All the ladies in Sliplin who had any respect for themselves attended these lectures, and a number read up the subjects privately, and wrote essays, the best of which were in their turn read out at subsequent meetings for the edification of the others. I think, however, these essays were rarely appreciated except by the families of the writers. But it may be easily perceived that a great deal of mental activity was going on where all this occurred.
The men of the community took a great deal less trouble in the improvement of their minds—two or three of them came to the lectures, a rather shame-faced minority amid the ranks of the ladies, but not one, so far as I have heard, belonged to a mutual improvement society, or profited by a correspondence class, or joined a Reading Union. Whether this was because they were originally better educated, or naturally had less intellectual enthusiasm, I cannot tell. In other places it might have been supposed to be because they had less leisure; but that was scarcely to be asserted in Sliplin, where nobody, or hardly anybody, had anything to do. There was a good club, and very good billiard tables, which perhaps supplied an alternative; but I would not willingly say anything to the prejudice of the gentlemen, who were really, in a general way, as intelligent as the ladies, though they did so much less for the improvement of their minds. Now, the people whom Katherine Tredgold had met at Steephill did none of these things—the officers and their society as represented by Charlie Somers and Algy Scott, and their original leader, Mrs. Seton, were, it is needless to state, absolutely innocent of any such efforts. Therefore Katherine, as may be said, had gained rather than lost by being so much more drawn into this intellectually active circle when dropped by that of Lady Jane.
The chief male personages in this society were certainly the doctor and the clergyman. Curates came and curates went, and some of them were clever and some the reverse; but Mr. Stanley and Dr. Burnet went on for ever. They were of course invariably of all the dinner parties, but there the level of intelligence was not so high—the other gentlemen in the town and the less important ones in the country coming in as a more important element. But in the evening parties, which were popular in Sliplin during the winter, and the afternoon-tea parties which some people, who did not care to go out at night, tried hard to introduce in their place, they were supreme. It was astonishing how the doctor, so hard-worked a man, managed to find scraps of time for so many of these assemblages. He was never there during the whole of these symposia. He came very late or he went away very early, he put in half an hour between two rounds, or he ran in for ten minutes while he waited for his dog-cart. But the occasions were very rare on which he did not appear one time or another during the course of the entertainment. Mr. Stanley, of course, was always on the spot. He was a very dignified clergyman, though he had not risen to any position in the Church beyond that of Rector of Sliplin. He preached well, he read well, he looked well, he had not too much to do; he had brought up his motherless family in the most beautiful way, with never any entanglement of governesses or anything that could be found fault with for a moment. Naturally, being the father of a family, the eldest of which was twenty-two, he was not in his first youth; but very few men of forty-seven looked so young or so handsome and well set up. He took the greatest interest in the mental development of the Sliplin society, presiding at the University Extension as well as all the other meetings, and declaring publicly, to the great encouragement of all the other students, that he himself had “learned a great deal” from the Merovingians lectures and the Ceramic lectures, and those on the Arctic regions.
Mr. Stanley had three daughters, and a son who was at Cambridge; and a pretty old Rectory with beautiful rooms, and everything very graceful and handsome about him. The young people were certainly a drawback to any matrimonial aspirations on his part; but it was surmised that he entertained them all the same. Miss Mildmay was one of the people who was most deeply convinced on this subject. She had an eye which could see through stone walls in this particular. She knew when a man conceived the idea of asking a woman to marry him before he knew it himself. When she decided that a thing was to be (always in this line) it came to pass. Her judgment was infallible. She knew all the signs—how the man was being wrought up to the point of proposing, and what the woman’s answer was going to be—and she took the keenest interest in the course of the little drama. It was only a pity that she had so little exercise for her faculty in that way, for there were few marriages in Sliplin. The young men went away and found their wives in other regions; the young women stayed at home, or else went off on visits where, when they had any destiny at all, they found their fate. It was therefore all the more absorbing in its interest when anything of the kind came her way. Stella’s affair had been outside her orbit, and she had gained no advantage from it; but the rector and the doctor and Katherine Tredgold were a trio that kept her attention fully awake.
There was a party in the Rectory about Christmas, at which all Sliplin was present. It was a delightful house for a party. There was a pretty old hall most comfortably warmed—which is a rare attraction in halls—with a handsome oak staircase rising out of it, and a gallery above which ran along two sides. The drawing-room was also a beautiful old room, low, but large, with old furniture judiciously mingled with new, and a row of recessed windows looking to the south and clothed outside with a great growth of myrtle, with pink buds still visible at Christmas amid the frost and snow. Inside it was bright with many lamps and blazing fires; and there were several rooms to sit in, according to the dispositions of the guests—the hall where the young people gathered together, the drawing-rooms to which favoured people went when they were bidden to go up higher, and Mr. Stanley’s study, where a group of sybarites were always to be found, for it was the warmest and most luxurious of all. The hall made the greatest noise, for Bertie was there with various of his own order, home, like himself, for Christmas, and clusters of girls, all chattering at the tops of their voices, and urging each other to the point of proposing a dance, for which the hall was so suitable, and quite large enough. The drawing-room was full of an almost equally potent volume of sound, for everybody was talking, though the individual voices might be lower in tone. But in the study it was more or less quiet. The Rector himself had taken Katherine there to show her some of his books. “It would be absurd to call them priceless,” he said, “for any chance might bring a set into the market, and then, of course, a price would be put upon them, varying according to the dealer’s knowledge and the demand; but they are rare, and for a poor man like me to have been able to get them at all is—well, I think that, with all modesty, it is a feather in my cap; I mean, to get them at a price within my means.”
“It is only people who know that ever get bargains, I think,” Katherine said, in discharge of that barren duty of admiration and approval on subjects we do not understand, which makes us all responsible for many foolish speeches. Mr. Stanley’s fine taste was not quite pleased with the idea that his last acquisition was a bargain, but he let that pass.
“Yes; I think that, without transgressing the limits of modesty, I may allow that to be the case. It holds in everything; those who know what a friend is attain to the best friends; those who can appreciate a noble woman——”
“Oh!” said Katherine, a little startled, “that is carrying the principle perhaps too far. I was thinking of china, you know, and things of that sort—when you see an insignificant little pot which you would not give sixpence for, and suddenly a connoisseur comes in who puts down the sixpence in a great hurry and carries it off rejoicing—and you hear afterwards that it was priceless, too, though not, of course,” she added apologetically, “like your books.”
“Quite true, quite true,” said the Rector blandly; “but I maintain my principle all the same, and the real prize sometimes stands unnoticed while some rubbish is chosen instead. I hope,” he added in a lower tone, “that you have good news from your sister, Miss Katherine, and at this season of peace and forgiveness that your father is thinking a little more kindly——”
“My father says very little on the subject,” Katherine said. She knew what he did say, which nobody else did, and the recollection made her shiver. It was very concise, as the reader knows.