“You think that is everything any one could desire?” he said smiling, with a flattered sense of his superiority—having found all these desirable things too little to content him—over this inexperienced creature. “But, Miss St. John, you forget the only motive worth discussing. There is a great deal that is very pleasant in Oxford—society, as you say, and books, and art, and much besides; but I am of no use to any one there. All the other people are just as well educated, as well off, as good, or better than I am. I live only to enjoy myself. Now, one wants more than that. Work, something to exercise one’s highest faculties. I want to do something for my fellow-creatures; to be of a little use. There must be much to do, much to improve, much to amend in a parish like this——”
A rapid flush of colour came to Cicely’s face. “To improve and amend!” she said quickly. “Ah! you speak at your ease, Mr. Mildmay—in a parish where papa has been working for twenty years!”
Mildmay gave her a startled, wondering look. To be thus interrupted while you are riding, full tilt, your favourite hobby, is very confusing. He scarcely took in the meaning of the words “working for twenty years.”
“Twenty years—all my lifetime and more; and you think you can mend it all at once like an old shoe!” cried Cicely, her cheeks flaming. Then she said, subduing herself, “I beg your pardon. What you say is quite right, I know.”
But by this time her words began to take their proper meaning to his mind. “Has Mr. St. John been here so long?” he said. “I hope you don’t think I undervalue his work. I am sure it must have been better than anything I with my inexperience can do; but yet——”
“Ah! you will learn; you are young; and we always think we can do better than the old people. I do myself often,” said Cicely, under her breath.
“I did not mean anything so presumptuous,” he said; “indeed, I did not know. I thought of myself, as one does so often without being aware—I hope you will not form a bad opinion of me, Miss St. John. I accepted the living for the sake of the work, not for any smaller motive. Books and society are not life. It seemed to me that to instruct one’s fellow-creatures so far as one can, to help them as far as one can, to bring a higher ideal into their existence——”
Cicely was bewildered by this manner of speech. She did not quite understand it. No one had ever spoken to her of a high ideal; a great deal had been said to her one time and another about doing her duty, but nothing of this. She was dazzled, and yet half contemptuous, as ignorance so often is. “A high ideal for the poor folk in the village, and Wilkins the grocer, and old Mrs. Joel with her pigs?” she cried mocking; yet while she said it, she blushed for herself.
Mildmay blushed too. He was young enough to be very sensitive to ridicule, and to know that high ideals should not be rashly spoken of except to sympathetic souls. “Why not,” he said, “for them as well as for others?” then stopped between disappointment and offence.
“Ah!” said Cicely, “you don’t know the village people. If you spoke to them of high ideals, they would only open their mouths and stare. If it was something to make a little money by, poor souls! or to get new boots for their children, or even to fatten the pigs. Now you are disgusted, Mr. Mildmay; but you don’t know how poor the people are, and how little time they have for anything but just what is indispensable for living.” As she said this, Cicely’s eyes grew wistful, and filled with moisture. The young man thought it was an angelical pity for the poverty and sufferings of others; but I fear the girl was at that moment thinking of what lay before herself.