The Hermitage stood on a little slice of ground which fell away from the lane. So close was The Hermitage to the lane, and the parlour windows were so low, and the lane beyond the palings so high, that the inmates could only guess at the identity of the passers-by by their legs. And rare guests and rarer callers, arriving in the wagonnette from the Manvers Arms, could actually look into the bedroom windows, while the Miss Blinketts' eyes, peering over the parlour muslins, were fixed upon their lower limbs.
And if I keep my eyes tightly shut and the eyes of memory open, I can see as I sit stroking Miss Blinkett's cat the legs of the new Vicar pass up the lane outlined against a lilac skirt. And Miss Amy, who is not a close observer of life, opines that the skirt belongs to Miss Janey Manvers, but Miss Blinkett senior instantly identifies it as Annette's new spotted muslin, which she had seen Mrs. Nicholls "getting up" last week.
But that was twenty years ago. I can only tell you what Riff was like then, for it is twenty years since I was there, and I am not going there any more, for I don't want to see any of the changes which time must have wrought there, and if I walked down the village street now I should feel like a ghost, for only a few of the old people would remember me. And the bright-eyed, tow-headed little lads whom I taught in Sunday school are scattered to the four winds of heaven. The Boer War took some of them, and London has engulfed more, only a few remaining at Riff as sad-looking middle-aged men, farm hands, and hedgers and ditchers, and cowmen.
And I hear that now the motors go banging along the Yarmouth high road day and night, and that Riff actually has a telegraph office of its own and that the wires go in front of The Hermitage, only the Miss Blinketts are not there to see it. A literary lady lives there now, and I hear she has changed the name to "Quill Cottage," and has made a garden in the orchard where old Nan's cottage was by the twisted pear tree: old Nan the witch, who grew mistletoe in all the trees in her domain, and cured St. Vitus' dance with it. No, I will not go to Riff any more, for I do not want to see any of these things, and least of all the literary lady who is writing her novels in the quiet rooms where my two old friends knitted and read Thomas à Kempis.
Twenty years ago, in the days when my father was doctor at Riff and when Annette came to live there, we could not help noticing—indeed, Mrs. Nicholls often mentioned it—what a go-ahead place Riff was, far more up to date than Sweet Apple Tree, and even than Meverly Mill. We measured everything in those days by Sweet Apple Tree, and the measurement was always in our favour. We did not talk much about Riebenbridge, where the "'Sizes" were held, and the new "'Sylum" had just been built. We were somewhat awed by Riebenbridge, but poor lag-behind Sweet Apple Tree, lost amid its reeds together with the Rieben, was the subject of sincere pity to the Riff folk. The Sweet Applers, according to Mrs. Nicholls, were "that clunch they might have been brought up in a wood." At Riff everything was cast in a superior and more modern mould. Riff had a postman on a bicycle with an enormous front wheel, and if he brought a letter in the morning you could if necessary post an answer to it the same day in the red slit in the churchyard wall. Now at Sweet Apple Tree the old man in a donkey-cart blowing on a little horn who brought the Sweet Apple letters, took away directly the donkey was rested those which the inhabitants had just composed. And even he did not call if "the water was out."
Before I was born, when the Miss Blinketts were young and crinolined and their father was Vicar of Riff, Sweet Apple Tree, as they have often told me, had no choir, and the old Rector held a service once or twice a year in his Bath chair. After he took to his bed there was no service at all for twenty years. No wonder the Sweet Apple folk were "clunch"! How different from Riff, with its trombone and fiddle inviting the attention of its Creator every Sunday, and Mr. Blinkett, whose watchword was "No popery," preaching in his black gown two sermons a week to the favoured people of Riff.
It was Mr. Jones, Mr. Blinkett's successor, that lamentable person, meaning well, but according to the Miss Blinketts quite unable to perceive when a parish was worked on the right lines, it was young Mr. Jones from Oxford, who did not marry either of the Miss Blinketts, but who did put a stop to the trombone and fiddle, and actually brought the choir out of the gallery, and took away the hour-glass from the south window below the pulpit, and preached in his surplice, and made himself very unpopular by forbidding the congregation to rise to its feet when the Manvers family came into church, almost as unpopular as by stopping the fiddle. You can see the old fiddle still in the cottage of Hesketh the carrier, next the village stocks. His father had played on it, and turned "chapel" when his services were no longer required. And it was young Mr. Jones who actually had the bad taste openly to deplore the saintly Blinkett's action in demolishing all the upper part of the ancient carved and gilded screen because at eighty he could no longer make his voice heard through it.
It was, of course, Mr. Jones who started the mixed choir sitting in the chancel behind the remains of the screen.
In the last days of the mixed choir, when first Mr. Black came to Riff (after Mr. Jones was made a bishop), Annette sang in it, with a voice that seemed to me, and not to me only, like the voice of an angel.