"No, believe me, no!" protested Mrs. Mornington, gaily. "I see you both with all your defects and qualities. You have the stronger character, but you have not Geoffrey's fascinating personality. His very faults are attractive. He is by no means effeminate; yet there is a something womanish in his nature which makes women fond of him. He has inherited his mother's sensitive, dreamy temperament. I feel sure he would see a ghost if there were one in his neighbourhood. The ghost would go to him instinctively, as dogs go unbidden to certain people—sometimes to people who don't care about them; while the genuine dog-lover may be doing his best to attract bow-wow's attention, and failing ignominiously."
"Every word you say increases my interest in Mr. Wornock. In a neighbourhood like this, where everybody is sensible and commonplace and conventional, excepting always your brilliant self"—Mrs. Mornington nodded, and put her feet on the fender—"it is so delightful to meet some one who does not move just on the common lines, and is not worked by the common machinery."
"You will find nothing common about Geoffrey," said the lady. "I have known him since he was a little white boy in a black velvet suit, and he was just as enigmatical to me the day he left for Bombay as he was on his seventh birthday. I know that he has winning manners, and that I am very fond of him; and that is all I know about him."
Allan drove to Filbury on the following Sunday, and was in his place in the little old parish church ten minutes before the service began. The high oak pews were not favourable to his getting a good view of the congregation, since, when seated, the top of his head was only on a level with the top of his pew; but by leaving the door of the pew ajar he contrived to see Mrs. Wornock as she went up the narrow aisle—nave there was none, the pews forming a solid square in the centre of the church. Yes, he was assured that slim, graceful figure in a plain grey cashmere gown and grey straw bonnet must be Mrs. Wornock and no other. Indeed, the inference was easily arrived at, for the rest of the congregation belonged obviously to the small tenant-farmer and agricultural-labourer class—the women-folk homely and ruddy-cheeked, the men ponderous, and ill at ease in their Sunday clothes.
The lady in the grey gown made her way quietly to a pew that occupied the angle of the church nearest the pulpit and reading-desk—the old three-decker arrangement, for clerk, parson, and preacher. Mr. Wornock was patron of the living of Filbury and Discombe, and this large, square pew had belonged to the Wornocks ever since the rebuilding of the church in Charles the Second's reign, a year or two after the manor-house was built, when the estate, which had hitherto been an outlying possession of the Wornocks, became their place of residence, and most important property.
Allan could see only the lady's profile from his place in the body of the church—a delicate profile, worn as if with long years of thoughtfulness; a sweet, sad face that had lost all freshness of colouring, but had gained the spiritual beauty which grows in thought and solitude, where there are no vulgar cares to harass and vex the mind. A pensive peacefulness was the chief characteristic of the face, Allan thought, when the lady turned towards the organ during the Te Deum, listening to the village voices, which sang truer than village voices generally do.
Allan submitted to the slow torture of a very long sermon about nothing particular, on a text in Nehemiah, which suggested not the faintest bearing on the Christian life—a sermon preached by an elderly gentleman in a black silk gown, whose eloquence would have been more impressive had his false teeth been a better fit. After the sermon there was a hymn, and the old-fashioned plate was carried round by a blacksmith, whom Allan recognized as a man who had fastened his hunter's shoe one day at a forge on the outskirts of Filbury, in the midst of a run; and then the little congregation quietly dispersed, after an exchange of friendly greetings between the church door and the lych-gate.
Allan's gig was waiting for him near the gate, and a victoria, on which he recognized the Wornock crest—a dolphin crowned—stood in the shade of a row of limes, which marked the boundary of the Vicarage garden. Allan waited a little, expecting to see Mrs. Wornock come out; and then, as she did not appear, he re-entered the churchyard, and strayed among moss-mantled tomb-stones, reading the village names, the village histories of birth and death, musing, as he read, upon the long eventless years which make the sum of rustic lives.
The blue pure sky, the perfume of a bean-field in flower, the hawthorns in undulating masses of snowy blossom, and here and there, in the angles of the meadows, the heaped-up gold of furze-bushes that were more bloom than bush—all these made life to-day a sensuous delight which exacted no questionings of the intellect, suggested no doubt as to the bliss of living. If it were always thus—a crust of bread and cheese under such a sky, a bed in the hollow of yonder bank between bean-field and clover, would suffice for a man's content, Allan thought, as he stood on a knoll in God's acre, and looked down upon the meadows that rose and fell over ridge and hollow with gentle undulations between Filbury and Discombe.