“He was troubled, you say?” she asked.
“In such a case as this—meeting death face to face unexpectedly—it is hardly possible not to be troubled, however truly we may have lived in preparation for it,” answered the sad, soft voice of the curate. “Mr. Selwyn’s chief perplexity lay in the fact that he had not settled his worldly affairs.”
“Do you mean, not made his will?”
“Just so,” nodded Mr. Lake; “he had meant to do so, he said to me, but had put it off from time to time. We got a lawyer in, and it was soon done; and—and—I stayed on with him afterwards to the end.”
“Oh dear, it is a piteous tale,” sighed Miss Deveen. “And his wife and daughters are away!”
“They went to Oxford last Saturday for a week; and the two sons are there, as you know. No one thought seriously of his illness. Even this morning, when I called upon him after breakfast, though he said he was not feeling well, and did not look well, such a thing as danger never occurred to me. And now he is dead!”
Never did a parson’s death cause such a stir in a parish as poor Mr. Selwyn’s did in this. A lively commotion set in. People flew about to one another’s houses like chips in a gale of wind. Not only was the sorrow to himself to be discussed, but the uncertainty as to what would happen now. Some six months previously a church not far off, St. Peter’s, which had rejoiced in three energetic curates, and as many daily services, suddenly changed its incumbent; the new one proved to be an elderly man with wife and children, who did all the duty himself, and cut off the curates and the week-day prayers. What if the like calamity should happen to St. Matthew’s!
I was away most of the following day with Mr. Brandon, so was not in the thick of it, but the loss was made up for in the evening.
“Of course it is impossible to say who will get the living,” cried Mrs. Jonas, one of the two widows already mentioned, who had been dining with Miss Deveen. “I know who ought to—and that is our dear Mr. Lake.”
“‘Oughts’ don’t go for much in this world,” growled Dr. Galliard, a sterling man, in spite of his gruffness. He had recently brought Cattledon out of a bilious attack, and ran in this evening to see whether the cure lasted. “They go for nothing in the matter of Church patronage,” continued he. “If Lake had his deserts, he’d be made incumbent of this living to-morrow: but he is as likely to get it as I am to get the Lord Chancellor’s seals.”