"Rachel is a good woman, a saint. Such a woman does not love in a hurry, but when she does she loves forever." What was that poem he and she had so often read together? Tennyson, wasn't it? About love not altering "when it alteration finds," but bears it out even to the crack of doom. Fine poet, Tennyson; he knew the human heart. She had certainly adored him four years ago, just in the devoted way in which he needed to be loved. And how he had worshipped her! Of course he had behaved badly. He saw that now. But if he had it was not from want of love. She had been unable to see that at the time. Good women were narrow, and they were hard, and they did not understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learned better by now? Did she realize that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter, like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the gentle, familiar face beside him.
"She will forgive me," he said, reassuring himself, in spite of an inward qualm of misgiving. "I am glad I arranged to stay on. I will speak to her this afternoon. She has become much softened, and we will bury the past and make a fresh start together."
"I will walk up to Beaumere this afternoon," said Doll, stretching a leg outside the open end of the pew. "I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters worms. They are some of my best tenants, and they won't like it when they hear of it. And I'll go round the young pheasants. (Doll did this, or something similar, every Sunday afternoon of his life, but he always rehearsed it comfortably in thought on Sunday mornings.) And if Withers is about I'll go out in the boat—the big one, the little one leaks—and set a trimmer or two for to-morrow. I'm not sure I'll set one under the south bank, for there was the devil to pay last time, when that beast of an eel got among the roots. I'll ask Withers what he thinks. I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters blind leaders of the blind. It's such bad form, and I don't suppose the text meant that to start with, and what's the use of ill-feeling in a parish? And I'll take Scarlett with me. We'll slip off after luncheon, and leave that bounder to bound by himself. And poor old Crack shall come too. Uncle George always took him."
"James is simply surpassing himself," said Mrs. Gresley to herself, her arm round her little daughter. "Worms what a splendid comparison! The Churchman, the full-grown man after the stature of Christ, and the Dissenter invertebrate (I think dear James means inebriate), like a worm cleaving to the earth. But possibly God in His mercy may let them slip in by a back-door to heaven! How like him to say that, so generous, so wide-minded, taking the hopeful view of everything! How noble he looks! These are days in which we should stick to our colors. I wonder how he can think of such beautiful things. For my part, I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity. How striking! What a lesson to the Bishop, if he were only here. He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion! What a gift he has! I know he will eat nothing for luncheon. If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated." And Mrs. Gresley closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, a tear sliding down her cheek on to Mary's floss-silk mane, that she might become less unworthy to be the wife of one so far above her, that the children might all grow up like him, and that she might be given patience to bear with Hester even when she vexed him.
Captain Pratt's critical eye travelled over the congregation. It absolutely ignored Mrs. Gresley and Fräulein. It lingered momentarily on Hester. He knew what he called "breeding" when he saw it, and he was aware that Hester possessed it, though his sisters would have laughed at the idea. He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester's case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it impossible to know better. Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer. He was excessively careful whom he knew, what women he danced with, what houses he visited; and any of his acquaintances who cared to ascertain their own social status to a hair's-breadth had only to apply to it the touchstone of Captain Pratt's manner towards them.
Hester, who grasped many facts of that kind, was always amused by the cold consideration with which he treated her on his rare visits to the parental Towers; and which his sisters could only construe as a sign that "Algy was gone on Hessie."
"But he will never marry her," they told each other. "Algy looks higher."