"The book is nearly finished," she said, the low light from the attic window striking sideways on the small face with its tightly compressed lips.
A spirit indomitable, immortal, looked for a moment out of Hester"s gray eyes. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was becoming weaker day by day.
"When it is finished," she went on, "I will go anywhere and do anything, but stay here I must till it is done. Besides, I am not fit for society at present. I am covered with blue mould. Do you remember how that horrid Lady Carbury used to laugh at the country squires" daughters for being provincial? I have gone a peg lower than being provincial--I have become parochial."
A knock came at the door, and Fraulein"s mild, musical face appeared in the aperture.
"I fear to disturb you," she said, "but Regie say he cannot go to sleep till he see you."
Hester introduced Fraulein to Rachel, and slipped down-stairs to the night nursery.
Mary and Stella were already asleep in their high-barred cribs. The blind was down, and Hester could only just see the white figure of Regie sitting up in his night-gown. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took him in her arms.
"What is it; my treasure?"
"Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying half-penny?"
"No, darling. Why?"
"Because mother always says not to put pennies in my mouth, and I never did till to-day. And now Mary says I have been very naughty."
"It does not matter what Mary says," said Hester, with a withering glance towards the sleeping angel in the next crib, who was only Mary by day. "But you must never do it again, and you will tell mother all about it to-morrow."
"Yes," said Regie; "but, but--"
"But what?"
"Uncle d.i.c.k did say it was a flying half-penny, and you said so, too, and that other auntie. And I thought it did not matter putting in flying half-pennies, only common ones."
Hester saw the difficulty in Regie"s mind.
"It felt common when it was inside," said Regie, doubtfully, "and yet you and Uncle d.i.c.k _did_ say it was a flying one."
Regie"s large eyes were turned upon her with solemn inquiry in them. It is crises like this that our first ideals are laid low.
Regie had always considered Hester as the very soul of honor, that mysterious honor which he was beginning to dimly apprehend through her allegiance to it, and which, in his mind, belonged as exclusively to her as the little bedroom under the roof.
"Regie," said Hester, tremulously, seeing that she had unwittingly put a stumbling-block before the little white feet she loved, "when we played at the doll"s tea-party, and you were the butler, I did not mean you were _really_ a butler, did I? I knew, and you knew, and we all knew, that you were Regie all the time."
"Ye-es."
"It was a game. And so when Uncle d.i.c.k found us playing the tea-party game he played another game about the flying half-penny."
"Then it was a common half-penny, after all," said Regie, with a deep sigh.
"Yes, it was a common half-penny, only the game was that it could fly, like the other game was that the acorn cups were real teacups. So Uncle d.i.c.k and all of us were not saying what was not true. We were all playing at a game. Do you understand, my little mouse?"
"Yes," said Regie, with another voluminous sigh, and Hester realized, with thankfulness, that the half-penny and not herself had fallen from its pedestal. "I see now; but when he said, Hi! Presto! and it flew away, I thought I saw it flying. Mary said she did. And I suppose the gate was only a game, too."
Hester felt that the subject would be quite beyond her powers of explanation if once the gate were introduced into it.
She laid Regie down and covered him.
"And you will go to sleep now. And I will ask Uncle d.i.c.k when next he comes to show us how he did the game with the half-penny."
"Yes," said Regie, dejectedly. "I"d rather know what there is to be known. Only I _thought_ it was a flying one. Good-night, Auntie Hester."
She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front-door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had arrived. Mr. Gresley"s voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.
Accordingly, a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the Parish Room. It was crammed. The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure. Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say. Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington. Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.
d.i.c.k, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the a.s.sembly, and, as Rachel well knew, looking for her.
Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals. There was a vacant s.p.a.ce between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible. Entirely disregarding the anxious church-wardens who were waving him forward, d.i.c.k disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of s.p.a.ce upon the empty seat near her, and d.i.c.k, who had persuaded the young men to give him foot-room on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several "school forms,"
sat down beside her.
It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling. But the thought darted through her mind that d.i.c.k was the kind of man who, somehow or other, would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry. There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished, with a nervous tremor, that his choice had fallen on some one else.
The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighboring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the princ.i.p.al speaker. Mr. Pratt"s face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long, parti-colored whiskers. He a.s.sumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his "humble brethren," admirably suited to one who, after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a "county family."
The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.
The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin, ascetic-looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties. d.i.c.k, who had so far taken more interest in Rachel"s gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.
A restive movement in the audience followed the speech, which was loudly clapped by Mr. Gresley and the Pratts.
Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.
Mr. Gresley had an enormous advantage as a platform speaker, and as a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home, owing to the conviction that he had penetrated to the core of any subject under discussion, and could p.r.o.nounce judgment upon it in a conclusive manner. He was wont to approach every subject by the preliminary statement that he had "threshed it out." This threshing-out had been so thorough that there was hardly a subject even of the knottiest description which he was unable to dismiss with a few pregnant words. "Evolution! Ha! ha!
Descended from an ape. I don"t believe that for one." While women"s rights received their death-blow from a jocose allusion to the woman following the plough while the man sat at home and rocked the cradle.
With the same n.o.ble simplicity he grappled with the difficult and complex subject of temperance, by which he meant total abstinence. He informed his hearers, "in the bigoted tones of a married teetotaler,"
that he had gone to the root of the matter--the roots were apparently on the surface--and that it was no use calling black white and white black.
He for one did not believe in muddling up black and white, as some lukewarm people advocated, till they were only a dirty gray. No; either drink was right or it was wrong. If it was not wrong to get drunk, he did not know what was wrong. He was not a man of compromise. Alcohol was a servant of the devil, and to tamper with it was to tamper with the Evil One himself. Touch not. Taste not. Handle not. He for his part should never side with the devil.
This lofty utterance having been given time to sink in, Mr. Gresley looked round at the sea of stolid, sullen faces, and concluded with saying that the chairman would now call upon his cousin, Mr. Vernon, to speak to them on the shocking evils he himself had witnessed in Australia as the results of drink.
d.i.c.k was not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from his seat with the help of the young men, and slowly ascended the platform. He looked a size too large for it, and for the other speakers, and his loose tweed suit and heather stockings were as great a contrast to the tightly b.u.t.toned-up black of the other occupants as were his strong, keen face and muscular hands to those of the previous speakers.
"That"s a man," said a masculine voice behind Rachel. "He worn"t reared on ditch-water, you bet."
"Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen," said d.i.c.k. "You"ve only got to listen to me for half a minute, and you"ll find out without my telling you that Nature did not cut me out for a speaker. I"m no talker. I"m a workingman"--an admission which Mr. Pratt would rather have been boiled in his own oil than have made. "For the last seven years I"ve done my twelve hours a day, and I"ve come to think more of what a man gets through with his hands than the sentiments which he can wheeze out after a heavy meal. But Mr. Gresley has asked me to tell you what I know about drink, as I have seen a good many samples of it in Australia."
d.i.c.k then proceeded, with a sublime disregard of grammar, and an earnestness that increased as he went on, to dilate on the evil effects of drink as he himself had witnessed them. He described how he had seen men who could not get spirits make themselves drunk on "Pain-killer"; how he had seen strong, young station hands, who had not tasted spirits for months, come down from the hills with a hundred pounds in their pockets, and drink themselves into "doddery" old men in a fortnight in the nearest township, where they were kept drunk on drugged liquor till all their hard-earned wages were gone.
The whole room listened in dead silence. No feet shuffled. Mr. Gresley looked patronizingly at d.i.c.k"s splendid figure and large, outstretched hand, with the crooked middle finger, which he had cut off by mistake in the bush and had stuck on again himself. Then the young Vicar glanced smiling at the audience, feeling that he had indeed elicited a "lay opinion" of the best kind.
"Now what are the causes of all these dreadful things?" continued d.i.c.k.
"I"m speaking to the men here, not the women. What are the causes of all this poverty and vice and scamped workmanship, and weak eyes and shaky hands, on the top of high wages? I tell you they come from two things, and one is as bad as the other. One is drinking too much, and the other is drinking bad liquor. Every man who"s worth his salt," said d.i.c.k, balancing his long bent finger on the middle of his other palm, "should know when he has had enough. Some can carry more, some less." Mr.