"You really needn't bother about the incense and the vestments," Mark assured him. "I like incense and vestments; but I don't think they're the most important things in religion. You couldn't find anybody more evangelical than Mr. Ogilvie, though he doesn't call himself evangelical, or his party the Evangelical party. It's no use your trying to argue me out of what I believe. I know I'm believing what it's right for me to believe. When I'm older I shall try to make everybody else believe in my way, because I should like everybody else to feel as happy as I do. Your religion doesn't make you feel happy, Uncle Henry!"
"Leave the room," was Mr. Lidderdale's reply. "I won't stand this kind of talk from a boy of your age."
Although Mark had only claimed from his uncle the right to believe what it was right for him to believe, the richness of his belief presently began to seem too much for one. His nature was generous in everything, and he felt that he must share this happiness with somebody else. He regretted the death of poor Mr. Spaull, for he was sure that he could have persuaded poor Mr. Spaull to cut off his yellow moustache and become a Catholic. Mr. Palmer was of course hopeless: Saint Augustine of Hippo, St. Paul himself even, would have found it hard to deal with Mr. Palmer; as for the new master, Mr. Blumey, with his long nose and long chin and long frock coat and long boots, he was obviously absorbed by the problems of mathematics and required nothing more.
Term came to an end, and during the holidays Mark was able to spend most of his time at Meade Cantorum. He had always been a favourite of Mrs. Ogilvie since that Whit-sunday nearly two months ago when she saw him looking at her garden and invited him in, and every time he revisited the Vicarage he had devoted some of his time to helping her weed or prune or do whatever she wanted to do in her garden. He was also on friendly terms with Miriam, the elder of Mr. Ogilvie's two sisters, who was very like her brother in appearance and who gave to the house the decorous loving care he gave to the church. And however enthralling her domestic ministrations, she had always time to attend every service; while, so well ordered was her manner of life, her religious duties never involved the household in discomfort. She never gave the impression that so many religious women give of going to church in a fever of self-gratification, to which everything and everybody around her must be subordinated. The practice of her religion was woven into her life like the strand of wool on which all the others depend, but which itself is no more conspicuous than any of the other strands. With so many women religion is a substitute for something else; with Miriam Ogilvie everything else was made as nearly and as beautifully as it could be made a substitute for religion. Mark was intensely aware of her holiness, but he was equally aware of her capable well-tended hands and of her chatelaine glittering in and out of a lawn apron. One tress of her abundant hair was grey, which stood out against the dark background of the rest and gave her a serene purity, an austere strength, but yet like a nun's coif seemed to make the face beneath more youthful, and like a cavalier's plume more debonair. She could not have been over thirty-five when Mark first knew her, perhaps not so much; but he thought of her as ageless in the way a child thinks of its mother, and if any woman should ever be able to be to him something of what his mother had been, Mark thought that Miss Ogilvie might.
Esther Ogilvie the other sister was twenty-five. She told Mark this when he imitated the villagers by addressing her as Miss Essie and she ordered him to call her Esther. He might have supposed from this that she intended to confer upon him a measure of friendliness, even of sisterly affection; but on the contrary she either ignored him altogether or gave him the impression that she considered his frequent visits to Meade Cantorum a nuisance. Mark was sorry that she felt like that toward him, because she seemed unhappy, and in his desire for everybody to be happy he would have liked to proclaim how suddenly and unexpectedly happiness may come. As a sister of the Vicar of the parish, she went to church regularly, but Mark did not think that she was there except in body. He once looked across at her open prayer book during the Magnificat, and noticed that she was reading the Tables of Kindred and Affinity. Now, Mark knew from personal experience that when one is reduced to reading the Tables of Kindred and Affinity it argues a mind untouched by the reality of worship. In his own case, when he sat beside his uncle and aunt in the dreary Slowbridge church of their choice, it had been nothing more than a sign of his own inward dreariness to read the Tables of Kindred and Affinity or speculate upon the Paschal full moons from the year 2200 to the year 2299 inclusive. But St. Margaret's, Meade Cantorum, was a different church from St. Jude's, Slowbridge, and for Esther Ogilvie to ignore the joyfulness of worshipping there in order to ponder idly the complexities of Golden Numbers and Dominical Letters could not be ascribed to inward dreariness. Besides, she wasn't dreary. Once Mark saw her coming down a woodland glade and almost turned aside to avoid meeting her, because she looked so fay with her wild blue eyes and her windblown hair, the colour of last year's bracken after rain. She seemed at once the pursued and the pursuer, and Mark felt that whichever she was he would be in the way.
"Taking a quick walk by myself," she called out to him as they passed.
No, she was certainly not dreary. But what was she?
Mark abandoned the problem of Esther in the pleasure of meeting the Reverend Oliver Dorward, who arrived one afternoon at the Vicarage with a large turbot for Mrs. Ogilvie, and six Flemish candlesticks for the Vicar, announcing that he wanted to stay a week before being inducted to the living of Green Lanes in the County of Southampton, to which he had recently been presented by Lord Chatsea. Mark liked him from the first moment he saw him pacing the Vicarage garden in a soutane, buckled shoes, and beaver hat, and he could not understand why Mr. Ogilvie, who had often laughed about Dorward's eccentricity, should now that he had an opportunity of enjoying it once more be so cross about his friend's arrival and so ready to hand him over to Mark to be entertained.
"Just like Ogilvie," said Dorward confidentially, when he and Mark went for a walk on the afternoon of his arrival. "He wants spiking up. They get very slack and selfish, these country clergy. Time he gave up Meade Cantorum. He's been here nearly ten years. Too long, nine years too long. Hasn't been to his duties since Easter. Scandalous, you know. I asked him, as soon as I'd explained to the cook about the turbot, when he went last, and he was bored. Nice old pussy cat, the mother. Hullo, is that the Angelus? Damn, I knelt on a thistle."
"It isn't the Angelus," said Mark quietly. "It's the bell on that cow."