Mr. Torkingham was slower in recognizing the astronomer, but in a moment had greeted him with a warm shake of the hand.
‘I have been to the station on purpose to meet you!’ cried Mr. Torkingham, ‘and was returning with the idea that you had not come. I am your grandmother’s emissary. She could not come herself, and as she was anxious, and nobody else could be spared, I came for her.’
Then they walked on together. The parson told Swithin all about his grandmother, the parish, and his endeavours to enlighten it; and in due course said, ‘You are no doubt aware that Lady Constantine is living again at Welland?’
Swithin said he had heard as much, and added, what was far within the truth, that the news of the Bishop’s death had been a great surprise to him.
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Torkingham, with nine thoughts to one word. ‘One might have prophesied, to look at him, that Melchester would not lack a bishop for the next forty years. Yes; pale death knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings with an impartial foot!’
‘Was he a particularly good man?’ asked Swithin.
‘He was not a Ken or a Heber. To speak candidly, he had his faults, of which arrogance was not the least. But who is perfect?’
Swithin, somehow, felt relieved to hear that the Bishop was not a perfect man.
‘His poor wife, I fear, had not a great deal more happiness with him than with her first husband. But one might almost have foreseen it; the marriage was hasty—the result of a red-hot caprice, hardly becoming in a man of his position; and it betokened a want of temperate discretion which soon showed itself in other ways. That’s all there was to be said against him, and now it’s all over, and things have settled again into their old course. But the Bishop’s widow is not the Lady Constantine of former days. No; put it as you will, she is not the same. There seems to be a nameless something on her mind—a trouble—a rooted melancholy, which no man’s ministry can reach. Formerly she was a woman whose confidence it was easy to gain; but neither religion nor philosophy avails with her now. Beyond that, her life is strangely like what it was when you were with us.’
Conversing thus they pursued the turnpike road till their conversation was interrupted by a crying voice on their left. They looked, and perceived that a child, in getting over an adjoining stile, had fallen on his face.