“They’ve come to the big pew, sir,” he whispered behind his hand.
“What?”
“Mrs Glaire, sir, and Miss Eve, and young Master Dicky.”
The vicar started slightly. This was a change, indeed, and full of promise. Richard Glaire, who had not been out of the house nor into the garden since the attack made upon him, and who had never been seen in the old pew since the vicar’s coming, had walked down the High Street between his mother and Eve, and made his appearance at church.
“Well, of course, he would be safe on such a day,” thought the vicar, “and the people have been quieter. God grant this is the beginning of the end, and that this little feud may be succeeded by peace.”
He thought this as the clock was striking, and he walked to the reading-desk, glanced through the Prayer-Book and Bible, where the markers were, to see that Jacky Budd, whose memory was erratic, had made no mistakes, and given him wrong psalms and lessons to read, and then turned to the opening sentences, and was about to commence; but the presence of Richard Glaire troubled him. He was glad at heart that he should be there, and now that he had come he wished to influence him for good,—to bring him to a different way of thinking, for Eve’s sake; and now these sentences all seemed, as of course they were, personal, and such as would make Richard Glaire think that they were selected and aimed specially at him.
“When the wicked man,” read the vicar to himself. No. “I acknowledge.” No, no, no, one after the other they seemed warnings to the sinner, such a one as Richard Glaire, and in the hurried glance down he came to, “I will arise.”
“More pointed still,” he thought, and having no time to study the question, he read the two last, beginning, “Enter not into judgment,” etc., and “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,” etc.
As the service went on the vicar’s eyes took in by turns the members of his congregation, and at last he let them light on the Glaires’ pew.
There stood Mrs Glaire, looking old and careworn; in another corner, Eve Pelly, with her sweet, innocent face, looking to him angelic in her rapt absorption, as she listened to his words, and there, with his back to them, and leaning over the edge of the pew in a negligent dégagé attitude, as if bent on showing the congregation the whiteness of the hands he held up for inspection, stood Richard Glaire, gazing at him with half-closed eyes, in a supercilious, sneering manner.