“I hope I may be able to take up her work. I shall stay with her as long as she needs me.”
“That is well. You found her sadly changed, did you not?”
“Yes, she is much changed. Yet how bright she looks this afternoon! what interest she takes in the conversation!”
“The flash of the falchion in the worn-out scabbard,” said Mr. Maltravers.
A layman might have said sword, but Mr. Maltravers preferred falchion, as a more picturesque word. Half the success of his preaching had lain in the choice of picturesque words. There were sceptics among his masculine congregation who said there were no ideas in his sermons; only fine words, romantic similes—a perpetual recurrence of fountains and groves, sunset splendours and roseate dawns, golden gates and starry canopies, seas of glass, harps of gold. But if his female worshippers felt better and holier after listening to him, what could one ask more?—and they all declared that it was so. They came out of church spiritualised, overflowing with Christian love, and gave their pence eagerly to the crossing-sweepers on their way home.
The dropping in and the tea-drinking went on for nearly two hours. Mr. Maltravers took four cups of tea, and consumed a good deal of bread-and-butter, abstaining from the chocolate biscuits and the poundcake which the ladies of the party affected; abstaining on principle, as saints and eremites of old abstained from high living. He allowed himself to enjoy the delicate aroma of the tea and the delicately-cut bread-and-butter. He was a bachelor, and lived poorly upon badly-cooked food at his vicarage. His only personal indulgence was in the accumulation of a theological library, in which all the books were of a High Church cast.
When the visitors were all gone Miss Fausset sank back into her chair, white and weary-looking, and Mildred left her to take a little nap while she went up to her own room, half boudoir, half dressing-room, a spacious apartment, with a fine seaview. Here she sat in a reverie, and watched the fading sky and the slow dim stars creeping out one by one.
Was she really to take up her aunt’s work, to live in a luxurious home, a lonely loveless woman, and to go out in a methodical, almost mechanical way so many times a week, to visit among the poor? Would such a life as that satisfy her in all the long slow years?
The time would come, perhaps, when she would find peace in such a life—when her heart would know no grief except the griefs of others; when she would have cast off the fetters of selfish cares and selfish yearnings, and would stand alone, as saints and martyrs and holy women of old had stood—alone with God and His poor. There were women she knew, even in these degenerate days, who so lived and so worked, seeking no guerdon but the knowledge of good done in this world, and the hope of the crown immortal. Her day of sacrifice had not yet come. She had not been able to dissever her soul from the hopes and sorrows of earth. She had not been able to forget the husband she had forsaken—even for a single hour. When she knelt down to pray at night, when she awoke in the morning, her thoughts were with him. “How does he bear his solitude? Has he learnt to forget me and to be happy?” Those questions were ever present to her mind.
And now at Brighton, knowing herself so near him, her heart yearned more than ever for the sight of the familiar face, for the sound of the beloved voice. She pored over the time-table, and calculated the length of the journey—the time lost at Portsmouth and Bishopstoke—every minute until the arrival at Romsey; and then the drive to Enderby. She pictured the lanes in the early May—the hedgerows bursting into leaf, the banks where the primroses were opening, the tender young ferns just beginning to uncurl their feathery fronds, the spearpoints of the hartstongue shooting up amidst rank broad docks, and lords and ladies, and the flower on the leafless blackthorn making patches of white amongst the green.