A very day, indeed, for hot coffee, odorous ham, and smoking mushrooms—as all these ministrants to the stomach's comfort on the Spawer's breakfast-table there are—but the Spawer only looks at them in staring disregard.
This last blow about Pam has struck him so suddenly and so forcefully that he can only keep feeling himself over, and wonder what bones are broken, and how many. His pride, he knows, has suffered a nasty shock. All along he has been reckoning upon the girl as though she were an actual possession, to be left or taken at his own sweet will; a fixed star in the firmament. And lo! now he finds she is very much of a planet, with a path of her own, that has swum into his ken and swum out again, leaving the astronomer stuck in the mud with his telescope to his eye, a pitiable object of miscalculation.
And by turns he is incredulous and despairing, and hopeful and indignant and irate. She is not going to be married. It is a lie. There is no truth in it. She is going to be married. The shadow-man, the moonlight, the parting, her avoidance of him—all point to the truth of it.
Pam was marrying a pair of bell-bottomed trousers and a shabby morning coat. Horrible! horrible!
Oh, the sting was bitter! The disappointment supreme. Even his love for the girl was so steeped in the sense of humiliation and of grief that she should have fallen to such extent below the standard of his measurement, that at times almost he failed to tell whether he really loved her any longer, or was possessed only of pity.
He could n't believe it. On his soul, he could n't believe it. He knew it was true, but he could n't believe it. On Sunday morning, wet or fine, he must go to Ullbrig and learn the truth. Father Mostyn would be sure to know and tell him.
And meanwhile he had to garb himself with the extra scrupulousness of attire for covering his torn pride. Now that he was humbled he must be very proud. He must show no tell-tale flinchings. He must laugh with the lazy, half-contemptuous humor, as though this little rustic world ... Morbleu! ... this little pasture of bucolic clods ... this fallow field of earthen intelligences ... you understand? ... this pitiable place called Ullbrig, meant no more to him in serious reality than Jarge Yenery's straw hat. If this thing were so, as he knew and dared not believe ... it should be buried in his bosom and heaped under a thousand simulations of indifference. Neither the girl nor any in Ullbrig should have the gratification of knowing that he had ever acted to her as other than the friend.
CHAPTER XXXII
It lacked yet some minutes to service time when the Spawer passed up the path to church. In the porch old Obadiah Beestman, with a bell-rope in one hand and a bell-rope in the other, and his right foot slung in the noose of a third, was still ringing his dismal ding, dang, dong, as the Spawer entered. Obadiah is also clerk and sexton too, and is shrewdly suspected by his Reverence of Nonconformist proclivities into the bargain.
He nodded solemn greeting to the Spawer as the Spawer arrived—the ringing of the bells being to Obadiah as much a part of the morning's devotion as the Prayers and Litany—if not more—and told him, "Onny on 'em to left 'and." By which he meant that the Spawer was at liberty to occupy any pew that caught his fancy, without fear of trespassing upon rights or being disturbed. Not a soul, so far, was in church. The Spawer picked his favorite pew, with its faded green cushion and family of hassocks—the grand patriarch standing a foot and a half high, and sloped for the knees to rest on without unnecessary bending; with others of various shapes and sizes, down to the baby sawdust-stuffed buffet, no bigger than a bath bun. Once upon a time, some God-fearing household of the Established Faith had come here week by week to worship, and brought these hassocks to kneel upon, and this cushion for ease in sitting, and had died or gone away, while the tokens of their devotions were lapsed into possession of the church. In his old right-hand corner, with his shoulders fitted into the angle of the high pew-back and side, he sat and turned over the books within reach; hymns, ancient and modern, commencing at page twenty; prayer-books, decorated with rude designs of the human body, with poems against theft, and so much inscribed with names of ownership that the nine points of law and possession were merged in them quite; some small, some large; all clammy and smelling of the vault. Up and down the woodwork of the pew, and the hymn-books, and the green cushions, were the glistening tracks of lethargic but progress-making snails. All over the damp walls of the church they ran too, like luminous hieroglyphics of death and decay; and over the mural tablet in marble to the memory of Francis Shuttlewell Drayman, one time vicar, who served God in this church faithfully for forty-nine years, and was given rest as a reward for his labors on February 19, 1799. Also Hannah, wife of the above, who departed this life in search of her beloved husband, August 5, 1804.