Laid up in Lavender

by Stanley John Weyman

"No, cannot!" the clergyman replied with vehemence.

"Then," Jim drawled--"I am not a moral man, don't mistake me, but I belong to the family--your majesty must go elsewhere for a wife! And a little late to do so!" he continued, harshness in his tone. "What! you are not coming to the house?"

"No!" the other cried violently. And, without a word of farewell, he turned his back on his companion, and strode away through the lush grass to a point a little higher up the stream, where a plank-bridge gave access to the Chase outbuildings, and through them to the village.

Foley stood awhile, looking after him. "Well," he said, speaking gently, as if rallying himself on some weakness, "I am afraid--I really am afraid that I am a little astonished. I should know men by now, yet I did think that if any one could show a clean bill of health it was the vicar. He is smug, he is next door to a prig. The old women swear by him, the young ones dote on him. They say he is on foot from morning till night, and not one blank day in a fortnight! And now--pheugh! I wonder whether I ought to have knocked him down. Poor little Patty! There is not a better girl in the country--except the Partridge!"

He looked pathetically at the gardens below him; then, seeing that the chimneys of the house were smoking briskly, he bethought him of dinner, and strode down to the gate with his usual air of insouciance.

Meanwhile the young clergyman gained the side avenue, and walked rapidly towards the village, his eyes dazzled by the low beams of the sun which shone in his face, and his mind confounded by the tumult of his thoughts. A crisis which he had long foreseen, often dreaded, and as often postponed, was now imminent, the power to control it gone from his hands. He looked on the past with regret, and forward with shame. That which had once been feasible--nay, as it seemed to him now, easy--time and his cowardice had rendered impossible. He stood aghast at his own feebleness; not considering that the routine of parish work and the satisfaction derived from small duties done, had weakened his moral fibre; even as the peace of the life about him, and the transparent truthfulness of those, with whom his lot was cast, had made the task of disclosure more formidable. He had fallen--no, he had not fallen; but he had put off the act which honour demanded so long that, though the day of grace was still his, there could be no grace in the doing.

The rooks, streaming homeward in some order of their own, were cawing overhead as he opened the gate and entered the vicarage garden, where the great hollyhocks stood in rows, and the peaches, catching the last rays of the sun aslant, were glowing against the southern gable. To the stranger--to the American, in particular--who looked in as he passed, it seemed a paradise, that garden. But--for peaches are not peace, nor hollyhocks either--its owner passed through it with compressed lips and tingling cheeks. He entered the porch, where one or two packing-cases told of coming changes; then he stood irresolute in the cool hall, remembering that he had intended to dine at the Chase, and that there was nothing prepared for him here. Not that he had an appetite, but dinner was a decent observance, and it seemed to him that not to dine would be to lose his hold on life and fall into abysses before his time.

It is well, when we are unfortunate, to consider how much worse a minute, a few seconds, may see us. A faint sound at his elbow caused him to turn. The door of the dining-room was ajar, and through the opening a face peered at him. The young vicar did not start, but he drew a deep breath, and stiffened as he gazed. A minute, and his lips--while the other face, with a shifty smile, half mockery, half shame, returned his look--formed the word "Father!"

It was not audible two paces away. But as it fell the clergyman glanced round with a gesture of alarm, and at a single stride he was in the dining-room, and had shut the door behind him. The other man--a shambling creature, grey-haired and blear-eyed and unwashed, with a beard of a week's growth--fell back to the table and leaned against it. His rusty black clothes and his broken boots seemed to share, rather than to impart, the look of decay which marked his person. The vicar, with his back against the door, looked at him and shuddered, and then looked again, his face hard and his eyes gloomy. "Well," he said, in a low stern voice, "what is the meaning of this? You know our agreement. Why have you broken it, sir?"

The old man pursed up his lips, and, with his head on one side, contemplated his questioner in silence. Then he said suddenly, "Blow the agreement!"