Chapter Six.
Virginia.
“A sense of mystery her spirit daunted.”
The vicar of Elderthwaite was Mr Seyton’s youngest brother. There had been one between them, the father of the Ruth mentioned in the last chapter, but he had married well, and died early, leaving this one girl, who lived with her grandmother, and paid occasional visits to Elderthwaite.
James Seyton had been the wildest of the three, and had taken orders to pay his debts by means of the family living, the revenues of which he had never fully enjoyed. He had never married, and his life—though just kept in bounds by the times in which he lived, so that he did not get tipsy in the Seyton Arms, nor openly scandalise a parish with so low a standard of right as Elderthwaite—was a thoroughly self-indulgent one. He read the service once on Sundays, and administered the Communion three times a year, while the delay and neglect of funerals, marriages, and baptisms were the scandal of every parish round. He rarely visited his flock; and yet the vicar was not wholly an unpopular man. He was good-natured, and though he drank freely and sometimes swore loudly, he had a certain amount of secular intercourse with his parishioners of a not unneighbourly kind.
The pressure of poverty made Mr Seyton a hard landlord, and between oppression and neglect the inhabitants of the picturesque tumbledown village were a bad lot, and neither squire nor parson did much to make them better. But their vicar now and then did put before the worst offenders the consequences of an evil life in language plain enough to reach their understanding; and he had a word and a laugh for most of them.
Mr Lester was frequently heard to inveigh against Parson Seyton’s shortcomings, and seriously, as well he might, regretted the state of Elderthwaite parish; but Mr Seyton doctored all his horses and dogs when they were ill, and was, “after all, an old neighbour and a gentleman.” He taught Cherry to catch rats, and took him out otter-hunting, and there was the oddest friendship between them, which Cherry, when a boy, had once exemplified in the following manner:—
The Bishop had paid an unexpected visit at. Oakby, and Cheriton following in the wake, while his father and Mr Ellesmere were showing off their new schools, heard him express his intention of going on to Elderthwaite; upon which Cherry ran full speed across the fields, found Parson Seyton shooting rabbits, decidedly in shooting-costume, gave him timely warning, and, with his own hands so tidied, dusted, and furbished up the wretched old church, that its vicar, entering into the spirit of the thing, fell to with a will, astonished the lazy blind old sexton, and produced such a result as might pass muster in a necessarily lenient north-country diocese.
Cherry then diffidently produced one of his father’s white ties which he had put in his pocket, “thinking you mightn’t have one clean,” and as the old vicar, with a shout of laughter, arrayed himself in it, he said,—
“Ay, ay, my lad, between this and the glass of port I’ll give his lordship (he won’t better that in any parish), we’ll push through.”