“I wanted to speak to you,” said Cicely, catching her breath a little; “it was about the books. I don’t know if you have looked at them lately. Oh, papa! do you know that we are—in debt? I don’t know how to say it—a great deal in debt!”
“Not a great deal, my dear,” he said faintly; “something, I know. Wilkins spoke to me to-day—almost before Mr. Mildmay.”
“It is not Wilkins alone,” said Cicely solemnly; “it is everybody. The butcher, too; and, oh! so many little people. How are they ever to be paid? When I looked over the books to-day, not knowing—Oh! do you know how it has happened? Can they be cheating? It is my only hope.”
“My dear,” said the curate, faltering, “better that one should have done wrong than that a great many should have done wrong. Poor Mrs. St. John—nay, I should say both of us, Cicely; for I was also to blame. We were not like your mother, my dear; it all came natural to your mother; but she, or rather we——” Mr. St. John’s voice sank into an indistinct confusion. He was too good to blame the poor woman who was dead, and he did not know how to meet the eyes thus shining upon him, youthful, inexorable, of Hester’s child. But even Cicely was moved by her father’s wistful looks, and the humility of his tone.
“If only one could see any way of paying them,” she said; “if even we had been staying here! I had a plan, and we might have done it. And it brings it all so near, and makes it so certain, to see this man.”
“My love,” said the curate remonstrating, “we knew that some one must come. It is not his fault. Why should we be unkind to him?”
“Unkind! Oh papa!” cried Cicely in her exasperation, “what had we to do with him? It was not our business to feast him and pet him. But that is nothing,” she said, trembling with excitement; “I will not blame you, papa, for that or anything, if only you will say now what you are going to do, or where you think we can go, or what I must say to these poor people. We cannot stay here and starve, or till they put us in prison—only tell me what we must do.”
“How can I tell you, Cicely,” said the curate, “when I do not know myself? I must advertise or something,” he said helplessly. “I am old, my dear. Few people want a curate of my age; I suppose it almost looks like a stigma on a man to be a curate at my age.”
“Papa!” Cicely stopped short in what she was going to say, and looked at him with strained and anxious eyes. She had meant to assail him for still being a curate, but his self-condemnation closed the girl’s lips, or rather roused her in defence.
“Yes,” said Mr. St. John, “you may say I ought to have thought of that sooner; but when things go on for a long time one asks one’s self why should not they go on for ever? ‘He said, There will be peace in my time.’ That was selfish of Hezekiah, my dear, very selfish, when you come to think of it. But I dare say it never seemed so to him, and neither did it to me.”