his name, your godfather?"
"No; why?"
"Because I never heard of any one being given a prayer book except as a wedding present, or by their godfathers and godmothers at their baptism. As you are not married, I know it could not have been the first case, and so I concluded it must be the last."
"Robert is not old enough to be my godfather," says Essie, overcoming by a great effort the repugnance to pronouncing the fateful name: "he is quite young; a great deal younger than you," she ends, rather spitefully.
"He might easily be that," replies St. John, coldly. "Once, not so very many years ago, in whatever company I was, I always was the youngest present; now, on the contrary, in whatever company I am, I always feel the eldest present. I don't suppose I always am, but I always feel as if I were."
"I believe old people have the best of it, after all," says Esther, recovering a little of her equanimity: "they have certainly fewer troubles than young ones. I should say that Sir Thomas was decidedly a happier man than you are."
"A man's happiness is proportioned to the simplicity of his tastes, I suppose," answers St. John, sardonically. "Sir Thomas's happiness lies in a nutshell: he has two ruling passions – eating and bullying; he has a very fair cook to satisfy the one, and my mother always at hand for the gratification of the other."
"We have all our ruling passions," rejoins Esther, with a light laugh, "only very often we will not own them. Mine is burnt almonds; what is yours?"
"Going to church," he replies, in the same tone; "as you may perceive by the strenuous efforts I have made to get there this afternoon."
Radley church stands on a knoll. Radley parishioners have to go upwards to be buried – a happy omen, it is to be hoped, for the destination of their souls. The church has a little grey tower, pretty, old, and squat, and a peal of bells – these are its claim to distinction – a merry peal, as people say; but to me it seems that in all the gamut of sad sounds there is nothing sadder, sorrowfuller, than bells chiming out sweetly and solemnly across the summer air.
Rung in by the grave music of their invitation, St. John and Esther enter. Verger or pew-opener is there none, so they slip into the first of the open sittings that presents itself. The clergyman is young and energetic: he has rooted up the tall, worm-eaten, oak pews – disfiguring compromises between cattle-pen and witness-box – has clothed several