“I am very thankful to hear that: we were fearing the worst. I wonder,” added Mrs. Topcroft, “if this will take Mr. Lake from us?”
“Probably. We cannot tell yet. People are saying he ought to have the living if it went by merit: but there’s not any hope of that.”
“Not any,” acquiesced Mrs. Topcroft, shaking her head. “It does seem unjust: that a clergyman should wear out all his best days toiling for a church, and be passed over at last as not worth a consideration.”
“It is the way of the world.”
“No one knows his worth,” went on Mrs. Topcroft, “So patient, so good, so self-denying; and so anxious for the poor and sick, and for all the ill-doers who seem to be going wrong. I don’t believe there are many men in this world so good as he. All he can scrape and save out of his narrow income he gives away, denying himself necessaries to be able to do it: Mr. Selwyn, you know, has given nothing. It has been said he grudged even the communion money.”
That was Mrs. Topcroft’s report of Mr. Lake; and she ought to know. He had boarded with her long enough. He had the bedroom over the best parlour; and the little den of a back-parlour was given over to his own use, in which he saw his parishioners and wrote his sermons.
“They come from the same village in the West of England,” said Miss Deveen to me as we walked homewards. “Mr. Lake’s father was curate of the place, and Mrs. Topcroft’s people are the doctors: her brothers are in practice there now. When she was left a widow upon a very slender income, and settled down in this little house, Mr. Lake came to board with her. He pays a guinea a-week only; but Mrs. Topcroft has told me that it pays her amply, and she could not have got along without it. The housekeeping is, of necessity, economical: and that suits the pocket on both sides.”
“I like Mrs. Topcroft. And she seems quite a lady, though she is poor.”
“She is quite a lady, Johnny. Her husband was a civil engineer, very clever: but for his early death he might have become as renowned as his master, Sir John Rennie. The son; he is several years older than Emma; is in the same profession, steady and diligent, and he gains a fair salary now, which of course helps his mother. He is at home night and morning.”
“Do you suppose that Mr. Lake thinks of Emma?”