“‘Reggie, you kissed me just outside the door;
Use Attar, or don’t kiss me any more!’”
And, laughing still, she fled—fortunately without seeing me, who had watched the proceedings unobtrusively from the shelter of a friendly clematis.
CHAPTER III
I had found lodgings with one Peggy Ransom, whom I soon discovered to be one of the chief characters in the village, as the Rector had reported her. A tiny old lady she was, with a small and shrivelled face, like a Ribston pippin that had survived well on into April, and bright beady eyes that always reminded me of a squirrel’s. She had, too, something of the same small creature’s animal vivacity, and talked in a queer little chirpy strain that suggested its note of satisfaction when it has lighted upon a particularly fine nut or acorn.
In dress she was scrupulously neat, though in the dress of some pre-historic age. For example, she never appeared without a silk ’kerchief bound over her head, because, as she said, you never “knew where a draught might find you, and prevention was better than cure.”
On Sundays and holidays she appeared resplendent in a black silk gown, which, she told me with pride, could “stand of itself in the days when the Rector gave it her”—how many years before I had never had the rudeness to enquire. But it was still a fine article of raiment, and had been preserved with such scrupulous care that even in its old age it still retained its dignity.
She was not, I found, a heart-whole admirer of the Rector’s opinions. “As good and kindly a gentleman,” she said, “as ever trod in shoeleather, and a real Christian. But takes things a bit too pleasantly, I allow, and makes out the next world to be a more comfortable place than some of us, I fear, will find it. Not but what ’tis better that way than to go about, as some of us do, with faces sad enough to sour the cream, finding no pleasure in all the gifts the Almighty has showered upon us.”
She had lost her husband and all her family one by one, and found the joy of her life in the Rector and the Rectory children, who were always in and out of the kitchen, worrying her and hindering her work, it seemed to me, though she would never hear a word from anyone against them. “Bless their hearts,” she would say, “I’d be a lone and dreary old body without them, though I do wish that child Aggie would come up the garden path like a Christian, instead of jumping over the flower-beds and tempting the cats to play hide-and-seek among my lilies of the valley.”
But of all the Rectory children Reginald was her first and special favourite. This was unfortunate for me. Not but what I liked the lad—what little I had seen of him before he left for the continent. But it was tedious to be reminded so often of his perfections. Besides, I had a lively remembrance of the love-scene that had passed between him and his cousin on the day that followed my arrival, which for some reason or other I had thought out of place and unseasonable. Though of course I had no right to begrudge two cousins the pleasure of a cousinly salutation, and perhaps, if Marion had been old and ill-favoured, I should have found no temptation to do so. As it was, and for whatever reason, I was glad that Reggie was for the moment out of the field of my vision. And I should have tried to forget the liberty, for so I called it, that he had taken in kissing her, if only Peggy had not so strongly insisted on the nearness and intimacy of their relations. She was for ever harping on Reggie’s good looks—he was well enough I admit, but, after all, nothing to compare with Riverdale—and what a handsome pair they’d make, and how suitable the match would be. “And Master Reginald just worships the ground under her feet,” she would add; as if I couldn’t see that much without Peggy’s interference. And then she would look slyly at me and say, “I suppose you think her good-looking, don’t you, sir? The two curates who were here before you both made eyes at her—really Peggy, I thought, you can be a little vulgar at times—indeed, I may say it was for that reason they left us, and because they saw they had no chance against Master Reginald. It is true they were none too well favoured—short and dark the first was, and the last one thin and scraggy. Not but what he was beautifully fair in complexion.”
For a while after this interview Peggy and I were at variance. Every scrap of her information had been distasteful to me, especially her reference to the complexion of the curate who had preceded me, in which I detected, however gratuitously, an allusion to that slight tendency to freckles which I thought somewhat marred my own completeness.