"No. But whether the garden is made or not seems so unimportant now in the face of all these complications. I think I won't say anything to Coombe myself, but will wait until William comes down. What was it actually that he said to the men about Edmund?"
"Oh, it was outrageous; but it shows the sort of feeling that has grown up with regard to Edmund and William. He told them that Edmund was desperately jealous of William on account of his title and his money, and that if this work they were doing was stopped they would have him to thank for it, for he hated William doing anything at Hayslope. Then of course he had been paying them more than the current rate of wages—I suppose William didn't know that—which made it difficult for Edmund when it came to employing them himself. But there they are, working for us at less than they were paid here, and refusing to go on under Coombe at the higher rate. So you see that Edmund is still respected by the villagers and work-people, in spite of all the difficulties that have been made."
Lady Eldridge arose somewhat abruptly. "We seem to have got back to general criticism," she said, "which I thought we had put behind us. I am not going on with that, Cynthia. I think we had better leave it alone altogether until William comes down. See, the rain has stopped. Let us go out."
[CHAPTER XIV]
CHURCH AND AFTER
There was nothing remarkable about Hayslope Church, unless it was its tower, which was large enough to make it a landmark for miles around, and its bells, whose full and mellow peal ringing out across the summer woods and fields, or in winter time over a landscape muffled white in snow, brought that sense of peaceful festivity which belongs especially to rural England, so many centuries old. The tower was of perpendicular architecture, the main body of the church, conceived with less largeness of aim, of an earlier date. But most of its character had been finally lost in the restoration to which it had been subjected in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Colonel Eldridge's grandfather had supplied the money for this work, as a thank-offering for the safe return of his son, who had been in the thick of the Indian Mutiny. The taste, which had seemed to him of the best, had been supplied by one or other of the ecclesiological malefactors of the time, whose baneful activities, carried on by their immediate successors, have left scarcely an old church in all England in which it is possible to feel the quiet and grateful influences of tradition. There were seats of pitch pine, varnished, a chancel paved with encaustic tiles, thinly lacquered metal work of a mean design, and a little triple reredos of oak underneath the distressing colours of the East window.
And yet it was possible sometimes to catch the sense of the long past, which the restorers had done their mischievous best to destroy. Lady Eldridge, somewhat troubled in her mind, and anxious to lay hold of whatever composing influence the morning service could bring her, looked here and there during the progress of the sermon, and it came home to her—that soothing impression of age and use and wont, which is the rightful heritage of old churches, and especially of old country churches.
The seats belonging to the Hall and the Grange were in what had once been the South Chapel, and were slightly raised above the rest. The side view of the altar, the choir-boys and handful of choirmen, backed by the garishly patterned organ pipes, held nothing for the eye to rest on with pleasure. But the high pulpit, of Jacobean oak, from which Mr. Comfrey was engaged in directing his flock, was consecrated by some centuries of use to that weekly exercise. Behind him, in a line from where she was sitting, was a window of little diamond panes of clear glass, through which the trees could be seen, and the birds flying to and fro. Perhaps it was this which first brought the sense of peace to her mind; for that outlook into the happy world of birds and trees had often freed her thoughts from the slight oppression caused by Mr. Comfrey's dialectics, which were concerned with nothing that seemed to bear upon the life that was all about him. But this morning it set her thinking of the past, as it hung about the familiar church, in which once or twice before she had caught at the skirts of time, and held them for a little.