“But I cannot prevent her wanting to be baptized,” said Mr. Taxater.
“You can talk to him,” answered Vennie, with intense conviction. “You can talk to him and he will listen to you. You can tell him the danger he is in of being made miserable for life.” She drew her breath deeply. “Oh the remorse he will feel; the horrible, horrible remorse!”
Mr. Taxater glanced across the hay-field. The sun, a red globe of fire, was resting on the extreme edge of Leo’s Hill, and seemed like a great blood-shot eye regarding them with lurid interest. Long cool shadows, thrown across the field by the elms in the hedge and by the stack beside them, melted magically into one another, and made the hillocks of still ungathered grass soft and intangible as fairy graves.
“I will do my best,” said the scholar. “I will do my best.” And indicating to Vennie, who was absorbed in her nervous gratitude, the near approach of the object of their saintly conspiracy, he led her forward to meet the young clergyman with an appropriate air of friendly and casual nonchalance.
“I am sorry to have to say it,” was Mr. Clavering’s greeting, “but that farmer-fellow is the only person in my parish for whom I have a complete detestation. I wish to goodness Mr. Romer had never brought him into the place!”
“I don’t like the look of his back, I must say,” answered the theologian, following with his eyes the retreating figure of Mr. John Goring.
“He is,” said the young priest, “without exception the most repulsive human being I have ever met in my life. Our worthy Romer is an angel of light compared with him.”
With Mr. Goring still as their topic, they strolled amicably together towards the same gap in the hedge, through which the apologist of the papacy had emerged an hour before. There they separated; Vennie returning to the vicarage, and the young clergyman carrying off Mr. Taxater to supper with him in his house by the church.
Clavering’s establishment consisted of a middle-aged woman of inordinate volubility, and the woman’s daughter, a girl of twelve.
The supper offered by the priest to his guest was “light and choice”—nor did it lack its mellow accompaniment of carefully selected, if not “Attic,” wine. Of this wine Mr. Taxater did not hesitate to partake freely, sitting, when the meal was over, opposite his host at the open window, through which the pleasant murmurs of the evening, and the voices of the village-street, soothingly and harmoniously floated.