“He was our very dear friend,” said Mr. Glenning.
Chapter VI: SETTLING DOWN
While the congregation in the little church at Eversfield was singing the last hymn of the morning service the October sun passed from behind an extensive bank of cloud, and its rays shot down through the plain glass window upon the figure of a young woman, whose sudden and surprising illumination instantly attracted many pairs of eyes to her. She looked, and knew it, like a little angel as she stood in this shaft of brilliance, hymn-book in hand, singing the well-known words in a voice which enhanced their ancient sweetness; and the vicar, from his place at the side of the small chancel, fixed his gaze upon her with an expression of such saintly beatitude upon his face as to be almost idiotic.
Her name was Dorothy Darling; but her mother, who here stood beside her in the shadow under the wall, called her Dolly, and rightly congratulated herself upon having chosen for her only baby, twenty-three years ago, a name of which the diminutive was so appropriate to the now grown woman.
In the sunshine the girl’s soft, fair hair looked like a puff of gold, and her skin like coral; and the play of light and shade accentuated the pretty lines of her figure, so that they were by no means lost under the folds of her smart little frock. Her large, soft eyes were as innocent as they were blue, and never a glance betrayed the fact that she was singing for the direct benefit of the new Squire, whose head and shoulders appeared above the carved wooden walls of the sort of loose-box which was his family pew.
The miniature church, though dating from the twelfth century, still retained the features by which it had been transformed and modernized in the obsequious days of Walpole and the first of the Georges. The pews for the “gentry” were boxed in, and each was fitted with its door; but the walls of Jim’s pew were higher than the others and its area bigger. At the back of the church there were the open seats for the villagers and persons of vulgar birth; but the woodwork here was not carved, save with the occasional initials of lads long since passed out of memory.
At the sides of the chancel were set the mural tablets which recorded the genealogical lustres of dead Tundering-Wests, back to the day when a certain Captain of Horse had obtained a grant of the manor from the Commonwealth, in lieu of his devastated estate in Devon, and, with admirable tact, had married the daughter of the exiled Royalist owner. Around the whitewashed walls of the small nave large wooden boards were hung, upon which were painted the arms and quarterings of the successive Squires and their spouses; and above the chancel arch the royal Georgian escutcheon was displayed in still vivid colours.
The church, indeed, was a tiny monument to all that glory of caste which its Divine Founder abhorred, and which the aforesaid Roundhead, misapprehending the unalterable character of his fellow-countrymen, had apparently fought in his own day to suppress.