‘Have you any idea what it is?’ the Curate said; ‘you were in the house, you must have heard something. It is inconceivable that a just man should be turned into an unjust one by that power of making a will. He was a good man,’ Charley added, with a little gulp of feeling. ‘I have known him since I was that high. He never talked very much about it, but he never was hard upon anyone. I don’t think I ever knew him to be hard on anyone. He said little, but I am sure he was a good man at heart.’
Heathcote Mountford did not make any answer; he replied by another question: ‘Mr. Douglas is a friend of yours, I hear?’
‘Oh, yes, he is a friend of mine: it was I—we are such fools—that brought him. Just think—if it brings harm to Anne, as everybody seems to believe—that I should have to reflect that I brought him! I who would cut off a hand!—I see you are thinking how strange it is that he is not here.’
‘It is strange,’ Heathcote said.
‘Strange! strange is not the word. Why, even Willie is here: and he that could have been of such use——. But we must remember that Anne has her own ways of thinking,’ the Curate added. ‘He wrote half-a-dozen lines to me to say that he was at her orders, that he could not act of himself. Now, whether that meant that she had forbidden him to come—if so, there is a reason at once.’
‘I don’t think I should have been inclined to take such a reason,’ Heathcote said.
The Curate sighed. How could he consider what he would have done in such circumstances? he knew that he would not have stopped to consider. ‘You don’t know Anne,’ he said: ‘one couldn’t go against her—no, certainly one couldn’t go against her. If she said don’t come, you’d obey, whether you liked it or not.’
‘I don’t think I should. I should do what I thought right without waiting for anyone’s order. What! a woman that has suffered for you, not to be there, not to be by, when she was in trouble! It is inconceivable. Ashley, your friend must be a—he must be, let us say the least——’
‘Hush! I cannot hear any ill of him, he has always been my friend; and Anne—do you think anything higher could be said of a man than that Anne—you know what I mean.’
Heathcote was very sympathetic. He gave a friendly pressure to the arm that had come to be linked in his as they went along. The Curate had not been able to disburden his soul to anyone in these days past, when it had been so sorely impressed upon him that, though he could work for Anne, it was not his to stand by her and give her the truest support. Heathcote was sympathetic, and yet he could scarcely help smiling within himself at this good faithful soul, who, it was clear, had ventured to love Anne too, and, though so faithful still, had an inward wonder that it had been the other and not himself that had been chosen. The looker-on could have laughed, though he was so sorry. Anne, after all, he reflected, with what he felt to be complete impartiality, though only a country girl, was not the sort of young woman to be appropriated by a curate: that this good, heavy, lumbering fellow should sigh over her choice of another, without seeing in a moment that he and such as he was impossible! However, he pressed Charley’s arm in sympathy, even though he could not refrain from this half derision in his heart.