But by this time they had reached the end of the avenue. The Rectory was the nearest house. It was a very handsome red-brick house, not older than the days of Queen Anne, standing only a little way off the road, half concealed in its shrubberies, well-kept, graceful, and comfortable. The pediment of the front showed over the lower growth of trees, and was sheltered and embosomed in the loftier ones. A noble old cedar stretching its long level arms across the road stood close by the gate. All kinds of fine flowering shrubs were in clumps in front of the house: some shining in dark evergreen, and some rapidly dropping their many-coloured leaves. There was something in the shape of sculpture adorning the pediment, and the Oakley tigers ramped on the posts of the gate; while behind stretched a large enclosure, full, apparently, of fine trees. It was as good as many a squire’s house in the country, one of the very finest specimens extant of an English Rectory. At a distance of about a quarter of a mile lay the village, such a spruce and trim place as villages are which live in kindly neighbourship with a rich Lord of the Manor and a fastidious Rector—their gardens, their windows, everything was in good order. There were flowers even now, chrysanthemums and dahlias, and some pale monthly roses. The end nearest the Hall and the Rectory was a sort of square built on three sides. The houses were old, with high-pitched roofs, covered with those soft brown-red tiles upon which lichens grow, and nothing could be more picturesque. A row of little old almshouses, older than either Rectory or Hall, was on one side, on the other was the Exchange, the Regent Street of Oakley. Here stood the inn, a rustic country inn with a sign on a post in front of it, and the post-office, with Berlin wool patterns in its little projecting window, and the shop in which you could buy everything. It was so civilized a place that in the post-office there was a little circulating library, chiefly of novels; and scarcely less innocent was the inn parlour where two papers were taken, and where the village men dropped in as into a club, to see if there was any news. The remains of an old cross stood in the centre of this little square. It was reduced to a mere stone post, with half illegible carvings, and in more modern days somebody had built a drinking-fountain close to it, taking advantage of the old well which had been there from time immemorial. The drinking-fountain was shabby, as drinking-fountains have a way of being, but when horses stopped to drink out of the trough, and a few people came with jugs of an afternoon for the water, which was quite famous for making tea, with the broken old stone of the cross standing up into the blue skies beyond them, it was a pleasant sight enough. Everything, however, was grey with the November chill. Few people were out of doors, but the afternoon had begun to brighten through the haze, promising better weather.
“I am going to the almshouses,” said Lucy, making a decided stop, in order to take leave of her companion.
“I will walk to the cross with you,” he said. And as they came within reach of the village windows more than one good woman within, glad even of this mild incident to pass the afternoon, came and looked at them across the muslin blind, and decided that something would come o’ that. “And I shouldn’t wonder if it was soon,” said the village dressmaker, getting up to look at the call of her assistant, “for one wedding brings another.”
“Oh, is it true as it’s nobody but a poor girl that young Squire has married?” asked the assistant, under her breath, who was young too, and pretty, and remembered that the young Squire had looked in at the window more than once as he had passed. “It might have been me!” She said to herself.
“There’s that overskirt to finish, Miss Cording,” said the dressmaker peremptorily. She prided herself in allowing no nonsense to be talked among her young ladies. Lucy did not know of the eyes that were upon her, or of the guess in everybody’s mind. She walked very sedately to the cross, and then turned round and bid her cousin good-bye.
“I have people to see in the almshouses, too,” he said. “I will go on with you.”
“I did not know you went there,” said Lucy. She was better acquainted with the poor people than he was, and indeed did a curate’s work, and saved (though without intending it) a great deal of trouble to the Rector.
“You make me out to be worse than I am,” he said, with an uneasy flush upon his face. “I may not perhaps take to the poor people as you do—I have not been brought up to it; but I am not such a stranger in the parish as you think.”
“I did not think anything about it,” said Lucy, calmly; and this perhaps he felt the hardest of all.
Sir John came strolling into his wife’s sitting-room after these two young people had gone down the avenue. He was restless, and came in there three or four times a day for no reason at all, except the restlessness of a troubled mind. He went up to the window, near which she was sitting, to get the light on her work, for Lady Curtis was not so young as she had once been, and her eyes, as she said, were going. She had not had courage to go out and face the damp air and the long dreary avenue with Lucy. She sat there mournfully enough by herself, trying to think she was interested in her crewels. Sir John did not say anything when he first came in, but went up to the window, and stared out with eyes that did not seem to see anything. But they did see something, for he said after a moment,