“He has two daughters grown up,” said Mildmay, “and two small children; and so far as I can judge is—— What is there to laugh at?” he added, with a look of the greatest surprise.
“So, so; he has daughters?” said the Master, with a burst of genial laughter. “That is it? Don’t blush, my dear fellow; as good men as you have been in the same predicament. Go and marry her, which will be much more sensible; and I hope Miss St. John is everything that is pretty and charming for your sake.”
Perhaps Mildmay blushed, but he was not aware of it. He felt himself grow pale in a white heat of passion. “This is a very poor joke,” he said. “Excuse me, Master, if I must say so. I speak to you of an injury to the Church, and a serious wrong to one of her priests, and you answer me with a jest most inappropriate to the occasion. I saw Miss—I mean Mr. St. John and his family for the first time two days ago. Personal feeling of any kind has not been my inducement to make this appeal to your sense of justice. But I have made a mistake, it seems. Good morning! I will not detain you more.”
“Why, Mildmay! a man may have his joke. Don’t take it in this tragical way. And don’t be so withering in your irony about my sense of justice,” said the Master, with a laugh, half apologetic, half angry. But he did not ask the young man to sit down again. “Justice goes both ways,” he added; “and I have justice to the college, and justice to its more distinguished members, and even to the parish, for whose good we are called upon to act—to consider; as well as justice to Mr. St. John, which really is not our affair. But, my dear fellow, all this is very admirable in you—and don’t think I fail to see that, though you say I made a poor joke. Yes, I am in a hurry, there is no denying it; but I’ll see Singleton, and leave the matter in his hands. Meet you in the Oberland, eh? My wife talks of St. Moritz, but we never can drag the children all that way. Good-bye.”
Mildmay marched out of the old house with all his pulses tingling. It seemed to him that poor Cicely, in the midst of all the anxieties that lurked in her young eyes, had been insulted. Was it that sort of folly he was thinking of, or she, poor girl, who had said nothing to him but reproaches? But yet, I will allow, that absolutely innocent as he felt of any such levity, the accusation excited him more, perhaps, than was needful. He could not forget or forgive it, as one forgives a sorry jest at one’s own expense, the reason being, he said to himself, that it was an insult to her, and that this insult had come upon a young innocent creature through him, which was doubly hard. He was still tingling with this blow, when he met his second in succession, so to speak, Mr. Ruffhead, who was serving a curacy near Oxford, and who had a slight unspoken, unacknowledged grudge at his brother Fellow who had been preferred before himself. Mildmay, in his excitement, laid hold upon this probable heir of his, in case he should give up Brentburn, and poured the whole story into his ears, asking with some heat and passion for his advice. “I don’t see how I can take the living over Mr. St. John’s head; it seems to me the most terrible injustice,” he cried.
Mr. Ruffhead shook his head.
“You must not ask my advice,” said that sensible person. “If you don’t take it, and it’s offered to me, I shall of course. I don’t know Mr. St. John, and if one neglected one’s own interests for every hard case one heard of, where would one be? I can’t afford to play with my chances. I daresay you think I am very hard-hearted; but that is what I should do.”
This plain declaration of sentiment subdued Mildmay, and brought him back to matters of fact. “I suppose you are right; but I have not made up my mind to decline the living,” he said coldly, and did not ask Ruffhead to dinner as he had at first intended. No man, they say, likes his heir, and this kind of inheritance was doubly disagreeable to think of. Certainly, if the only alternative was Ruffhead and his honeymooning (which somehow it disgusted Mildmay to think of, as of something almost insulting to himself), it would be better, much better, that he himself should take Brentburn. He would not give it up only to see it passed on to this commonplace fellow, to enable him, forsooth, to marry some still more commonplace woman. Good heavens! was that the way to traffic with a cure of souls? He went back to his beautiful rooms in a most disturbed state of mind, and drew up impatiently the blinds which were not intended to be drawn up. The hot August light came in scorching and broad over all his delights, and made him loathe them; he tripped upon, and kicked away to the end of the room, a rug for which you or I, dear reader, would have given one of our ears; and jerked his Italian tapestry to one side, and I think, if good sense had not restrained him, would have liked to take up his very best bit of china and smash it into a hundred pieces. But after a while he smiled at himself, and reduced the blaze of daylight to a proper artistic tone, and tried to eat some luncheon. Yesterday at the same hour he had shared the curate’s dinner, with Cicely at the head of the table, looking at him with sweet eyes, in which there was still the dewy look of past tears. She had the house and all its cares upon her delicate shoulders, that girl; and her innocent name had been made the subject of a jest—through him!
CHAPTER XV.
THE ARTIST AND THE HOUSEKEEPER.
I DO not suppose that Cicely St. John had really any hope in her new acquaintance, or believed, when she looked at the matter reasonably, that his self-renunciation, if he had the strength of mind to carry it out, would really secure for her father the living of Brentburn. But yet a certain amount of faith is natural at her years, and she was vaguely strengthened and exhilarated by that suppressed expectation of something pleasant that might possibly happen, which is so great an element in human happiness; and, with this comfort in her soul, went about her work, preparing for the worst, which, to be sure, notwithstanding her hope, was, she felt, inevitable. Mab, when the stranger’s enthusiastic adoption of her sister’s suggestion was told to her, accepted it for her part with delight, as a thing settled. A true artist has always more or less a practical mind. However strong his imagination may be, he does not confine himself to fancies, or even words, but makes something tangible and visible out of it, and this faculty more or less shapes the fashion of his thinking. Mab, who possessed in addition that delightful mixture of matter-of-factness which is peculiar to womankind, seized upon the hope and made it into reality. She went to her work as gaily as if all the clouds had been in reality dispersed from her path. This time it was little Annie, the nursemaid—Cicely having interfered to protect the babies from perpetual posing—who supplied her with the necessary “life.” Annie did not much like it. She would have been satisfied, indeed, and even proud, had “her picture” been taken in her best frock, with all her Sunday ribbons; but to be thrust into a torn old dingy garment, with bare feet, filled the little handmaiden with disgust and rage great enough for a full-grown woman. “Folks will think as I hain’t got no decent clothes,” she said; and Mab’s injudicious consolation, to the effect that “folks would never see the picture,” did not at all mend the matter. Cicely, however, drew up her slight person, and “looked Miss St. John,” according to Mab’s description; and Annie was cowed. There were at least twenty different representations in Mab’s sketch-books of moments in which Cicely had looked Miss St. John; and it was Mab’s conviction in life as well as in art that no opponent could stand before such a demonstration. Bare-footed, in her ragged frock, Annie did not look an amiable young person, which, I am ashamed to say, delighted the artist. “She will do for the naughty little girl in the fairy tale, the one with toads and frogs dropping from her lips,” cried Mab, in high glee. “And if it comes well I shall send it to Mr. Mildmay, to show we feel how kind he is.”