[CHAPTER I]
SURLEY RECTORY
The old man lay dying at last. He had lingered on for months, now getting a little better and giving hope that the end might be deferred for a time, now sinking, so that it seemed as if it had come; but with all the alterations in his state moving onwards slowly and surely towards his rest. Now there was no longer any hope, even for a few days more. His two daughters and his son sat by his bedside, waiting. There was nothing to do but to wait, and to think.
It was towards the close of a sunny April day. The windows of the large eastward-facing room were wide open to admit the fragrant air. The birds were making a great to do in the Rectory garden, where the flowers of early spring flaunted their bright colours, and the lawns answered them with living verdure. Nearly every morning for five and forty years the old man who was dying had arisen from the bed on which he lay to look out on this scene. It might almost be said to have been what he had lived for. At the age of thirty-four, still a young man, with a wife still younger, and his two little girls, he had come to this assured haven, with no thought of leaving it until he had lived his life out to the full, where there was everything to make life what he wished it to be.
There was the pleasant roomy house, so admirably adapted to the delights of a quiet home life, the beautiful garden, the glebe and the outbuildings and the two or three cottages which added what was almost a little farm to what was almost a country mansion. And there was the substantial income, which would provide for the pleasures and hospitalities as well as the responsibilities of country life.
There was a little queer eighteenth century church, hardly more than a meeting-house, but big enough to hold such proportion of the three hundred or so inhabitants of the parish of Surley as would make a practice of attending it. It was to serve them that the Reverend William Cooper had been appointed to the living by the Bishop of the Diocese, and the house and the garden and the glebe and the substantial income were to be the reward of his service. None of the parishioners were very poor; the income would not be greatly depleted by the calls of charity. Nor would the time of their ministrant be too much occupied by them, supposing him to have other uses to which to put it.
He had done his work and taken his reward. There had never been any question in his mind that the one was not fitted to the other, nor any sense of diffidence before others who were spending themselves in the vineyard with material reward barely existent. It had been rather the other way about. The Rector of Surley was almost a dignitary, by reason of the reward, and carried himself so before his lesser brethren, but not with arrogance, for he was an amiable likeable man, and only living up to his position. These things were so; it was not even necessary to excuse them, at least in those days.
An amiable likeable man! He had gone about his parish for five and forty years, until there were only two or three in it who were older than he. Most of them now living he had christened into the Church, many he had buried, some he had married, a few he had helped, as one helps friends, not as one gives doles to the poor. He had touched the lives of all of them, and they had been satisfied with him. It was not for them to complain of the established order. These things came from above. If the Rector of Surley lived in a big house, with a thousand a year, the Squire lived in a bigger one, with ten thousand a year. The one was no more explicable than the other, and no more or less to be criticised. What might come from either to ameliorate the lot of the less fortunate would depend upon what sort of Squire or Rector there might be.