CHAPTER V
Mrs. Elles had arrived at Rokeby on a Monday. When Sunday came round, she had been prepared for the usual flying in the face of Philistine custom and observance that prevailed in her own circle and imagined that the artist would go out to paint as usual or perhaps as a concession to popular prejudice stay and work indoors. But to her intense surprise and amusement, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning found her murmuring the Litany by the side of the artist in the parish church, among the placid farmers and their complacent, Sunday-bedizened wives. Mr. Rivers, it seemed, was in the habit of going to church every Sunday, and, when she discovered this, it had seemed quite natural to go with him, though it was the first time she had been inside the walls of a church since her marriage. The service, to her mind unblunted by custom, seemed very picturesque; so was the church, a beautiful specimen of pure early Gothic, and the figure of this grave, handsome man, standing by her side, with his dark head relieved against the white plaster background, most natural of all.
“If anyone had told me, a month ago,” she thought, “that I should be doing this, I believe I should have laughed in his face.”
She felt happy, but a little out of place, and looked it, perhaps, for the vicar, a stolid, white-bearded, dignified man, stared at her over the pulpit cushion, discreetly, while a thin, little, sharp-nosed lady, presumably of some authority in the congregation, did so, too, indiscreetly. Jane Anne, who played the harmonium, was discretion itself and never even glanced her way, but Mrs. Elles thought she read excommunication and condemnation in every turn of her not too supple wrist.
“So you go to church every Sunday?” Mrs. Elles said to Rivers, as they walked down the path and away together. “Somehow I thought artists——”
“Never went to church?” He finished her sentence for her. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t do it as a religious observance, exactly, I am afraid. I do it because I like it, here in the country. Besides,” he added, “it is a beautiful church!”
Mrs. Elles, who considered herself an agnostic, was satisfied, by this speech, that Rivers’ church-going was the result of his indulgence of æsthetic needs rather than spiritual ones; though, indeed, she would have been quite ready to embrace any faith to which he should pronounce his adhesion.
“How picturesque the Vicar’s white hair is!” she remarked, aloud. “Do you know him?”
“Oh, yes; Mr. Popham. He will come now to call on you, since you have been to call on him.”