Susie had been nearly a month in Edgeley, and a new faculty had developed in her—a faculty that lies dormant for a life long with many people, and that is impossible to others—the faculty of living in the country. She had never known what that was. Not only in town, in the midst of London, but in the strange, rigid, conventional, severely-regulated life of the great hospital, she had spent all the most important years of her life, and thought she knew no other way. Had she been interrogated on the subject, Susie would have said that the country might be very good for a change—it was, as everybody knew, the very place for convalescents; where people ought to be sent to get well: but for those who were well to start with, oh no! This she would have said in all good faith, in that serene unacquaintance with what she rejected, which is the panoply of the simple mind.
But when she got to the country, almost the first morning Susie woke up in the quiet, in the clear air, and kind, mild sunshine which beamed out of the skies like a smile of God, and had no stony pavement to rebound from and turn into an oven—with a soft rapture such as all her life she had never known before. She had thought she liked the crowd, the stir, the perpetual call upon her, and what people called the life, which was nowhere so vigorous, so intent, so full of change, as in town. But in a moment she became aware that all this was a mistake, and that it was for the country she had been born. This had been a delightful revelation to Susie. And there had followed quickly another revelation, which never is unimportant in a young woman’s life, but which in her peculiar existence had been somehow eluded: and this was her own possession of that feminine power and influence of which books are full, but which Susie had not seen much of in ordinary life. Sometimes, indeed, there had happened cases in which a young doctor had somehow been transported beyond the line of his duties, by some one, perhaps a sister, most probably a young lady on probation, or one who was playing at nursing, as some will. And this had been at once wrong, which gave it piquancy as an incident, and amusing. But such incidents were very rare; people in the hospital being too busy to think of anything of the kind. Susie had been, without knowing, the object of one or two dawning enthusiasms of this description. In one case she had perhaps vaguely suspected the possibility: but Mrs. Sandford gave neither opportunity nor encouragement, and the thing had blown over.
Now, however, it had fully dawned upon her that she herself, tranquil and simple in early maturity, no longer a girl, as she said to herself, nor in the age of romance, had come to that moment of sovereignty which sooner or later falls to most women, notwithstanding all statistics—the power of actually affecting, disposing of, the life of another. It does not always turn out to be of profound importance in a man’s life that he has been refused by a certain woman. But for the time, at least, both parties feel that it is of great importance: and the result of acceptance, colouring and determining the course of two lives, cannot be exaggerated. Susie discovered, first with amusement, afterwards with a little fright, that the visits of Percy Spencer and of Mr. Cattley were not without meaning. The two curates, who were so different! Their position gave them a certain right to come, and her position as a stranger and a temporary inhabitant exempted her, so far, at least, as she was aware, from the remarks and criticisms to which another young woman living alone might have been subject. But Susie had nobody to interfere, no duenna, not even a well-trained maid to say not at home. These visitors came in with a little preliminary knock at the parlour door without asking if it was permitted—without any formality of announcement. The door of the house was always open, and Sarah in the kitchen would have thought it strange indeed to be interrupted in her morning work by anyone ringing at the bell.
A month is a long time when it is passed in this land of intimacy. Susie was asked frequently to the rectory, not always with Mrs. Egerton’s free will—but there are necessities in that way which ladies in the country cannot ignore: and it was very rarely that a day passed without a meeting in the village street, if no more—at some cottage where Susie had made herself useful, but most frequently in her own little sanctuary, in the parlour so familiar to both these gentlemen, so much more familiar to them than to her. At first they were continually meeting there, and their meetings were not pleasant. For Percy did his best to exasperate Mr. Cattley by a pretended deference to his old age and antiquated notions, or by the elevation of his own standard of churchmanship over the mild pretensions of the clergyman who did not call himself a priest. And Mr. Cattley would retaliate by times with a middle-aged contempt for boyish enthusiasms, by assuring his young friend that by-and-by he would see things in a different light.
After a while, however, they fell into a system, arranging their comings and goings with a mutual and jealous care in order that they might not meet. And they both gave Susie a great deal of information about themselves. She sat, and smiled, and listened, not without a subdued pleasure in that power which she had discovered later than usual, and which even this mutual antagonism made more flattering. Percy was full of schemes in which he demanded her interest.
‘Everything has gone on here in the old-fashioned way,’ he said, ‘in the famous old let-alone way. Aunt Mary has pottered about: she is the only one that has done anything. My father never had any energy. He would have let anyone take the reins out of his hands. And she has done it; and she has always had old Cattley under her thumb. He has not dared to say his soul was his own. To see him sit and stare and worship her used to be our fun when we were boys. Jack must have told you.’
‘No, never. John saw nothing that was not perfect. He worshipped all of you, I think.’
‘Some of us too much, perhaps—not me, I am certain,’ said Percy. ‘But old Cattley was the greatest joke, Miss Sandford. How you would have laughed!’ (Susie, however, did not laugh at all at this suggestion, but sat as grave as a judge, with her eyes bent on her sewing.) ‘But nothing could have been more unecclesiastical,’ Percy continued, recovering his gravity. ‘It was the first thing I had to do in getting the parish into my hands. Aunt Mary had to be put down.’
‘Has she been put down?’ said Susie, laughing a little in her turn.
‘I flatter myself, completely,’ said the young man. ‘She has learned to keep her own place, which is everything. My father gives no trouble; he sees how things have been neglected, and he is quite willing that I should have it all in my own hands. I hope, especially if I have your help, Miss Sandford, to have the cottage hospital and all the improvements of which we have talked carried out. If I might hope that you would set it going——’