“The young ladies,” said Miss Eliza with a laugh, “are mostly of that opinion, and I should not say nay, for I have not less than six nephews coming to-morrow for tennis, and everything that they can find that is diverting. They are either at the college, for there’s a summer session in the scientific classes, or else they’re in offices, and they come down to us on Saturday to play. I hope you’ll come up to the Burn, you and your brother, to meet my young men. There will be a view or two as well. And after the diversion there will be a kind of supper, and then they will see you home.”
Marion did not know how to act in such an emergency, but it was understood that the invitation was accepted. And Miss Eliza returned after half-an-hour’s talking, full of the genius of the mistress of the house, and the wealth of its fitting up. “There would need to be something very sustaining in the sense of good old blood in your veins, and a family that has existed for generations,” she said, “for if I was Lady Jean, I could not bear to see how the house is changed, just by the railway man. For it was always a bare, cauldrife sort of house. I used to feel that there were not carpets enough on the floor, nor coals enough in the grate. Now it’s just all blazing and shining with warmth—curtains that just clothe the place, and pictures on the walls, and grand carpets that your foot sinks in. It may not be such good taste, but it is far more comfortable. And Mrs. Rowland is a most personable woman, and him a very good sort of a man.”
“And the daughter, Aunt Eliza?” cried the miss, to whom this was the most interesting part of all.
“The daughter—well she’s just a young lady like the rest. I asked her to come to-morrow, and you can judge for yourself,” Miss Eliza said.
The minister and his wife formed a still more interesting part of the immediate society of the little place, and puzzled Evelyn, who had been brought up in the somewhat narrow creed of her country to ignore everything but “the Church,” and to look with small respect upon dissenters in general as a community of uneducated people. She did not at all know what to make of the trim and well dressed pair who called upon her, he in garments almost more sacerdotal than if he had been a priest of All Saints, Elizabeth Street, and she with the fashionable cut of her dress shadowed by the inevitable mackintosh. This was the Scotch minister whom she had met with in pictures in a very different aspect, but of whom she knew nothing in real life except that she had a puzzled comprehension that he did not belong to “the Church,” but yet was—what was he?—a kind of vicar or rector after another fashion, like yet quite unlike the vicars and rectors whom she knew. Mrs. Rowland had her limitations like others, and did not know what to think. But she was, as ever, charmingly polite, and did her best to please these bewildering neighbours. She apologised for not having yet been to church, giving some excuse of tiredness or headache. As a matter of fact the headache had been a result of the same bewilderment which made her so curious and so unassured about the position of Mr. Dean. A Scottish gentlewoman in England would have had no such ignorance; which is a curious fact, and one, perhaps, which proves the superiority of the wealthier and more remote ecclesiastical economy.
“I dare say,” said Mrs. Dean, “that you were not sure if you should come to our church. There is an Episcopalian Chapel in Kilrossie. As you are English, Mrs. Rowland, it’s perhaps there you should go.”
“Indeed, I cannot say,” said Evelyn, “I have never gone anywhere but to the parish church—but—I don’t quite understand—”
“We both understand perfectly,” said Mrs. Dean, “that you would miss the ritual and your beautiful prayer-book. We have a great sympathy for that. There is nothing in the prayer-book, I am sure, that would be a stumbling-block to my husband, and he sometimes takes a collect just straight out of it without any kind of clipping or trimming. There is a great movement in Scotland, which perhaps you are not acquainted with, to improve the baldness of our services, and make them more generally attractive. We have a harmonium,” Mrs. Dean said with pride, “and I am happy to say that our choir is beginning to chant just extraordinarily well. You will see no such terrible difference as maybe you think.”
Evelyn held her peace, being more and more bewildered with every word. She wondered what Mrs. Reuben Butler, née Jeanie Dean, who was once the minister’s wife of this parish, would have thought of this statement. She only bowed in reply, not being for her own part at all qualified to speak.
“Alexander will explain to you far better than I can, and you will find no intolerance in him. He perhaps agrees better with you,” she added, with a smile, “than with the old-fashioned folk who insist upon keeping up all the difference.—Alexander, Mrs. Rowland would like you to explain the way we’re trying to bridge over the debateable land between our establishment and the other. Just come here. I will change places with you.” The good wife, with these words, rose and took a chair beside Rowland, to whom her husband had been talking, which was very self-denying on the part of the minister’s wife, there being nothing at all novel in the gentleman of the house, whereas there was a great deal that was novel in the lady, and therefore interesting. She relinquished the post to the minister, who was perhaps better able to expound—was he better able to expound?—the problem of that ecclesiastical movement in Scotland which is so much more puzzling to unsophisticated English understandings, prepared for polemics and opposition, than the good old conventional figure of the Presbyterian Calvinist, which is a primitive type that everybody knows.