Oh, Andy was no fool, once his eyes were opened, and he saw that plainly enough now. But it is a painful thing to be wounded in one’s vanity—more keenly smarting than to be wounded in one’s love, though without the dull ache that love’s hurts leave behind.
He went to the window and pulled up the blind. There was no moon, but it was a light night with stars, and he could see clearly the gravestones in the churchyard, and the dim whiteness of the lilies in the garden. He felt he could not stay within those four walls any longer.
The house was intensely quiet in the midst of the starlit silence, and he dreaded above all things to have Mrs. Jebb peering at him over the banisters in curling pins and dressing-gown as he went out of the door.
He looked down at the ivy beneath the window—the growth of fifty years—and crept down upon that green ladder provided by his predecessor into the free coolness of the summer night.
The wet grass soaked his thin boots as he crept cautiously across the lawn, and out by the churchyard path. Once out of sight of the house, he paused, and stood leaning against the gate with his hands in his pockets. The fact of doing something had diverted his thoughts for a while, and now a sort of dull depression settled down upon him—that horrible dull time after a storm of emotion, when nothing seems worth while.
But in that storm the mantle of the senior curate—good man that he was, with a real desire to serve his Master his own way—had been blown away from Andy’s shoulders for ever. It never fitted, or perhaps it would have clung more closely.
And it was just a lad doubtful of himself, and of everything else, who stumbled miserably down the churchyard path in the uncertain light. He had forgotten all about Brother Gulielmus, and only because he caught his foot on the edge of the path that curved outwards by the tombstone did he pause there for a moment.
But once stayed, he glanced from habit at the familiar resting-place of that Gulielmus who had once been plain Will Ford.
Over fifty years. And the Vicar before Andy had been fifty years as well.
That half-century stretched out, interminable, before the young man’s vision.