Mrs. Egerton passed over this compliment with a slight wave of her hand; a smile would have been enough, had it been possible to see it. ‘I shall go to-morrow,’ she said. ‘I should have done so anyhow. And John—is anything settled with your brother about him? Is he going to begin his work? Poor boy; he will go with an aching heart. But he is so young.’
‘Do you think people don’t feel when they are young, Aunt Mary? I think it is then they feel most.’
‘Yes, Elly—and no: you feel, my dear, no one more keenly; but then you forget. Your heart will be breaking, and then there will come a bright day, a burst of sunshine, and it will spring up like a bird in spite of you. Thank God for it. That is the good of being young.’
‘There seems to be some hesitation now about my brother,’ said Mr. Cattley. ‘This aunt, if she is the aunt, seems to have interfered. I don’t know what is to come of it, except that the boy is evidently unhappy.’
‘It is very clear,’ said Mrs. Egerton, half smiling, half serious, ‘that I have been too long away, and that I must try what I can make of it at once.’
‘Oh, do! No one ever understands like you,’ said the curate, with a sigh of relief. And then the fireside talk floated off to other things.
Mrs. Egerton set out next morning according to her engagement. She was a comely woman of forty-five, bright-eyed, grey-haired, ample, as became her age, and making no pretensions to be a day younger than she was. She had been long a widow, so long that the recollection of her married life was not much more than a dream; but her brother’s household and children had kept her from relapsing into any narrowness of a celibate state, and conferred upon her that larger and softer development of motherhood which was not hers in fact. She was a woman in whom a great many people had much confidence, and who had, to tell the truth, a good deal of confidence in herself. But she did not take herself altogether seriously, as Mr. Cattley did. She half laughed at the influence with which she was credited, and laughed altogether at the magic powers with which that one worshipper endowed her. But still the worship had a certain effect. Perhaps but for that she would not have thought herself capable of unwinding the tangled skein which had suddenly been brought under her notice. A sense of half-fantastic annoyance to find that the family she knew so well was in reality not known to her at all, which in Edgeley parish was a breach of all custom and decorum; and at the same time a half satisfaction that these perplexing circumstances had come to light while she was out of the way, so that it was quite possible that everything might be set right when she, the legitimate confidential adviser of the parish, had returned—was, in her mind, not unmixed with a certain self-ridicule on the surface, and amusement with herself for this certainty of setting all right.
‘How do I know they will tell me any more than the others?’ she said to herself: but as a matter-of-fact she had no doubt whatever that they would tell her more than the others. She had been away for nearly a month, and found a great many things to remark as she walked down the village street. Perhaps she was, as Elly had said, something of a despot—as the benevolent head of a community, wishing the greatest possible happiness of all, not only of the greatest number, usually is. Her despotism was of the benignant kind, but still here and there it was resented by a too independent spirit. That she should pause to put the baby in a comfortable position in its perambulator, and to give the young nurse a lesson as to carefulness in driving it, was no doubt quite legitimate; but when she stopped to say to Mrs. Box at the shop—‘I would not, if I were you, send out the child with such a very young girl; she can’t have sense enough to take proper care,’ Mrs. Box tossed her head a little, and said she hoped she was as careful of her children as most folks.
‘So you are, I don’t doubt, yourself; but that girl is too young, you should have some one with more sense. I am sure you are able to afford it,’ the rector’s sister said.
Mrs. Box from that day was unsettled in her principles, and, though in the interests of trade she made no reply, it became very clear to her that clergy and clergy’s belongings who interfered with what they had nothing to do with, were extremely troublesome. Mrs. Egerton, however, walked on with a conviction that she had said no more than was her duty, and a serene unconsciousness of having fostered the first flying seeds of Dissent.