“Helena Thornleigh, for instance,” said Clare. “I have no patience with her. Thornleigh village is in pretty good order, thanks to Ada; but only fancy a girl wanting a career, and all those dreadful cottages within a mile of her father’s house! Don’t you know Chomely and Little Felton, on the way to Thorne? They are frightful places. If the poor people were pigs, they could not be more uncomfortable. And what does Helena ever do to mend them? Why, there is a career ready to her hand.”
“But what could she do to mend them?” said Lord Newmarch, “I don’t suppose she has any money of her own.”
“She has her father’s,” said Clare indignantly, and walked on, elevating her head, her heart swelling with a recollection of all the power her father accorded to her, and all the revolutions she had made.
“Ah,” said Lord Newmarch, shaking his head, “there are fathers and fathers; and besides, Miss Thornleigh probably thinks that to gain a thing by wheedling her father, which her brother could do independently, is but a sign of bondage. She has a fine intellect, and a great deal of energy——”
“Then I would go and build them with my own hands!” said Clare, with that fine mixture of unreasoning Conservatism and Revolutionism which so often distinguishes a woman’s politics. She was the strictest Tory in the world: a change of law or custom was a horror to her. She scorned the idea of a career for Helena Thornleigh with the intensest inconsiderate disdain. But she would have backed her up about the cottages to the fullest extent that enthusiasm could go, and helped her to work at them had that been needful. Lord Newmarch put his head a little on one side and took a close view of her, which was not without meaning. Strong sense of duty, good fortune, enthusiasm in a certain way which might be most usefully trained, excellent old family, great personal beauty, youth. These were qualities most worthy of consideration. He could not feel that he had encountered any one yet who was quite so well endowed. She would do credit to the choice even of an Earl’s son; she might further even a high political career. He made a mental note in his mind to this effect as they arrived at the church door.
Mr. Fielding was not very much of a preacher. He looked venerable in his surplice, with his white hair, and he read the service with a certain paternal grace, like a father among his children. He had baptised the great majority of his hearers, married them, had some share in all the great events of their life, and had given them all the instruction they had in sacred things. Accordingly, there was no one so appropriate as he to conduct their prayers, to read them the simple lesson of love to God and aid to man. His teaching seldom went any further. His was not the preaching which insists upon the authority of the Church, or the extreme importance of the divisions of the ecclesiastical year. And though there were one or two points of doctrine which he held very strongly, it was only on very urgent pressure that he preached on them. His audience knew, or, at least, the instructed among his audience knew, that the Rector had been holding a very hot discussion with Dr. Somers when he produced one of his discourses upon Faith or Predestination. On such occasions Dr. Somers would himself be present, with his keen eyes confronting the gentle preacher in an attitude of war, and noting all the flaws in his armour; and it was well for Mr. Fielding that he was short-sighted and could not see his adversary. But on this Sunday there had been nothing to excite him. The June day was soft and balmy, and through the open door the peaceable blue sky and green boughs looked in to cool and lighten the atmosphere. A grave or two outside but made the sense of home more profound. The rustics worshipped with their dead around them, almost sharing their prayers, and eyes that wandered found nothing worse to look upon than the green grassy turf with its pathetic mounds below, and the deep blue, leading their thoughts to the unutterable, above. The line of educated faces in the Squire’s pew, and Dr. Somers, like a humanised eagle, seeing everything, were the only breaks in the usual audience. Here or there a farmer or two, with an ample wife more brilliant than her humble neighbours, headed a row of ruddy boys and girls—but these were as much rustics as the ploughmen round them. At the big door of the church, the west end, sat Perfitt and Mrs. Murray, two faces of a very different type. She looked on, rather than joined in the service, half disapproving, half interested; while he, with a certain matter-of-fact superiority, patronised and initiated the stranger, finding the places in the prayer-book for her, and thrusting it into her hand at every change. No one noted the two thus strangely introduced into a scene foreign and strange to at least one of them, except Edgar, who, perhaps, was not so attentive as he ought to have been to Mr. Fielding’s sermon, and to whom the changes on the old Scotchwoman’s face were interesting, he could not tell why. It seemed to him that he could divine what was passing through her mind, and he looked on with almost affectionate amusement at the listener, who was perhaps Mr. Fielding’s only attentive hearer in all the congregation. The good folks about were dropping asleep in the unaccustomed quiet, or else looking straight before them with complacent composure, hearing the words addressed to them as they heard the bees and insects, which made a slumberous pleasant hum about the place. That sound was natural to church, as the hum of bees and twitter of birds are natural which come so sweetly from the outer world. The hush, the warmth, the stray breath of air, now and then, the Sunday clothes, the hum of parson and bees together, the scent of the monthly rose laid on the prayer-book—all this was pleasant to the simple folk. They were doing their duty, and their hearts were at rest. But Mrs. Murray looked and commented, and sometimes softly shook her handsome Scotch head, and wondered if this was all the spiritual fare vouchsafed to the inhabitants of Arden. Edgar divined her thoughts as if he had known her all his life, and was more interested than if Mr. Fielding had been a much better preacher, though it would have been hard to tell why.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
After this Sunday, and the thoughts it awoke in his mind, Lord Newmarch found that he could stay another day, and during that day he sought Clare’s company with great perseverance. And it was not so difficult as might have been expected to secure it. Miss Arden, indeed, found her noble companion tiresome sometimes, but yet she agreed in a good many of his ways of thinking. His Radicalism did not jar upon her as did the Radicalism of other people. For Lord Newmarch was clear as to the duty of the upper classes to head and guide the new movement in which he devoutly believed. He had no desire to lessen the influence of his own order, or withdraw a jot of position or power from them. And Clare did not laugh at the social reformer, as her brother was tempted to do. She was even angry with Edgar for his amusement, and could not understand what called it forth. “He is serious, of course; but a man whose mind is full of such subjects ought to be serious,” she said, with a little displeasure. “I don’t know what you find to laugh at in him.” And she did not object to being talked to about the improvement of the country, and how the people could best be guided for their own good. Clare knew, no one better, that the people took a great deal of guiding. She had not the least objection to make their social existence the subject of laws, to condescend to minute legislation, and ordain how often they were to wash, and what clothes they were to wear. Why not? It was all for their own comfort, and not for anybody else’s advantage. Thus Lord Newmarch and she had a good many topics of mutual interest. They squabbled over the question of education, but that only increased the interest of their talk; and it is not to be denied that his position as an actual legislator, a man not discussing an abstract question, but seeking information on a matter he would have personally to do with, increased his importance in her eyes. She battled stoutly against the impression which sometimes forced itself upon her mind that he was a bore, and did not decline to talk to him, nor show any desire to avoid him all through the following Monday. Arthur Arden looking on was dismayed. Even he was not clever enough in his own case to perceive, what he would have perceived in any other, that Clare’s avoidance of himself was the strongest argument in his favour. She did not avoid Lord Newmarch; and Arthur was in dismay. He took Edgar dolefully to the other end of the terrace, upon which the drawing-room windows opened, that Monday evening. Lord Newmarch had engaged Clare upon some of their favourite subjects, and the other two were thrown out, as people so often are by one animated dialogue going on in a small society. “That Newmarch has plenty to say,” Arthur ejaculated, sulkily; and pulled his moustache, and secretly murmured at Clare, whose presence prevented even the consolation of a cigar.
“Yes; he will not soon exhaust himself I fear,” said Edgar. “Clare will be too much accomplished with all this flood of information poured upon her. It is a triumph of good manners on her part not to look bored.”
“Do you think she is bored?” said Arthur Arden, eagerly. “I fear she is not. See how interested she looks. Confound him! The fellow’s father was a cheesemonger, or his grandfather—it comes to the same thing—and to see him sitting there! If I were you, Arden, I should not stand it. Being as I am, you know, only a poor cousin, it goes against me.”