“‘T’s goin’ to be proper, Samuel Bilson. You wait, an’ you’ll see what you’ll see. ’Ere ’e comes.”
Mr. Bilson’s room was reached by a ladder, coming up through a hole in the floor. Through this hole came a peculiarly shaped felt hat; then a pale youthful face; then a vest with many buttons.
“To ’ave and to ’old,” said Sophronia. “‘Ere ’e is.”
The head came up, and a long, thin body after it. Pale and gaunt, swaying slightly backward and forward, like a stiff cornstalk in a mild breeze, the Reverend Mr. Chizzy stood before them and smiled vaguely.
The Reverend Mr. Chizzy was only twenty-four, and he might have passed for nineteen; but he was so high a churchman that the mould of several centuries was on him. He was a priest without a cure; but, as some of his irreverent friends expressed it, he was “in training” for the Rectorship of St. Bede’s the Less, a small church in the neighborhood, endowed by Mr. Tullingworth-Gordon and disapproved of by his Bishop, who had not yet appointed a clergyman. The Bishop had been heard to say that he had not yet made up his mind whether St. Bede’s the Less was a church or some new kind of theatre. Nevertheless, Mr. Chizzy was on hand, living under the wing of the Tullingworth-Gordons, and trying to make the good Church-of-England people of the parish believe that they needed him and his candles and his choir-boys.
Behind Mr. Chizzy came two limp little girls, hangers-on of the Tullingworth-Gordon household by grace of Mrs. Tullingworth-Gordon’s charity. In New England they would have been called “chore-girls.” The Tullingworth-Gordons called them “scullery maids.”
Bilson half rose on his elbow in astonishment, alarm and indignation.
“Sophronia ’Uckins,” he demanded, “what do this ’ere mean? I ain’t a-dyin’, and I ain’t got no need of a clergyman, thank ’eaven. And no more this ain’t a scullery, Mrs. ’Uckins.”