Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

“Oh, not at all,” said Emmie; using, as so often happens when we feel that an occasion is momentous, the tritest and most simple form of words. “Do please sit down”; and she indicated that she wished him to choose the sofa as his seat. Her nerves were fluttered and her thoughts in some disorder during these first civilities.

“It is a great pleasure, Miss Verinder, to make your acquaintance.”

“And I,” said Emmie earnestly, “have wanted to know you, Mr. Dyke. I have wanted it so much—so very much.”

“Thank you. It is good indeed of you to say that. I should have wished to come long ago—but, well, somehow I did not venture”; and he had a smile that seemed to shoot like an arrow into Emmie’s gentle breast and set it throbbing with exquisite pain. Almost, for that instant, Anthony might have been there smiling at her. “No, I wished to do so—but one is always afraid of seeming intrusive. Only when he wrote to me—”

Mr. Dyke sat then upon the sofa, and they began to talk about his son.

He was a much smaller man than Anthony, very thin and spare, and yet obviously possessing something of Anthony’s iron strength; so that, although sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, he gave one an impression of a person who will go on living for a great while without ever growing really old. He too had blue eyes and a straight nose, but one could not imagine this face becoming hawklike or fierce. He was quite dignified, yet devoid of all commanding or majestic attributes. His manner, reminding her of Anthony’s now and then in its deferential courtliness, more particularly as expressed by bowing the head, was quite that of a man of the world. And Emmie noticed that his sacred calling was not indicated by the slightest sign in the clothes he wore. Then as her nerves steadied themselves, while he went on talking and she listening, she thought of nothing beyond the one fact that he was Anthony’s father.

He was telling her about Anthony’s birthplace, their home in Devonshire, and the time of Anthony’s boyhood. “Endells—that is the name of our house, you know—quite a small place, but in a way very charming—to us, at least—we all love it. Close to the sea, you know. Endells—so many places in our part of the world have a plural name. Abertors—that’s the big place, the show-place. An old house, ours, you know—and the most delightful old church close by, on our own ground. I am, you know, what they used to call ‘a squarson,’” and he smiled again. She could bear it now; and it was not really Anthony’s smile. It was full of goodness and kindness, but it had not that warm flood of light as of the sunshine bursting through splendid dark clouds and making the whole world happy. “At the time I speak of, I was still doing my clerical duties. I hadn’t then turned lazy and handed everything over to a curate. And will you believe it, Miss Verinder? I then thought that Anthony, when he grew up, would be ordained and follow in my footsteps. His mother thought so. Poor dear”; and he sighed. “We lost her before he was fourteen. As a boy he was religious—unusually religious. But now, I fear—well, you know his inmost thoughts a great deal better than I do. We won’t speak of that.”

Then, continuing, he said he felt it would interest her to hear that as a boy Anthony showed no sign of the adventurous spirit. “Isn’t it strange, Miss Verinder? But so it is.” He was a dreamy boy, loving mystical books, with a hankering after magic, astrology, and spiritualism. He had never been seen to read tales of travel. Nor was he fond of athletic sports. He did not care for riding. “You know, there are hounds of course within reach of us. And sometimes he would follow them on foot, but never on horseback. Always a prodigious walker.” Then Mr. Dyke laughed gently. “He would not come in to meals. It worried his poor mother, and our housekeeper—who had been his nurse—used to say nature never put a clock or dinner bell inside Master Anthony’s stomach as it does with other children. He would climb along the cliffs and lie on his back on some ledge or other, looking at the sky or watching the seagulls, and dreaming—dreaming hour after hour; the whole day often, in summer. All one can imagine is that during these long reveries great purposes were slowly shaping—unknown to himself perhaps. At any rate not one single word about it did he utter to me—and we were friends, Miss Verinder—a very real affection, thank God, remained always between us two—I fancy, something more than is common with fathers and sons.” And Mr. Dyke paused to blow his nose. “Not one word until he was approaching his nineteenth birthday. Then he said to me—I was never more astonished in my life—he said, ‘Father, I can’t stand this any longer. I am starting for Africa to-morrow.’ Just like that. And he went, you know.

“The rest—if a father may say so—is history. It is, isn’t it, Miss Verinder? Now I musn’t tire you by too long a visitation. But I felt that these little early details would interest you. They are so little and yet so much. And they should certainly come into his life when it is written. I think it is a mistake in biographies to omit all the slight and seemingly trivial details and give one only the big events. Nothing is trivial in the lives of really great men.”

Miss Verinder assured him that she had been enthrallingly interested; and, taking leave, he detained her hand in his for a moment while he asked if he might call again in a few days’ time before he returned to Devonshire. She was conscious during these moments of a constraint or uneasiness that he had seemed to feel even when he was talking to her so gently and kindly. It had been as if the talk was merely superficial, and that beneath it there was a communication that he desired to make but could not. Now it seemed that this had risen close to the surface, and with her hand in his, she braced herself to meet it. Perhaps that mental preparation on her side, detected and misunderstood, was sufficient to check him again; for, without saying anything further, he went away.