“Hush, Arthur dear—oh, hush! Your duty to your flock is above your duty even to your sister,” said the widow, with a tremulous voice, timid of saying anything to him whose mood she could not comprehend. “You must find out when the first train starts, and I will go. I have been very foolish,” faltered the poor mother, “as you say, Arthur; but if my poor child is to bear such a dreadful blow, I am the only one to take care of her. Susan”—here she made a pause, her lip trembled, and she had all but broken into tears—“will not upbraid me, dear. You must not neglect your duty, whatever happens; and now let us go and inquire about the train, Arthur, and you can come on Monday, after your work is over; and, oh! my dear boy, we must not repine, but accept the arrangements of Providence. It was what your dear father always said to his dying day.”
Her face all trembling and pale, her eyes full of tears which were not shed, her tender humility, which never attempted a defence, and those motherly, tremulous, wistful advices which it now for the first time dawned upon Mrs. Vincent her son was not certain to take, moved the young Nonconformist out of his personal vexation and misery.
“This will not do,” he said. “I must go with you; and we must go directly. Susan may be less patient, less believing, less ready to take our word for it, than you imagine, mother. Come; if there is anybody to be got to do this preaching, the thing will be easy. Tozer will help me, perhaps. We will waste no more time here.”
“I am quite rested, Arthur dear,” said Mrs. Vincent; “and it will be right for me to call at Mrs. Tozer’s too. I wish I could have gone to Mrs. Tufton’s, and perhaps some others of your people. But you must tell them, dear, that I was very hurried—and—and not very well; and that it was family business that brought me here.”
“I do not see they have any business with the matter,” said the rebellious minister.
“My dear, it will of course be known that I was in Carlingford; and I know how things are spoken of in a flock,” said Mrs. Vincent, rising; “but you must tell them all I wanted to come, and could not—which, indeed, will be quite true. A minister’s family ought to be very careful, Arthur,” added the much-experienced woman. “I know how little a thing makes mischief in a congregation. Perhaps, on the whole, I ought not to call at Mrs. Tozer’s, as there is no time to go elsewhere. But still I should like to do it. One good friend is often everything to a young pastor. And, my dear, you should just say a word in passing to the women outside.”
“By way of improving the occasion?” said Vincent, with a little scorn. “Mother, don’t torture yourself about me. I shall get on very well; and we have plenty on our hands just now without thinking of Salem. Come, come; with this horrible cloud overhanging Susan, how can you spare a thought for such trifles as these?”
“Oh, Arthur, my dear boy, must not we keep you right?” said his mother; “are not you our only hope? If this dreadful news you tell me is true, my child will break her heart, and I will be the cause of it; and Susan has no protector or guardian, Arthur dear, that can take care of her, but you.”
Wiping her eyes, and walking with a feeble step, Mrs. Vincent followed her son out of Salem; but she looked up with gentle interest to his pulpit as she passed, and said it was a cold day to the cleaners, with anxious carefulness. She was not carried away from her palpable standing-ground by any wild tempest of anxiety. Susan, whose heart would be broken by this blow, was her mother’s special object in life; but the thought of that coming sorrow which was to crush the girl’s heart, made Mrs. Vincent only the more anxiously concerned to conciliate and please everybody whose influence could be of any importance to her son.
So they came out into the street together, and went on to Tozer’s shop. She, tremulous, watchful, noting everything; now lost in thought as to how the dreadful truth was to be broken to Susan; now in anxious plans for impressing upon Arthur the necessity of considering his people—he, stinging with personal wounds and bitterness, much more deeply alarmed than his mother, and burning with consciousness of all the complications which she was totally ignorant of. Fury against the villain himself, bitter vexation that he was Lady Western’s brother, anger at his mother for admitting, at Susan for giving him her heart, at Mrs. Hilyard for he could not tell what, because she had added a climax to all, burned in Vincent’s mind as he went on to George Street with his mother leaning on his arm, who asked him after every wayfarer who passed them, Who was that? It was not wonderful that the young man gradually grew into a fever of excitement and restless misery. Everything conspired to exasperate him,—even the fact that Sunday came so near, and could not be escaped. The whirl of his brain came to a climax when Lady Western’s carriage drove past, and through the mist of his wretchedness he saw the smile and the beautiful hand waved to him in sweet recognition. Oh heaven! to bring tears to those eyes, or a pang to that heart!—to have her turn from him shuddering, or pass him with cold looks, because her brother was a villain, and he the avenger of that crime! His mother, almost running to keep up with his unconsciously quickened pace, cast pitiful looks at him, inquiring what it was. The poor young fellow could not have told even if he would. It was a combination of miseries, sharply stimulated to the intolerable point by the mission on which he had now to enter Tozer’s shop.