Anne had known Little Gidding all her life, and she shared her father’s love for the lonely little church perched on the edge of the hillside, with the slope of green sward below and the woods behind. She had been brought up to revere Nicholas Ferrar, and had loved to reconstruct a life which had so much of the beauty of religion in it, and nothing of what she disliked. Often she thought that she would have been content for her father to have been a clergyman if he had lived in the seventeenth century, or even in the eighteenth for the matter of that, for it was only during the reign of Queen Victoria that the clergy in England lost touch with the community and became self-conscious. Anne knew how much happier her father would have been had he belonged to Nicholas Ferrar’s household, and though she would not have cared for it herself (she would have disliked rising at four o’clock for prayers every morning) she wished he could live in such a way himself. Thus for once she was tolerant, for she loved Little Gidding, and had prayed in the narrow little church with an outburst of religious passion such as she had never experienced in Ely Cathedral.
For the rest of that evening father and daughter spoke of Little Gidding, calling up pictures in each other’s minds of how it must be looking in the spring weather, and of the life of the immense and extraordinary household which had lived there until the Roundheads had burned the roof over their heads and had thrown the brass eagle lectern in the church into the pond below.
“The men slept in one wing of the house and the women in the other,” Anne remembered. “And Nicholas Ferrar slept watchfully in the middle. That is the funny side,” but she hid her thought from her father, and when she spoke it was to remind him of the immense number of children in the community.
“His daughter brought her eleven children; there were thirty people altogether,” said her father, and he passed on to describe the three visits of King Charles I, and so vivid were his words that Anne could picture to herself, more clearly than ever before, the visit the King paid during the civil war when he came toiling up the hill on foot, and alone, to pray.
“There is no more sacred spot in England,” said Mr. Dunnock, and Anne was inclined to agree with him. That night she lay for some time without sleeping, giving herself up to the happiest thoughts, and when at last she dozed off it was with the picture of Richard Sotheby in her mind: Richard walking over the greenest turf where the manor house had stood, resting on the sides of the dry grassy moat, and then walking down by the edge of the wood to the little church with Nicholas Ferrar’s tomb in the pathway leading up to it, under a tombstone, the letters of which are written in moss. A tall figure came toiling up the hill to meet him; she saw a tired man with a pale face—King Charles the First, and try how she would to dream of Richard Sotheby, King Charles would reappear.
“I shall certainly try to see Richard before he goes this morning,” Anne thought at breakfast. “I shall look in and tell Mrs. Sotheby that I have come to say good-bye.”
But when the time came she went past the shop, for she remembered Mr. Sotheby’s look of surprise when he found that she was acquainted with his son, and the long hostile silence before he spoke, after he had recognized her in the painting.
“Mr. Sotheby does not approve of my knowing Richard,” Anne said to herself, glancing through the windows of the shop. She could see no one inside, and the longer she meditated over the grocer’s behaviour at Rachel’s birthday party, the more convinced she became that he was jealous of her, and alarmed lest an attachment should spring up between his son and her.
“I will go for a stroll on the green,” and looking about her she saw for the first time that the sun was shining, and that the grass was greener after the rain of the day before. “Why, the hawthorns have come into leaf; the horse-chestnut buds are bursting; in a few days the apples will be in blossom,” but the daily progress of the spring, which would ordinarily have given her such keen pleasure, was meaningless now. “I must see Richard before he goes,” she said in desperation. “I must arrange with him about finding me work in Paris,” and she remembered with dismay that she did not even know his address.
Soon she turned back on her footsteps, and fully an hour was spent in passing and repassing the grocer’s shop.