“When I tell you the mornings hang on my hands! I don’t know what to do with my mornings. There’s Tuesday I’m due at the schools, but the rest of the week I do nothing but idle. And idling’s a great temptation. A cigar comes natural when you’ve nothing to do. You don’t like a man smoking in the morning; I’ve heard you say so. So you see the young ones will save me from a—no, I won’t say cigar; worse than that; cigars are too dear for a curate, me dear lady—from a pipe.”
“Mr. Nolan, you are too good for this world,” said poor Mrs. Damerel, affected to tears; “but I must first try what can be done at home,” she added after a pause; “no, no, you weigh me down under your kindness. What would the parish be but for you?”
“It would be just the same if I were dead and buried,” said the curate, shrugging his shoulders. “Ah, that’s the worst of it: try for a little bit of a corner of work like a child’s lessons, and you may be of service; but try to mend the world, even a bit of a parish, and you’re nowhere. They don’t think half as much of me as they do of the rector?” he added, with a curious smile, which the rector’s wife only half understood. Was it satirical? or could it be possible that the curate was surprised that the people thought more of the rector than of himself? Mrs. Damerel was aware, no one better, of her husband’s faults. Many a time she was ready to say in bitterness (to herself) that he was wearing her to death; but nevertheless she looked at long, loosely-built, snub-nosed Mr. Nolan, with mingled amusement and surprise. Was it possible that he could entertain any hopes of rivalling her husband? Of course a visit from the rector was an honor to any one, for Mr. Damerel was a man who, notwithstanding a little human weakness, was the very picture and model of a gentleman; and the idea of comparing him with good Mr. Nolan was too absurd.
“Yes, no doubt they are pleased to see him,” she said: “poor people are very quick to recognize high breeding; but I am sure, my dear Mr. Nolan, that they are all very fond of you.”
The curate made no immediate answer. I am not sure that he had not in his private heart something of the same feeling with which his present companion had been thinking of her daughter, a feeling less intense in so far as it was much more indifferent to him, yet in a way stronger because untempered by affection. The rector was of his own kind, the ornamental and useless specimen, while he was the worker whom nobody thought of; but these secret feelings neither of the two confided to the other. Mr. Nolan would have been horrified had he detected in Mrs. Damerel that slight bitterness about Rose, which indeed would have shocked herself as deeply had she paused to identity the sentiment, and she would have been, and was, to some slight extent—suspecting the existence of the feeling—contemptuous and indignant of Nolan’s “jealousy,” as I fear she would have called it. They returned, however, to the educational question, which did not involve anything painful, and after considerable discussion it was settled that he should give the elder children lessons in the morning “if their papa approved.” It is impossible to say what a relief this decision was to the mother, who had felt these lessons to be the last straw which proverbially breaks the camel’s back. She was glad of the chat with a sympathizing friend, who understood, without saying anything about, her troubles—and doubly glad of the holiday exacted from her by his means—and gladder still to get rid of him and return to her many other occupations; for it was Monday, as has already been mentioned, and there was the laundress to look after, and a thousand other things awaiting her. The curate went out by the garden door when he left her, out upon the lawn, where he paused to look at as charming a scene as could be found in England: a fair country spreading out for miles its trees and fields and soft undulations under a summer sky, which was pale with excess of light, and ran into faint lines of misty distance almost colorless in heat and haze. Here and there the sunshine caught in a bend of the river, and brought out a startling gleam as from a piece of silver. The world was still with noon and distance, no sound in the air but the rustle of the leaves, the hum of insects; the landscape was all the sweeter that there was no remarkable feature in it, nothing but breadth and space, and undulating lines, and light, everywhere light; and to make up for its broad, soft vagueness, how distinct, like a picture, was the little group in the foreground—the lime-trees in their silken green, the soft rippling shadows on the grass, the picturesque figure in the chair, and the beautiful girl!
The beauty of the sight charmed good Mr. Nolan. Had it been put to him at that moment, I believe he would have protested that his rector should never do anything in his life except recline with languid limbs out-stretched, and his poetical head bent over his book, under the sweet shadow of the trees. And if this was true even in respect to Mr. Damerel, how much more true was it with Rose?
“Well, Nolan,” said Mr. Damerel, suavely, as the bony curate and his shadow came stalking across the sunshine; “well, worrying yourself to death as usual in this hot weather? My wife and you are congenial souls.”
“That is true, and it’s a great honor for me,” said Nolan. “She is worrying herself to death with the children, and one thing and another. As for me, in the mornings, as I tell her, I’ve next to nothing to do.”
Rose looked up hastily as he spoke. How angry she felt! If her mother chose to worry herself to death, who had anything to do with that? was it not her own pleasure? A hot flush came over the girl’s face. Mr. Nolan thought it was the quick, ingenuous shame which is so beautiful in youth; but it was a totally different sentiment.
“Mamma does nothing she does not choose to do,” she cried; then blushed more hotly, perceiving vaguely that there was something of self-defense in the heat with which she spoke.