“Yes—but—I suppose anxieties, and cares, and growing older, cloud it over in a way,” was the best solution Mary could arrive at as to why greater things had not come of her father’s talents.
Perhaps the truth was that they were not very remarkable—not so remarkable, certainly, as to have forced for themselves a way through the adverse circumstances of being united to a somewhat easy-going, kindly, and contented nature such as that of the Rector of Hathercourt, whose worldly needs had never been pressing enough to force him to great exertion, who loved the place he had lived in for a quarter of a century, and was not hard upon his people, even though they were averse to morning service, and now and then indulged in forty winks, even of an afternoon.
“We have got into each other’s ways,” he would say sometimes, with a mixture of deprecation and self-congratulation, when, even to Hathercourt, echoes of the strange noises beginning to be heard in the ecclesiastical “great world” would find their way. “We understand each other, and know each other’s good points. I don’t pretend to go along with all these changes, though I am far from saying no good may come out of them. But they are not in our way—they are not in our way; and, after all, there is something in letting well alone. It is something to feel, as I hope to do when I die, that at least I haven’t left my people worse men and women than I found them—eh, Polly?”
For on his second daughter’s face there came sometimes a look her father hardly understood—a look of questioning and consideration, of less readiness to take things just as she found them, than altogether tallied with his philosophy. Yet Mary was his favourite child. Lilias disagreed with him openly in her sweet-tempered way, grumbling with a sunny face at their monotonous and secluded life, and openly avowed her determination to change it for a different one, should she ever get a chance of doing so to advantage.
“What would you do with five old maids, papa?” she would say sometimes. “Just fancy us all in a doleful row—the five Miss Westerns! In ten years hence even Francie will be grown up, remember.”
“Ten years may bring—indeed, are sure to bring many changes, Lily dear,” her mother would say—“some, perhaps, that it would take half the heart out of us could we foresee.”
“Mamma is so sensible and reasonable always, I sometimes think she has forgotten what it was to be a girl,” said the elder to the younger sister one October Sunday morning as they were crossing the pretty little bit of inclosed meadow land which was all that separated the church from the Rectory.
“No,” said Mary, “it isn’t that; she knows and remembers quite well. It is that she knows too well, I fancy.”
“How do you mean, Polly? I’m stupid at understanding things, unless people say them plainly. Stay a minute, we are in plenty of time—nobody is coming to church yet, and it is so nice here under the trees.” Lilias leaned against one of a beautiful cluster of horse-chestnuts growing in the middle of the church paddock, and as she spoke looked up through the already fast baring branches to the cold, grey, blue sky overhead. “Dear me, how very quickly the leaves are falling this year!” she said, “it was that stormy weather in September that shook them, and, once they begin to fall, winter seems to come with a rush.”
Mary smiled, and her lips moved as if she was going to speak, but she stopped and said nothing.