“Eight years,” said Mr. Nolan, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“And now?”
“Now? I’ll go off again, I suppose, like a rollin’ stone, unless the new rector will have me. God help us, what heartless brutes we are!” said the curate, with fiery heat; “I’ve just laid my old rector in the grave, and I think of the new one before the day’s gone. God forgive me; it’s the way of the world.”
“And why shouldn’t you be rector yourself? No one would be so good for the parish, I am sure.”
“Me!” said Mr. Nolan, his face lighting up with a broad gleam of humor, which he quenched next moment in the half-conventional gravity which he felt to be befitting to the occasion. “The days of miracles are over, and I don’t expect to be made an exception. No; I’ll get a district church maybe sometime, with plenty of hard work and little pay; but I am not the kind that are made to be rectors. There is no chance for me.”
“The people would like it,” said Mr. Hunsdon, who was fishing for information; “it would be a popular appointment, and my sister and I would do anything that might lie in our power.”
Mr. Nolan shook his head. “Not they,” he said. “They have a kindness for me in my humble condition. They know I’m a friend when they want one; but they want something more to look at for their rector—and so do I too.”
“You are not ambitious?” said Mr. Hunsdon, perplexed by his new acquaintance, who shrugged his shoulders again, and rose hastily from the seat under the thorn-tree where they had been sitting.
“That depends,” he said, with impatient vagueness; “but I have my work waiting if I can be of no more use here. For whatever I can do, Mrs. Damerel knows I am at her orders. And you won’t let her be worried just yet a while?” he added, with a pleading tone, to which his mellow brogue lent an insinuating force which few people could resist. “You’ll not go till it’s fixed what they are to do?”
“You may be sure I shall do my duty by my sister,” said the squire, who, though he had been willing to take the curate’s evidence about the most intimate details of his sister’s life, instantly resented Mr. Nolan’s “interference” when it came on his side. “He is in love with one or the other, or perhaps with both,” said the man of the world to himself; “I must put Rose on her guard;” which accordingly he tried to do, but quite ineffectually, Mrs. Damerel’s mind being totally unable to take in the insinuation which he scarcely ventured to put in plain words. But, with the exception of this foolish mistake and of a great deal of implied blame which it was not in the nature of the man to keep to himself, he did try to do his duty as became a man with a certain amount of ordinary affection for his sister, and a strong sense of what society required from him as head of his family. However he might disapprove of her, and the extravagance in which she had undeniably been act and part, yet he could not abandon so near a relation. I should not like to decide whether benefits conferred thus from a strong sense of duty have more or less merit than those which flow from an affectionate heart and generous nature, but certainly they have less reward of gratitude. The Green was very much impressed by Mr. Hunsdon’s goodness to his sister, but I fear that to her his goodness was a burden more painful than her poverty. And yet he was very good. He undertook, in his brother’s name and his own, to pay Bertie’s expenses at Eton, where the boy was doing so well; and when it was decided, as the Green by infallible instinct had felt it must be, that the White House was the natural refuge for Mrs. Damerel when the time came to leave the rectory, Mr. Hunsdon made himself responsible for the rent, and put it in order for her with true liberality. The whole parish admired and praised him for this, and said how fortunate Mrs. Damerel was to have so good a brother. And she tried herself to feel it, and to be grateful as he deserved. But gratitude, which springs spontaneous for the simplest of gifts, and exults over a nothing, is often very slow to follow great benefits. Poor Mrs. Damerel thought it was the deadness of her grief which made her so insensible to her brother’s kindness. She thought she had grown incapable of feeling; and she had so much to realize, so much to accustom herself to. A change so great and fundamental confuses the mind. So far as she could see before her, she had nothing now to look forward to in life but an endless, humiliating struggle; and she forgot, in the softening of her heart, that for years past she had been struggling scarcely less hardly. When she looked back she seemed to see only happiness in comparison with this dull deprivation of all light and hope in which she was left now. But the reader knows that she had not been happy, and that this was but, as it were, a prismatic reflection from her tears, a fiction of imagination and sorrow; and by and by she began to see more clearly the true state of affairs.