But on the whole Peggy and I got on capitally together, and she was in most respects an ideal landlady for a curate who was new and strange to his surroundings. She had lived her life in the parish, and knew its landmarks as no one else knew them. Besides, she amused me with her gossip, especially when I could draw her on the subject of the Rector and his theories, which she was never weary of discussing.
“The worst of it is,” she would say authoritatively, “he’s none too strict, to my way of thinking, in the matter of church-going. Only the other day he said to me ‘Yes, Peggy, church-going is good for all of us, not but what we may have too much of it’—did ever woman hear the like from her minister?—or rather we may follow it to the exclusion of better things. To do the thing we ought is better than to listen to it, and I’d come down easy on any one who stayed away from Church to do a kind act for a neighbour. Unluckily it’s usually to please ourselves, and not to help our neighbours, that we fight so shy of our Church.’”
In her little peculiarities Peggy was wonderfully diverting. For example, whenever she found herself in difficulties, as when the potatoes were hard, or the meat overdone, she would take refuge in the platitude, “I’ve done my best: I can no more,” thus casting all her care upon Fate as the inscrutable power which had wrought the mischief and must take the responsibility. She was also a firm believer in the guidance of astrology, always planting her flowers and vegetables when two benign planets were in conjunction, and avoiding with scrupulous care the baleful influence of Mars and Saturn. Only I wish she had abstained more wisely from words of which she had not mastered the meaning, as when she told me they had been “hanging a hamlet” in the Rectory garden, or “keeping the university” of the King’s birthday!
There was something else by the way that gave Peggy Ransom a special interest in my eyes. She had been housekeeper at the Manor House in the days of Marion’s youth, but had left it fifteen years before to form her own ill-fated marriage.
It was not much, but I suppose it was better than nothing, for an incipient lover like myself to learn at first-hand what his lady-love was like in the days of her infancy. But either Peggy’s memory was failing her, or her love for the Rectory children had made her forgetful of her earlier charge, for her reminiscences of Marion at that age were hardly of absorbing interest, being limited for the most part to a rambling catalogue of childish illnesses, and the skill with which Peggy had treated them. But possibly in the very warmest heart it would be difficult to stimulate raptures by a record of what your lady-love was doing at the early age of five.
This afternoon, for example, I had reached the stage at which Marion was recovering from a vague and mysterious illness called “thrush,” when we were interrupted by Aggie, who, as usual, made a bee-line towards us in flying leaps and bounds across the garden beds. “Here’s a letter for you, Mr. Stirling,” she cried, “from the Manor House. Uncle Edgar wants you to dine with him this evening at eight. I told him you had no engagement; besides, Marion who came with him said she was dying to make your acquaintance. But you must hurry up and dress for it’s past seven already.” As she spoke, she had pounced on Peggy’s two cats—Toby and Sambo by name—who were reposing peacefully on the porch above our heads, and was off again home down the garden with the pair of them close at her heels, all the three doing their level best to break off as many flowers as possible in their passage down the garden.
There were to be only four of us at dinner that evening. In the ignorance of my heart I rejoiced at Reggie’s absence, little thinking that, before the evening was over, I should have been glad to welcome his cousinly attentions to Marion as a far less dangerous rivalry than the one which was suddenly to burst upon me from a quarter wholly beyond the range of my vision.
CHAPTER IV
The old Manor House was looking its best, as half an hour later I walked up through the avenue by which it was approached.
Planted against the south-west side of a hill, the ground gently falling away in front of it, it caught the evening sun, which burnished the trees on either side, and called up all the lovely shades of colour that lie dormant in old red brick, as the fires that are latent in opal and carbuncle wake up at the touch of light. It is the fashion already to disparage Ruskin, and to find that we have over-rated him like so many of our heroes, but at any rate he was right in his devotion to the fine red brick of Elizabethan architecture. One marvels how any one who has looked upon Hatfield or Aston can condescend to build in any other medium. There is much stone, I know—Ham Hill by preference—that takes a lovely colouring from age, to which lichen and stonecrop and ivy would seem to have an instinctive affinity. But the setting provided by Nature, and the requirements of our dull uncongenial atmosphere find their proper complement, I think, in a brick-dust red, just as surely as they repudiate its vile twin brother, the white and yellow clay which time in its progress only makes more and more disreputable.