“Are you going anywhere this summer? Of course not, for so long as there is an unbaptized child, or a bedridden old woman in the parish, you must stay at home, even if you do grow as rusty as did Professor Cobden’s coat before we boys made him a present of a new one. I say, Arthur, there was a capital fellow spoiled when you took to the ministry, with your splendid talents, and rare gift for making people like and believe in you.
“Now, I suppose you will reply that for this denial of self you look for your reward in heaven, and I suppose you are right; but as I have no reason to think I have stock in that region, I go in for a good time here, and this summer I take Saratoga, where I expect to meet one of your lambs. I hear you have in your flock forty in all, their ages varying from sixteen to fifty. But this particular lamb, Miss Anna Ruthven, is, I think, the fairest of them all, and as I used to make you my father confessor in the days when I was rusticated out in Winsted, and fell so desperately in love with the six Miss Larkins, each old enough to be my mother, so now I confide to you the programme as marked out by Mrs. Julia Meredith, the general who brings the lovely Anna in the field.
“We, that is, Mrs. Meredith and myself, are on the best of terms. I lunch with her, dine with her, lounge in her parlors, drive her to the park, take her to operas, concerts, and plays, and compliment her good looks, which are wonderfully well-preserved for a woman of forty-five. I am twenty-six, you know, and so no one ever associates us together in any kind of gossip. She is the very quintessence of fashion, and I am one of the danglers whose own light is made brighter by the reflection of her rays. Do you see the point? Well, then, in return for my attentions, she takes a very sisterly interest in my future wife, and has adroitly managed to let me know of her niece, a certain Anna Ruthven, who, inasmuch as I am tired of city belles, will undoubtedly suit my fancy, said Anna being very fresh, very artless, and very beautiful withal. She is also niece to Mrs. Meredith, whose only brother married very far beneath him, when he took to wife the daughter of a certain old-fashioned Captain Humphreys, a pillar, no doubt, in your church. This young Ruthven was drowned, or hung, or something, and the sister considers it as another proof of his wife’s lack of refinement and discretion, that at her death, which happened when Anna was three years old, she left her child to the charge of her parents, Captain Humphreys and spouse, rather than to Mrs. Meredith’s care, and that, too, in the very face of the lady’s having stood as sponsor for the infant, an act which you will acknowledge as very unnatural and ungrateful in Mrs. Ruthven, to say the least of it.
“You see I am telling you all this, just as if you did not know Miss Anna’s antecedents even better than myself; but possibly you do not know that, having arrived at a suitable age, she is this summer to be introduced into society at Saratoga, while I am expected to fall in love with her at once, and make her Mrs. Hastings before another winter. Now, in your straightforward way of putting things, don’t imagine that Mrs. Meredith has deliberately told me all this, for she has not; but I understand her perfectly, and know exactly what she expects me to do. Whether I do it or not depends partly upon how I like Miss Anna, partly upon how she likes me, and partly upon yourself.
“You know I was always famous for presentiments or fancies, as you termed them, and the latest of these is that you like Anna Ruthven. Do you? Tell me, honor bright, and by the memory of the many scrapes you got me out of, and the many more you kept me from getting into, I will treat Miss Anna as gingerly and brotherly as if she were already your wife. I like her picture, which I have seen, and believe I shall like the girl, but if you say that by looking at her with longing eyes I shall be guilty of breaking some one of the ten commandments,—I don’t know which,—why, then, hands off at once. That’s fair, and will prove to you that, although not a parson like yourself, there is still a spark of honor, if not of goodness, in the breast of
“Yours truly,
“Thornton Hastings.
“If you were here this afternoon, I’d take you to drive after a pair of bays, which are to sweep the stakes at Saratoga this summer, and I’d treat you to a finer cigar than often finds its way to Hanover. Shall I send you out a box, or would your people pull down the church about the ears of a minister wicked enough to smoke. Again adieu.
“T. H.”
There was a half-amused smile on the face of the rector as he finished the letter, so like its thoughtless, light-hearted writer, and wondered what the Widow Rider, across the way, would say of a clergyman who smoked cigars, and rode after a race-horse with such a gay scapegrace as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look passed away, and was succeeded by a shadow of pain, as the rector remembered the real import of Thornton’s letter, and felt that he had no right to say, “I have a claim on Anna Ruthven; you must not interfere.” For he had no claim on her, though half his parishioners had long ago given her to him, while he had loved her, as only natures like his can love, since that week before Christmas, when their hands had met with a strange, tremulous flutter, as together they fastened the wreaths of evergreen upon the wall, he holding them up, and she driving the refractory tacks, which would keep falling, so that his hand went often from the carpet or basin to hers, and once accidentally closed almost entirely over the little soft white thing, which felt so warm to his touch.