“Well, of course,” said Aunt Laura, “if he won’t be a nuisance to you. . . .” But Edwin was too pleased and excited to mind what she said. He kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious tenderness, clasped his arm. It seemed that catastrophe had strange uses. Already it had thrown the ordinary course of life into more than one curious byway, and now, behold, he was to embark upon another strange adventure, to become familiar with another sort of life. He determined that his duty (whatever that might be) should not suffer by it. When they returned from their holiday, all through the summer months, he would work like anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship that had seemed part of an indefinite future, as near a certainty as made no matter. He would show them—in other words Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert—what he could do.
“If we are going on Monday I had better think of packing,” he said. “Shall I need to take many things, father?”
“Oh, don’t worry your father, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura.
III
Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness. The customary penance of the morning service was actually the least trying part of it to Edwin. To begin with, the parish church of Halesby was a structure of great beauty. Originally an offshoot of the abbey that now stood in ruins above the long string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the grace and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly architects had embellished its original design with many beautiful features, and the slender beauty of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the degraded river, had imposed an atmosphere of dignity and rest upon the rather squalid surroundings of this last of the black-country towns. The music, even though it was not in any way comparable with that of St. Luke’s, was good, and the recent arrival of a young and distinguished rector from Cambridge, whose voice and person would have qualified him for success as a bishop, or an actor manager, had restored to the building some of its popularity as a place of resort or of escape from the shuttered Sunday streets.
At ten o’clock the fine peal of bells filled the air with an inspiriting music. Edwin remembered, hearing them, the melancholy with which they had often inspired him on dank evenings of autumn when the ringers were at practice. Very different they sounded on this summer morning, for a gentle wind was moving from the hills to westward, and chime eddied in a soft air that was clearer than the usual, if only because it was Sunday and the smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks no longer filled it with suffocation.
At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in the dining-room, in a black silk dress smelling faintly of lavender: a minute later, Uncle Albert, in a frock coat, coaxing the last sweetness from his after-breakfast pipe. Mr. Ingleby also had exchanged the alpaca jacket in which he had been leisurely examining his roses, for the same uniform. Uncle Albert, Edwin noticed, had not yet removed the deep band of crape from his top-hat. As usual, Aunt Laura appeared a little flustered, the strain of conscious magnificence in her millinery making it difficult for her to collect her thoughts.
“Are you sure you have all the prayer-books, Albert?” she asked anxiously.
Uncle Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe. “Yes, my dear,” he said.
“Don’t scatter those ashes all over the fireplace, Albert. The least you can do is to keep the room tidy on Sunday.”