"We wish to see him then, if you please," says Cynthia.
"What might your business be?" says the woman, looking us all over with a really disconcerting keenness.
"I think we must explain that to the parson himself," says Cynthia.
"Then I think you will not then," says the woman, mighty uncivilly. "I've formed my own opinion of you. You shall not see the master, not if I know it. He's got such a character for softness of heart all about the countryside that you vagrant beggars come for miles to get what you can out of him. It's mortal lucky he's got me to look after him, or he would have given away the shirt off his back this many a year ago."
It was impossible to deny that the good woman's estimate of our station and business was shrewd enough. We were certainly a pair of vagrants, if ever there was a pair in the world, and were certainly come to get something of the parson that we had no means of requiting him for. And I am sure neither of us, singly or together, would have stood a chance of melting that adamantine bosom, since everything we said seemed more clearly to reveal our humble not to say destitute condition; indeed we had come to the point where this clergyman's uncompromising guardian was about to bang the door in our faces, when the parson himself made a very welcome intervention.
He came shuffling along the path from some remote part of the vicarage garden, in a pair of old down-trodden carpet slippers, wearing over an old-fashioned wig a beaver grotesquely battered and green with age. His cassock hung in tatters at his heels, and he made about as unkempt and disreputable a figure of a clergyman as it was possible to conceive. Besides, he was a very small and insignificant rat of a fellow, and had a strange odd way of peering through his horn spectacles. But the moment he began to speak such a pleasant twinkle of courtesy came into his ugly countenance—by itself it was plain to the point of ugliness, although to this day Cynthia will never allow it to be so—and his voice was so wondrous musical, that straightway we forgot that he had such a singular appearance, and fell in love with him.
"A very good morning to you," says he. "I hope you are drinking in this golden morning that God hath sent us. Hey, what a thing it is to be a human being!"
As he came up and observed Cynthia more closely, he, bowed with a wonderful grave dignity, and took off his hat with a flourish that became him most inimitably well. Such courtesy from an appearance so discourteous never was seen.
"La, master, what be you at?" says the woman, highly scandalized by so polite a demeanour. "Do you not see these are an arrant pair of vagrant beggars? I must get you more artful spectacles if you will stay so close at your book-reading."
"Peace, my good Blodgett," says the parson. "Do you think I do not know breeding when I see it? It is a rare possession that nothing can disguise. There is sensibility here, in this fair countenance, and pride and candour, and the features are almost highly classical in their outline. A little too full in the lips perhaps, yes, I think a little too full, or this would have been the countenance of Minerva with the animation of Diana in it. I must remind you again, my good Blodgett, that appearances are apt to deceive; non semper ea sunt quæ videntur, as the excellent Phædrus has so wisely said. You will do me the honour, I hope, my dear young lady, of entering my house and partaking of a glass of my gooseberry-wine and of eating a piece of Banbury cake. And you, sir, also, I hope and trust; although in your case the credentials you bear in your countenance are nothing like so noteworthy. But as Plautus very pertinently asks, non soles respicere te, to look at oneself ere one abuses another, the less said the sooner we shall mend it, tulum silentii præmium. Come this way, I beg you."