“You are quite unlike yourself, my child,” Sir Roland said with perfect truth; “you surprise me very much to-day. I am sure that you do not mean a quarter of what you are saying.”
“You are right, papa. I do not mean even a tenth part of my spitefulness. I will try to be more like Mabel Lovejoy, who really is so good and nice. It is quite a mistake to suppose that I could ever be jealous of her. She is a dear kind-hearted girl, and the very wife for Hilary. But I think that she differs a little from me.”
“It is no matter of opinion, Alice. Mabel differs from you, as widely as you differ from your Cousin Cecil. I begin to incline to an old opinion (which I came across the other day), that much more variety is to be found in the weaker than in the stronger sex. Regard it thus——”
“Excuse me, father. I have no courage for regarding anything. You can look at things in fifty lights; and I in one shadow only. Good-bye, darling. Perhaps I shall never speak to you again as I have to-night. But I hope you will remember that I meant it for the best.”
CHAPTER LXV.
A FINE CHRISTMAS SERMON.
According to all the best accounts, that long and heavy frost began with the clearing of the sky upon Christmas-day. At least it was so in the south of England, though probably two or three days earlier in the northern countries. A great frost always advances slowly, creeping from higher latitudes. If the cold begins in London sooner than it does in Edinburgh, it very seldom lasts out the week; and if it comes on with a violent wind, its time is generally shorter. It does seem strange, but it is quite true, that many people, even well-informed, attribute to this severity of cold the destruction of the great French army during its retreat from Moscow, and the ruin of Napoleon. They know the date of the ghastly carnage of the Beresina and elsewhere, which happened more than a year ere this; but they seem to forget that each winter belongs to the opening, and not to the closing, year. Passing all such matters, it is enough to say that Christmas-day 1813 was unusually bright and pleasant. The lowering sky and chill grey mist of the last three weeks at length had yielded to the gallant assault of the bright-speared sun. That excellent knight was pricking merrily over the range of the South Down hills; his path was strewn with sparkling trinkets from the casket of the clouds; the brisk air moved before him, and he was glad to see his way again. But behind him, and before him, lay the ambush of the “snow-blink,” to catch him at night, when he should go down, and to stop him of his view in the morning. However, for the time, he looked very well; and as no one had seen him for ever so long, every one took him at his own price.
Rector Struan Hales was famous for his sermon on Christmas-day. For five-and-twenty years he had made it his grand sermon of the year. He struck no strokes of enthusiasm—which nobody dreamed of doing then, except the very low Dissenters—still he began with a strong idea that he ought to preach above the average. And he never failed to do so—partly through inspiration of other divines, but mainly by summing up all the sins of his parish, and then forgiving them.
The parish listened with apathy to the wisdom and eloquence of great men (who said what they had to say in English—a lost art for nearly two centuries), and then the parish pricked up all its ears to hear of its own doings. The Rector preached the first part of his sermon in a sing-song manner, with a good see-saw. But when he came down to his parish-bounds, and traced his own people’s trespasses, he changed his voice altogether, so that the deafest old sinner could hear him. It was the treat of all the year to know what the parson was down upon; and, to be sure, who had done it. Then, being of a charitable kind, and loving while he chastened, the Rector always let them go, with a blessing which sounded as rich as a grace for everybody’s Christmas dinner. Everybody went out of church, happy and contented. They had enough to talk about for a week; and they all must have earned the goodwill of the Lord by going to church on a week-day. But the Rector always waited for his two church-wardens to come into the vestry, and shake hands, and praise his sermon. And, not to be behindhand, Farmer Gates and Mr. Bottler (now come from Steyning to West Lorraine, and immediately appointed, in right of the number of pigs killed weekly, junior churchwarden)—these two men of excellent presence, and of accomplished manners, got in under the vestry arch, and congratulated the Rector.
Alice Lorraine was not at church. Everybody had missed her in her usual niche, between the two dark marble records of certain of her ancestors. There she used to sit, and be set off by their fine antiquity; but she did not go to church that day; for her mind was too full of disturbance.