“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have me help the sick and needy.”
“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to mock I hasten to cry peccavi. But, seriously, this kind of parochial charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St. Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is picturesque.”
“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their pains.”
“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done, and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the cobbler on our round?”
“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”
“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”
“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for papa.”
“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough for that. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”
“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of man.”
“And how does he live?”