"I am very sorry," said the Rector. "Poor ladies! it will come very hard upon them. My dear, I think you should call and ask if you can do anything. Troubles never come singly, it is said. I am very sorry for that poor young creature; though, perhaps, things have not gone so far as one imagined." The Rector sighed again, and looked as though his secret, whatever it might be, was almost too much for him. The consequence, of course, was, that Thomas prolonged his services to the last possibility, by way of hearing what had happened; as for Mrs Morgan, she sat on thorns, though her sense of propriety was too great to permit her to hurry over the dinner. The pudding, though it was the Rector's favourite pudding, prepared from a receipt only known at All-Souls, in which the late respected Head of that learned community had concentrated all his genius, was eaten in uneasy silence, broken only by the most transparent attempts on both sides to make a little conversation. Thomas hovered sternly over his master and mistress all the time, exacting with inexorable severity every usage of the table. He would not let them off the very smallest detail, but insisted on handing round the peaches, notwithstanding Mrs Morgan's protest. "They are the first out of the new orchard-house," said the Rector's wife. "I want your opinion of them. That will do, Thomas; we have got everything now, I think." Mrs Morgan was a little anxious about the peaches, having made a great many changes on her own responsibility in the gardening department; but the Rector took the downy fruit as if it had been a turnip, and notwithstanding her interest in the long-delayed news, his wife could not but find it very provoking that he took so little notice of her exertions.
"Roberts stood out against the new flue as long as he could," said Mrs Morgan. "Mr Proctor took no interest in the garden, and everything had gone to ruin; though I must say it was very odd that anybody from your college, William, should be careless about such a vital matter," said the Rector's wife, with a little asperity. "I suppose there must be something in the air of Carlingford which makes people indifferent." Naturally, it was very provoking, after all the trouble she had taken, to see her husband slicing that juicy pulp as if it had been any ordinary market fruit.
"I beg your pardon, my dear," said Mr Morgan; "I was thinking of this story about Mr Wentworth. One is always making new discoveries of the corruption of human nature. He had behaved very badly to me; but it is very sad to see a young man sacrifice all his prospects for the indulgence of his passions; though that is a very secular way of looking at the subject," said the Rector, shaking his head mournfully. "If it is bad in a worldly point of view, what is it in a spiritual? and in this age, too, when it is so important to keep up the character of the clergy!" Mr Morgan sighed again more heavily than ever as he poured out the single glass of port, in which his wife joined him after dinner. "Such an occurrence throws a stigma upon the whole Church, as Mr Leeson very justly remarked."
"I thought Mr Leeson must have something to do with it," said the Rector's wife. "What has Mr Wentworth been doing? When you keep a Low-Church Curate, you never can tell what he may say. If he had known of the All-Souls pudding he would have come to dinner, and we should have had it at first-hand," said Mrs Morgan, severely. She put away her peach in her resentment, and went to a side-table for her work, which she always kept handy for emergencies. Like her husband, Mrs Morgan had acquired some little "ways" in the long ten years of their engagement, one of which was a confirmed habit of needlework at all kinds of unnecessary moments, which much disturbed the Rector when he had anything particular to say.
"My dear, I am very sorry to see you so much the victim of prejudice," said Mr Morgan. "I had hoped that all our long experiences—" and here the Rector stopped short, troubled to see the rising colour in his wife's face. "I don't mean to blame you, my dear," said the perplexed man; "I know you were always very patient;" and he paused, not knowing what more to say, comforting himself with the thought that women were incomprehensible creatures, as so many men have done before.
"I am not patient," said the Rector's wife; "it never was my nature. I can't help thinking sometimes that our long experiences have done us more harm than good; but I hope nothing will ever make me put up with a Curate who tells tales about other people, and flatters one's self, and comes to dinner without being asked. Perhaps Mr Wentworth is very sinful, but at least he is a gentleman," said Mrs Morgan; and she bent her head over her work, and drove her needle so fast through the muslin she was at work upon, that it glimmered and sparkled like summer lightning before the spectator's dazzled eyes.
"I am sorry you are so prejudiced," said the Rector. "It is a very unbecoming spirit, my dear, though I am grieved to say so much to you. Mr Leeson is a very good young man, and he has nothing to do with this terrible story about Mr Wentworth. I don't wish to shock your feelings—but there are a great many things in the world that one can't explain to ladies. He has got himself into a most distressing position, and a public inquiry will be necessary. One can't help seeing the hand of Providence in it," said the Rector, playing reflectively with the peach on his plate.
It was at this moment that Thomas appeared at the door to announce Mr Leeson, who had come to talk over the topic of the day with the Rector—being comfortably obtuse in his perceptions, and quite disposed to ignore Mrs Morgan's general demeanour towards himself. "I am sure she has a bad temper," he would say to his confidants in the parish; "you can see it by the redness in her face: but I never take any notice when she says rude things to me." The redness was alarming in Mrs Morgan's face as the unlucky man became visible at the door. She said audibly, "I knew we should be interrupted!" and got up from her chair. "As Mr Leeson is here, you will not want me, William," she added, in her precisest tones. "If anything has happened since you came in, he will be able to tell you about it; and perhaps I had better send you your coffee here, for I have a great many things to do." Mr Morgan gave a little groan in his spirit as his wife went away. To do him justice, he had a great deal of confidence in her, and was unconsciously guided by her judgment in many matters. Talking it over with Mr Leeson was a totally different thing; for whatever might be said in his defence, there could not be any doubt that the Curate professed Low-Church principles, and had been known to drink tea with Mr Beecher, the new minister of Salem Chapel. "Not that I object to Mr Beecher because he is a Dissenter," Mr Morgan said, "but because, my dear, you know, it is a totally different class of society." When the Rector was left alone to discuss parish matters with this doubtful subordinate, instead of going into the subject with his wife, the good man felt a pang of disappointment; for though he professed to be reluctant to shock her, he had been longing all the time to enter into the story, which was certainly the most exciting which had occurred in Carlingford since the beginning of his incumbency. Mrs Morgan, for her part, went up-stairs to the drawing-room with so much indignation about this personal grievance that she almost forgot her curiosity. Mr Leeson hung like a cloud over all the advantages of Carlingford; he put out that new flue in the greenhouse, upon which she was rather disposed to pique herself, and withered her ferns, which everybody allowed to be the finest collection within a ten miles' circuit. This sense of disgust increased upon her as she went into the drawing-room, where her eye naturally caught that carpet which had been the first cross of her married life. When she had laid down her work, she began to plan how the offensive bouquets might be covered with a pinafore of linen, which looked very cool and nice in summer-time. And then the Rector's wife reflected that in winter a floor covered with white looked chilly, and that a woollen drugget of an appropriate small pattern would be better on the whole; but no such thing was to be had without going to London for it, which brought her mind back again to Mr Leeson and all the disadvantages of Carlingford. These subjects occupied Mrs Morgan to the exclusion of external matters, as was natural; and when she heard the gentlemen stir down-stairs as if with ideas of joining her in the drawing-room, the Rector's wife suddenly recollected that she had promised some tea to a poor woman in Grove Street, and that she could not do better this beautiful evening than take it in her own person. She was very active in her district at all times, and had proved herself an admirable clergywoman; but perhaps it would not have occurred to her to go out upon a charitable errand that particular evening had it not been for the presence of Mr Leeson down-stairs.
It was such a very lovely night, that Mrs Morgan was tempted to go further than she intended. She called on two or three of her favourites in Grove Street, and was almost as friendly with them as Lucy Wodehouse was with the people in Prickett's Lane; but being neither pretty and young, like Lucy, nor yet a mother with a nursery, qualified to talk about the measles, her reception was not quite as enthusiastic as it might have been. Somehow it would appear as though our poor neighbours loved most the ministrations of youth, which is superior to all ranks in the matter of possibility and expectation, and inferior to all ranks in the matter of experience; and so holds a kind of balance and poise of nature between the small and the great. Mrs Morgan was vaguely sensible of her disadvantages in this respect as well as in others. She never could help imagining what she might have been had she married ten years before at the natural period. "And even then not a girl," she said to herself in her sensible way, as she carried this habitual thread of thought with her along the street, past the little front gardens, where there were so many mothers with their children. On the other side of the way the genteel houses frowned darkly with their staircase windows upon the humility of Grove Street; and Mrs Morgan began to think within herself of the Miss Hemmings and other spinsters, and how they got along upon this path of life, which, after all, is never lightsome to behold, except in the future or the past. It was dead present with the Rector's wife just then, and many speculations were in her mind, as was natural. "Not that I could not have lived unmarried," she continued within herself, with a woman's pride; "but things looked so different at five-and-twenty!" and in her heart she grudged the cares she had lost, and sighed over this wasting of her years.
It was just then that the youngest Miss Hemmings saw Mrs Morgan, and crossed over to speak to her. Miss Hemmings had left five-and-thirty behind a long time ago, and thought the Rector's wife a happy woman in the bloom of youth. When she had discovered conclusively that Mrs Morgan would not go in to have a cup of tea, Miss Hemmings volunteered to walk with her to the corner; and it is not necessary to say that she immediately plunged into the topic which at that moment engaged all minds in Carlingford. "If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I should not have believed it," said Miss Hemmings. "I should have thought it a got-up story; not that I ever could have thought it impossible, as you say—for, alas! I know well that without grace every wickedness is more than possible—but I saw them with my own eyes, my dear Mrs Morgan; she standing outside, the bold little thing, and he at the door—as if it was right for a clergyman to open the door like a man-servant—and from that moment to this she has not been seen by any living creature in Carlingford: who can tell what may have been done with her?" cried the horrified eyewitness. "She has never been seen from that hour!"