The excellent prelate delivered this _ex cathedra_, as an immortal to a mortal. It was his duty to impress old Lady Alice, and he courteously included himself, being a modest priest, who talked of sin and death as if bishops were equally subject to them with other men.
CHAPTER x.x.xVI.
Old Scenes recalled.
At dinner the prelate, who sat beside Lady Alice, conversed in the same condescending spirit, and with the same dignified humility, upon all sorts of subjects--upon the new sect, the Huggletonians, whom, with doubtful originality, but considerable emphasis, he likened to "lost sheep."
"Who"s lost his sheep, my lord?" inquired Sir Paul Blunket across the table.
"I spoke metaphorically, Sir Paul. The Huggletonians, the sheep who should have been led by the waters of comfort, have been suffered to stray into the wilderness."
"Quite so--I see. Shocking name that--the Huggletonians. I should not like to be a Huggletonian, egad!" said Sir Paul Blunket, and drank some wine. "Lost sheep, to be sure--yes; but that thing of bringing sheep to water--you see--it"s a mistake. When a wether takes to drinking water, it"s a sign he"s got the rot."
The Bishop gently declined his head, and patiently allowed this little observation to blow over.
Sir Paul Blunket, having delivered it, merely added, after a decent pause, as he ate his dinner--
"Dartbroke mutton this--five years old--eh?"
"Yes. I hope you like it," answered his host.
Sir Paul Blunket, having a bit in his mouth, grunted politely--
"Only for your own table, though?" he added, when he"d swallowed it.
"That"s all," answered Sir Jekyl.
"Never pay at market, you know," said Sir Paul Blunket. "I consider any sheep kept beyond two years as lost."
"A lost sheep, and sell him as a Huggletonian," rejoined Sir Jekyl.
"It is twenty years," murmured the Bishop in Lady Alice"s ear, for he preferred not hearing that kind of joke, "since I sate in this parlour."
"Ha!" sighed Lady Alice.
"Long _before_ that I used, in poor Sir Harry"s time, to be here a good deal--a hospitable, kind man, in the main."
"I never liked him," croaked Lady Alice, and wiped her mouth.
They sat so very close to Sir Jekyl that the Bishop merely uttered a mild e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, and bowed toward his plate.
"The arrangements of this room--the portraits--are just what I remember them."
"Yes, and you were here--let me see--just thirty years since, when Sir Harry died--weren"t you?"
"So I was, my dear Lady Alice--very true," replied the Bishop in his most subdued tones, and he threw his head back a little, and nearly closed his eyes; and she fancied he meant, in a dignified way, to say, "I should prefer not speaking of those particular recollections while we sit so near our host." The old lady was much of the same mind, and said to him quietly--
"I"ll ask you a few questions by-and-by. You remember Donica Gwynn.
She"s living with me now--the housekeeper, you know."
"Yes, perfectly, a very nice-looking quiet young woman--how is she?"
"A dried-up old woman now, but very well," said Lady Alice.
"Yes, to be sure; she must be elderly now," said he, hastily; and the Bishop mentally made up one of those little sums in addition, the result of which surprises us sometimes in our elderly days so oddly.
When the party transferred themselves to the drawing-room, Lady Alice failed to secure the Bishop, who was seized by the Rev. Dives Marlowe and carried into a recess--Sir Jekyl having given his clerical brother the key of a cabinet in which were deposited more of the memoranda, and a handsome collection of the official and legal correspondence of that episcopal ancestor whose agreeable MSS. had interested the Bishop so much before dinner.
Jekyl, indeed, was a good-natured brother. As a match-making mother will get the proper persons under the same roof, he had managed this little meeting at Marlowe. When the ladies went away to the drawing-room, he had cried--
"Dives, I want you here for a moment," and so he placed him on the chair which Lady Jane Lennox had occupied beside him, and what was more to the purpose, beside the Bishop; and, as Dives was a good scholar, well made up on controversies, with a very pretty notion of ecclesiastical law and a turn for Latin verse, he and the prelate were soon in a state of very happy and intimate confidence. This cabinet, too, was what the game of chess is to the lovers--a great opportunity--a seclusion; and Dives knowing all about the papers, was enabled really to interest the Bishop very keenly.
So Lady Alice, who wanted to talk with him, was doomed to a jealous isolation, until that friend, of whom she was gradually coming to think very highly indeed, Monsieur Varbarriere, drew near, and they fell into conversation, first on the recent railway collision, and then on the fruit and flower show, and next upon the Bishop.
They both agreed what a charming and venerable person he was, and then Lady Alice said--
"Sir Harry Marlowe, I told you--the father, you know, of Jekyl there,"
and she dropped her voice as she named him, "was in possession at the time when the deed affecting my beloved son"s rights was lost."
"Yes, madame."
"And it was the Bishop there who attended him on his death-bed."
"Ho!" exclaimed M. Varbarriere, looking more curiously for a moment at that dapper little gentleman in the silk ap.r.o.n.
"They said he heard a great deal from poor wretched Sir Harry. I have never had an opportunity of asking him in private about it, but I mean to-morrow, please Heaven."
"It may be, madame, in the highest degree important," said Monsieur Varbarriere, emphatically.
"How can it be? My son is dead."
"Your son is"----and M. Varbarriere, who was speaking sternly and with a pallid face, like a man deeply excited, suddenly checked himself, and said--
"Yes, very true, your son is dead. Yes, madame, he is dead."
Old Lady Alice looked at him with a bewildered and frightened gaze.
"In Heaven"s name, sir, what do you mean?"
"Mean--mean--why, what have I said?" exclaimed Monsieur Varbarriere, very tartly, and looking still more uncomfortable.
"I did not say you had said anything, but you do mean something."
"No, madame, I _forgot_ something; the tragedy to which you referred is not to be supposed to be always as present to the mind of another as it naturally is to your own. We forget in a moment of surprise many things of which at another time we need not to be reminded, and so it happened with me."