His Reverence shook his head, and passed over to the cupboard again.
"A very great mistake," he said, stooping on one knee and speaking into the cavernous recesses of the shelves; and after a moment: "A very great mistake," he said. "I 'm not surprised at your incredulity. Of course, being ignorant of circumstances, you 've nothing but your judgment to guide you—and plainly judgment would lead you to pronounce against such a form of proceeding. Yes!" He raised himself from the floor with the twisted face for a rheumatic twinge in his knee, and returned once more to his table preparations. "I must admit that the girl has disappointed me. Of course ... ever since the beginning—as Ullbrig will tell you if you care to pay it the compliment of asking (which I don't suppose you will)—this has been a contingency to reckon with. But I 'd hoped. You see ... it 's different. Things latterly had looked so favorable. I thought the musical experiment was likely to succeed. Ha! and the French too. Yes, yes; the French too. It seemed to have stimulated the girl to aspirations altogether beyond Ullbrig. I thought we 'd trained her palate to require daintier food in every respect than Ullbrig could give her. And then ... all at once ... to be beaten on the post. Of course—" he drew attention to what followed with a quiet gesture, as though it were really quite obvious enough without the superfluous emphasis of pointing out—"... it would be quite possible for me to forbid the thing—veto it completely and put a stop to it once for all. But then..." he screwed up his mouth for a moment's reconsideration of what such an act would effect, "for the present I have n't quite found my justification for this extreme measure."
"He is ... a schoolmaster?" the Spawer hazarded.
"Exactly; our Ullbrig schoolmaster. A worthy enough man, no doubt, in his own particular way—but it is n't the way I had in my mind for Pam. I believe he excels somewhat in free-hand and rule of three. These are his specialties. His father—if my memory serves me right—" here the Vicar appeared to interrogate his memory through fringed lashes, "... was a—ha!-small greengrocer and mixed provision dealer—Knaresbro' way, I believe. Of course, under ordinary circumstances, I should have had no alternative but to nip the whole affair in the bud; pack Pam away, if need be, and arrange meanwhile for the fellow to be transplanted in some peculiarly far and foreign soil. But as it is ... that seems an unnecessary setting of the mills to grind without grist. If we stop this marriage..." His eye roamed over the table, where knives and forks and spoons and plates and glasses commenced to array themselves with a semblance of order beneath his fingers. The Spawer's eye shifted, as a meeting seemed imminent. "... Perhaps, when I 'm dead and gone, she may contract a worse. Situated as she is, without friends or society, we can't hope to place her in life as by right and reason she should be placed. Perhaps, if one could only finance the girl, and secure fashionable influence for her, and float her upon the social sea, she might repay the investment cent for cent. But on the other hand ... there 's always a fear. Knowing nothing of the temptations of society life, she might fall to the first barrel like a lame pigeon. Besides, the girl shows no hankerings after the flesh-pots. There 's not a pinch of mundane salt in her nature. So why apply it with one's own fingers, and spoil her in the seasoning? Ha! why indeed? Therefore, as things stand, she must be sacrificed. This man wants her and she wants him—more strongly than even I 'd supposed—and when all 's said and done, we might only make worse of it if we tried to twist human nature to our own preconcerted theories. At least, the fellow has no positive vices—they are mostly negative. He is steady, sober, respectable; a hard worker, likely—so far as one can foresee—to provide the girl with a certain home for life. For an indefinite period they may remain at Ullbrig, where—except for those inevitable little disturbances which we may expect under conditions of matrimony—her existence will be but slightly changed. Of course, she will have to relinquish her postal duties, but her parochial work will suffer no modification.
"Ha! now for the larder. Let 's see what there is to pick. Do you feel anything in the lobster way? Here 's a pie that Pam 's cooked and stuffed into the larder for me—knowing I should be back too late to lay in stock for Sunday. Dear girl. Why in the world could n't she think as beautifully for herself as she does for others? And here 's his reverence's brown loaf, and some beet, and some herring olives. Come, come! We shan't do so badly."
"You only got back last night?" the Spawer inquired.
"Last night only," his Reverence rejoined, dispersing his various acquisitions about the table. "Came along with Friend Tankard from Hunmouth. Poor Friend Tankard! I think he gets slower and slower. Some day, mark my words, he 'll set out from Hunmouth, and never reach Ullbrig at all. That 'll be the end of him. However, he did just manage to pull us through this time, and for the rest of the evening I was interviewing our errant sister. But she stood firm. I tried to shake her on all points; had her in tears even. Yes, poor girl, had her in tears. She rained copiously, but it only seemed to water the roots of her resolve. She used the tears of my making to beg to me with. Ha! Let 's see ... to be sure! The beer. You 're a beer man, at least, are n't you?—even though you stop short of whiskey. Capital! capital! I 'm going to offer you a little specialty of my own. It 's a local beer—not Ullbriggian, by the way—but from the district, and you 'll say you never tasted its equal. Foams like champagne and bites like a nettle. Mild withal."
He disappeared from sight on this new errand, and returned, after a remote sound of clinking, with half a dozen bottles of his specialty, three by the neck in each hand.
"Here we are! If the light were n't so bad, I 'd ask you to examine the color. But that 's no use. We 'll let that go, and judge by the taste alone.... And so—" By a skilful intonation he cleared his voice of the beer, and skipped back to the old topic where they had been before. "... In the end we allowed the matter to stand, and deferred judgment."
"And they will be married..." the Spawer began.