Then, with anxiety in her voice, Hannah said: "I wish you'd take a book that would do you some good."
"It can't do me any harm." Margaret was delighted at finding Hannah a little softer than usual. "I'm going to take Paradise Lost—it's a poem."
"It sounds very appropriate," Hannah said, solemnly.
Margaret blinked her eyes in astonishment, and wondered if Hannah were making a joke, and on the Sabbath, too! Perhaps, as most people are influenced by worldly matters, protest to the contrary as they will, Hannah was somewhat soothed in her secret mind at yesterday's revelations concerning the Vincent family. To be sure, the Australian brother had gone away, according to Mrs. Lakeman, because he made an unlucky marriage. And Gerald Vincent had lived quietly for twenty years at Woodside Farm: perhaps he, too, considered his marriage unlucky, and in his heart looked down on her and her mother; but even that would not undo the fact of the relationship, or prevent the step-daughter of Lord Eastleigh from being counted a more important person than hitherto when she went to Petersfield. There were moments when Hannah had visions of herself as an aristocrat in an open carriage driving through a park, or going to court in a train and feathers; she had often heard that people wore trains and feathers when they went to court. Nonsense and vanity she called it, but the momentary vision of herself trailing along and the white plumes nodding from her head was pleasant all the same.
"Well, we'll see when he comes back," she thought, as she walked across the fields with her mother. "If he isn't going to call himself Lord anything, and is going to live on here all the same, I may as well marry Mr. Garratt and be done with it—that is, if he behaves himself properly. He's getting a good business round him at Guildford, and we'll hardly rank as tradespeople when they know who I am. Mother," she said, aloud, "you'll not be staying on at the farm if what this Mrs. Lakeman said is true, and father comes back with a title?"
"Nothing will ever take me away from it," Mrs. Vincent answered; "and father will be just the same when he comes back, whether his brother be living or dead. I'm sorry you know anything about it, Hannah, for it won't make any difference one way or another."
XIX
Lena Lakeman, haunting the green landscape like an uneasy spirit, watched Mrs. Vincent and Hannah go into the church. "I wonder what little Margaret does with her morning when she's left alone?" she thought, as she went through the gate that led across the fields, and played about the field searching for clover, counting the blades in a tuft of grass, or resting beneath the outreaching hedge of honeysuckle like a lizard. From sheer sleepiness, she stayed there almost without moving till presently she heard the country voices in church singing "Oh, be joyful in the Lord all ye lands." She opened her eyes then and looked at the beauty round her. The land did rejoice, she thought—in the summer time. If God would only let it last His people would rejoice all the year round; but how could they, how could they be religious, when the climate was bad? Perhaps one reason why Roman Catholics took their religions so closely into their lives was that it had generated in those places that were filled with sunshine.